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The Ins and Outs of Applying to Graduate Programs in English: An Information Session

Are you interested in attending a Graduate Program in English? You won’t want to miss out on the panel that will take place September 27 from 5:15-7:30 in 300 Wheeler! Additional resources can be found on our department website under the resources tab. For additional information, contact Dorothy Hale or Elisa Tamarkin: dhale@berkeley.edu or tamarkin@berkeley.edu (Photo: Keegan Houser)  

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Featured Summer Courses

For a full list of summer course selections, click here English R1B: Thinking through Memory in Poetry and Fiction with Dana Swensen Summer Session A: May 23 – July 1 How and why do we remember? What does ‘memory’ mean to both an individual and a culture? How do fictional narrators construct their memorial landscapes? In this class we will...

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2022 Gayley Lecture | “First Thing Smokin’ “: A Trajectory Concerning Railroad Sense | C.S. Giscombe

April 19 at 8pm in the Maude Fife Room (315 Wheeler Hall) The 2022 Gayley Lecture will be given by Cecil S. Giscombe, Professor and Robert Hass Chair in English. The talk’s an inquiry into the status of the railroad as a complicated series of facts in Black life and art and will be drawn, in large part, from materials...

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April 30 | The Ones Who Leave by Nagahara Hideaki

A Stage Reading of Nagahara Hideaki’s –The Ones Who Leave– translated by Andrew Way Leong with Q & A moderated by Philip Kan Gotanda. About this event The Ones Who Leave (Sariyukumono, 去り行く者, 1927) is the only surviving play of Nagahara Hideaki, a Los Angeles-based author who wrote for a Japanese-language audience in the mid-1920s. The Ones Who Leave depicts the struggles of the...

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Read Along with Berkeley English

There is still time to join our Spring 2022 seminars! If you are like many graduates, your seminars count among your most vivid college memories. We’d like to share that experience with you again by inviting you to read along with the two current seminars highlighted below. For each seminar, we provide selected readings and discussion questions, along with an invitation...

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Danielle Evans, Author of The Office of Historical Corrections in conversation with Beth Piatote, Author of The Beadworkers

The Department of English and the New Literary Project present the winner of the 2021 New Literary Project Joyce Carol Oates Prize, Danielle Evans. Danielle Evans is the author of the story collections The Office of Historical Corrections (Riverhead, 2020) and Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self (Riverhead, 2010), which won the PEN American Robert W. Bingham Prize, the...

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The Week: A History of the Unnatural Rhythms That Made Us Who We Are

On Wednesday, February 2nd at 12pm, Elisa Tamarkin (English) will be talking with David Henkin (History) about his new book, The Week: A History of the Unnatural Rhythms That Made Us Who We Are. Click here for the livestream. We take the seven-day week for granted, rarely asking what anchors it or what it does to us. Yet weeks are...

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Josephine Miles: Poet and First Tenured Professor in English

By Emma Campbell, Kahyun Koh, and Anya Vertanessian Born in Chicago on June 11th, 1911, Josephine Miles was an acclaimed poet, professor, literary critic, and a vital part of the Berkeley community. In 1947, she became the first woman to be awarded tenure in the English Department, eighty years after its founding, and she was the sole tenured woman for...

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The Holloway Series in Poetry welcomes Morgan Parker

Each academic year, The English Department’s Holloway Series in Poetry welcomes several renowned and rising contemporary poets to campus to share and celebrate their work. This week, the series welcomes poet Morgan Parker. Morgan Parker is the author of There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé (Tin House Books 2017) and Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night (Switchback Books 2015), which was selected by Eileen...

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The Holloway Series in Poetry welcomes Douglas Kearney

Each academic year, The English Department’s Holloway Series in Poetry welcomes several renowned and rising contemporary poets to campus to share and celebrate their work. This week, the series welcomes poet Douglas Kearney. Kearney is the author of several collections of poetry, including Mess and Mess and (Noemi Press, 2015), a Small Press Distribution Selection esteemed as, “an extraordinary book,” by Publisher’s Weekly. His other works...

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The Holloway Series in Poetry welcomes Graham Foust

Each academic year, The English Department’s Holloway Series in Poetry welcomes several renowned and rising contemporary poets to campus to share and celebrate their work. This week, the series welcomes poet Graham Foust. Foust is the author of several collections of poetry, including As in Every Deafness (2003); Leave the Room to Itself (2003), which won the Sawtooth Poetry Prize; Necessary Stranger (2007);...

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Professor Namwali Serpell on PBS News Hour’s “Brief but Spectacular”

“You might be wondering why a Zambian citizen and a resident alien of the United States is teaching you the history of American literature, but who better than an outsider to teach you about American literature?”  Professor Namwali Serpell was recently on PBS News Hour’s “Brief but Spectacular” series to talk about belonging, identity, and her personal experience as an...

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PhD Student Ismail Muhammad publishes two essays on James Baldwin

Though he passed away in 1987, the writer James Baldwin is still very much with us — as a theorist of “intersectionality” well before it became a watchword in the Black Lives Matter movement, and now as the subject of Raoul Peck’s much-admired film I Am Not Your Negro. Over the past few weeks, PhD student Ismail Muhammad has published...

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