The second piece in the series is a review by Jonathan Shelley of the Berkeley Rep’s production of Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, which won the 2013 Tony Award for Best Play.
In a new series for the blog, we ask current graduate students with an interest in theater to review select local plays. The first piece in the series is a review by Alek Jeziorek of the Shotgun Players’ performance of Bonnie & Clyde.
READ MORE Bonnie and Clyde: On the Run with the Shotgun Players at Ashby Stage
Bradford Taylor, a graduate student in the department, recently opened a wine shop and bar in Oakland called Ordinaire. To celebrate the occasion, we asked him to write a piece for us about his interest in wine and the experience of opening the shop.
A reflection on the surprisingly close relationship between bicycles and books during the first half of the 20th century.
On April 17th, hundreds of people filled Wheeler’s Maude Fife Auditorium to hear Anne Carson read a selection of poems from her new volume.
READ MORE Holloway Poetry Series: Anne Carson + Gillian Osborne
Lili Loofbourow is a seventh-year graduate student, who works on early modern constructions of reading as a form of eating—theologically, physiologically, etc.
READ MORE The Virtues of Excrement: Lili Loofbourow on Blogging and the Academic Life
Just in time for the weekend, a poem.
This past semester, under the leadership of Professor Eric Falci, the department inaugurated a graduate student publication workshop. Designed as a forum for graduate students to receive feedback on their work-in-progress as they prepare that work for eventual publication, the workshop met five times in the fall 2009 semester, and plans to meet six or seven times this spring. Read full post…
READ MORE Department Starts New Publication Workshop for Graduate Students
Each fall the population of the English department is refreshed by an incoming class of graduate students. This year, we welcomed over 20 new students to Wheeler Hall. Richard Lee is one of the new PhD students who are making their way through the first semester of graduate work at Berkeley.[Read full post…]
Graduate students Charles Legere and Javier Huerta both live in Oakland and both write poetry. Now, after being approached by the website deepoakland.org, they’ve written some poetry about living in Oakland. [Read full post…]
READ MORE Graduate Students Explore Vitality of Oakland Through Poetry
In what follows, Tiffany Tsao, who received her PhD in English this past Spring, reports on her life as a postdoctoral fellow at Georgia Tech. She begins with an epigraph from Dante which, she feels, encapsulates her experience so far.
…what I sing will be that second kingdom,
in which the human soul is cleansed of sin,
becoming worthy of ascent to Heaven.
(Purgatorio, Canto I.4-6)[Read full post…]
READ MORE Notes from Postdoctoral Purgatory: A Recent PhD Reports
The issue of “relevance” is a constant concern among Humanities departments today, especially in these troubled economic times. How do you make literature interesting and important to a 
population that seems to be increasingly indifferent to, or perhaps simply too busy for, it? Third-year graduate student Dimiter Kenarov has some very strong opinions about questions like this one, and, as a freelance journalist and contributing editor to the Virginia Quarterly Review, he has put his thoughts into action. He has published an article on Milosevic’s Serbia (Summer 2006) which was the co-winner of the Staige D. Blackford Prize for Nonfiction, a piece on the Roma in Bulgaria (Summer 2008), which was recently selected for the Best American Travel Writing of 2009, and an account of the double identity of Radovan Karadzic, the “Butcher of Bosnia” (Winter 2009). The blog recently sat down with Dimiter to find out more about the relationship between his academic work and his journalistic pursuits.
In what follows, Assistant Professor Nadia Ellis profiles graduate student GerShun Avilez, a PhD candidate in English at the Univeristy of Pennsylvania who has spent the last year at UC Berkeley participating in the Exchange Scholar Program. The program enables a graduate student enrolled in a doctoral program in one of the participating institutions to study at one of the...
In what follows, graduate student Austin Grossman tells how he came to write and publish his novel Soon I Will Be Invincible during his time in the Ph. D. program. He talks about the process of creating the novel, learning how to move back and forth between creative and academic writing and the unexpected twists and turns that are integral...
In last week’s post, we focused on the ways in which two current graduate students are Artwork currently on display at the Alphonse Berber Gallery. leveraging the new media of the blogosphere to disseminate critical thinking on history and literature in broad new ways. This week, we bring you examples of a different, perhaps more “concrete” kind of outreach by...
