UC Berkeley Graduate Student and Faculty Make National Headlines

Two members of the UC Berkeley English Department have recently made big splashes in the national news scene.

Professor Ishmael Reed published an oped in the Dec 11, 2010 New York Times on “What Progressives Don’t Understand About Obama.”  Professor Reed has a recent book, Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media, out on the same subject from Baraka Books.

Aaron Bady, an advanced graduate student who studies African literature in the department, made waves in the national conversation surrounding the recent WikiLeaks case. The virtuoso close reading of  Julian Assange’s personal philosophy that Aaron posted on his blog, http://zunguzungu.wordpress.com/, became a viral phenomenon, drawing more than ten thousand readers and links from some of the most prominent news media outlets in the country.  His influence prompted The Atlantic to call him “The Unknown Blogger Who Changed the WikiLeaks Conversation.”  The University has also published an account here.