Experiencing an English 190: Research Seminar Stephanie Reyna EUA Vice President English and Anthropology Major Going into the required research seminar can seem daunting in the beginning. The idea of having to develop an original argument for your topic can stop any writer in their tracks but it is called a seminar for a reason. You are prepared...
Fall 2019 The Pleasures of Allegory and its Significance for an Aspiring Medievalist By Amanda Styles 2019 EUA Treasurer, English Major, Medieval Studies Minor Like many American high school students, I think my first conscious experience with allegory, other than on a vocabulary sheet, was with the teaching of George Orwell’s 1945 novel, Animal Farm. In my sophomore...
READ MORE Fall 2019 The Pleasures of Allegory and its Significance for an Aspiring Medievalist
Like many young people, Bernardo Hinojosa went to Europe last summer. But rather than backpacking and seeing the sights, Bernardo engaged in a different kind of tourism: he traveled from library to library, looking at medieval manuscripts and documents. As a medievalist in training – he is currently in his fourth year of completing a joint PhD in English and...
Last summer, Berkeley senior English major Arielle Moscati got two new library cards and fulfilled a long held dream: she researched her senior thesis in the British Library in London and the Bodleian Library in Oxford. A Los Angeles native, Arielle transferred to Berkeley from community college as a junior. Right away, she found her academic passion: the Middle Ages,...
In the spring semester of 2017, Tessa Rissacher took Prof. Scott Saul’s American Studies H110, “The Bay Area in the Seventies.” It changed her life. Students in the course worked on research projects that became part of an extraordinary website and cultural archive, “The Berkeley Revolution.” The website traces the social and cultural transformations centered in Berkeley during the 1960s...
Wai Ho is a graduating English major at UC Berkeley. During the winter of 2016, she traveled to the Beinecke Library at Yale University to conduct archival research on Erasmus Darwin for a thesis. Her archival findings helped her develop her ideas on marginal discourse between unlikely speakers and addressees in botanical poetry and the personification of plant life. In...
Keanu Cohen is a current student in the English Department at Cal. Last summer, he was given the opportunity to pursue independent research through an English Department Undergraduate Archival Travel Grant. The English Department encourages its undergraduates to pursue serious archival research, offering seed grants of $150 to any student with a research proposal that requires travel. What follows is Keanu’s reflection on his summer of...
READ MORE The Lure of the Archive: The Novella That Took William Gaddis 50 Years to Write
Amy Clark is a graduating senior, and was recently awarded the Charlene Conrad Liebau Library Prize for her English honors thesis, “More than Meets the Eye: Cultural Color Resonances in Old English Literature.”
Samuel Diener is a senior finishing an Honors thesis this year on the General History of the Pyrates and the early seafaring novels of Daniel Defoe. He will go on to a Ph.D. program in English at Harvard this fall, where he hopes to continue to study the novel, the eighteenth century, and voyage narratives in Spanish, Portuguese, and English.
Dennis Velasquez (‘15) was given the opportunity to pursue independent research through the McNair Scholars Program and the Haas Scholars Program (the only student awarded both research fellowships for 2014-15). His project is a comparative study of strategies of literary defiance of English Linguistic Imperialism across disparate temporal and geocultural locations.
READ MORE From the Western U.S. to Western Europe: Running the Archive Gauntlet
Charlotte Hull is a fourth year, double major in English Literature and History. Her academic interests include community building in Colonial New England, the impact of space and environment on society, and the ways in which stories shape and reflect our own histories.
Caitlin Lowe is a current student in the English Department at Cal (class of ’15). This summer, she was given the opportunity to pursue independent research through the Student Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) grant. SURF is a campus-wide award that supports student research under the supervision of a faculty sponsor.
In the following article, Emily Doyle (’14) considers the subject of her summer 2013 undergraduate research fellowship concerning Henry James and the phrase, ‘As if’. Emily will graduate from Berkeley this spring and is currently in the final stages of developing her research into an honors thesis focusing on the specific ways elements of fiction, grammar, and philosophy converge upon the...
Sixth in the series is Christian Durán (’13), whose senior honors thesis — “Reconciling Daniel Venegas: Las Aventuras de Don Chipote in the Balance of History” — was recently recognized with an honorable mention from the Undergraduate Library Prize, one of Berkeley’s most distinguished awards for undergraduate research.
Fifth in the series is a reflection from Nashilu Mouen-Makoua (’13), who explored three different archives in France, each housing different manuscripts related to the poet and statesman Aimé Césaire.
READ MORE The Lure of the Archive (V): Nashilu Mouen-Makoua’s Detour par Paris
