Category: People

We asked our most recent graduates to submit entries to an essay-writing contest on the topic of what they’ve done with their B.A. degrees in English, and we received over thirty entries. In her winning essay, “A Tale of Two Cities,” Lindsay King (Class of 2010) writes, “I have never been more convinced that literature is profound and sublime extension of the people and cultures which produce it, and had it not been for my undergraduate experience in both English and French, I do not know if I would have been able to come to appreciate or understand this reality as deeply as I currently do. Had I simply focused on what I was planning to do with my degrees rather than on who I was going to become, I know that I would not have grown into being the young woman that I am today….” Read the complete texts of Lindsay King’s winning essay and second place essays by Kaelan Connella, Adrienne D’Luna, and Ben Kahane.

Each year in the “Faculty Notes” section of the department newsletter, we list the most recent faculty accomplishments. In the same spirit of recognition and congratulation, here are only some of the many accomplishments of our graduate students from this past year.

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Recently the Townsend Humanities Center at U.C. Berkeley has initiated a site devoted to heightening modern awareness of Milton’s relevance and currency by using audiovisual approaches…

Welcome back everyone!!

I’m not on campus today, so I don’t have the pleasure of seeing your beautiful, shining faces or feeding off your I’m So Rested From An Amazing Summer!! energy, but I did want to wish you all a very happy first day of the new semester.

Here’s some Ferris Bueller to help get you good and ready for the new year.

If you’ve ever wondered what your students were listening to on their iPods while they waltzed into class or what albums were the soundtrack to their writing, Professor Eric Falci clues us all in.

In an article for Food and Wine Magazine, our department’s own Karen Leibowitz writes, “We weren’t chefs—I was a graduate student and my husband, Anthony Myint, was a line cook—but we thought it would be fun to sublet a taco cart and sell “PB&Js,” sandwiches stuffed with pork belly and jicama. We set up shop at 21st and Mission in San Francisco and called ourselves Mission Street Food.” Karen answers some of my excited questions about how studying literature helped her first, manage a restaurant, then write a funky cookbook, with her husband.

If you studied English as an undergraduate, someone eventually asked you, “What are you going to do with that?” Candace Cunard ’11 gives her answer.

Even if you didn’t graduate, that doesn’t mean you don’t need some inspiration. Here’s a roundup of some of the best commencement speeches of the season.

The English Department wishes everyone a safe and happy holiday. As the students depart for winter break, the department blog is also taking a short hiatus. We will be back online with our weekly posts when the new semester begins in mid-January.

Until then, we leave with you a classic holiday poem: Robert Burns’ “Auld Lang Syne.” Read full post…

Over this past semester, the Chernin Mentoring Program has organized a wide array of activities designed to enrich and support the English major experience at Berkeley.  One particularly interesting activity was a new twist on the “campus tour,” an exercise in which the graduate student mentors showed the undergraduates how they can put the readings skills they learn in their English classes to work by reading the physical environment of the Berkeley campus. Read full post…