The Wheeler Column

James Grantham Turner’s The Villa Farnesina: Palace of Venus in Renaissance Rome

Published date October 19, 2022

Professor James Grantham Turner’s The Villa Farnesina: Palace of Venus in Renaissance Rome (Cambridge University Press, 2022) studies in depth, for the first time in English, a building that has enraptured admirers from Rubens and Fragonard to Goethe and Edith Wharton — a villa that Turner compellingly evokes as the most beautiful dwelling of the Renaissance. Drawing on a treasure...

Ryan Lackey’s essay forthcoming in Simpsonistas

Published date October 6, 2022

“Beyond the Process,” an essay by fourth-year English Ph.D. student and recent Simpson fellow Ryan Lackey, will be included in the forthcoming fourth volume of Simpsonistas: Tales from the Simpson Literary Project due out in October 2022. Simpsonistas, which is published annually, collects work by associates of the New Literary Project (formerly the Simpson Literary Project), placing the work of...

Lauren Groff in Conversation with Ryan Lackey: Thursday, October 13th

Published date October 6, 2022

The Department of English and the New Literary Project present the winner of the 2022 New Literary Project Joyce Carol Oates Prize LAUREN GROFF Author of Matrix, Florida, and Fates and Furies in conversation with New Literary Project Simpson Fellow Ryan Lackey October 13, 2022, 6:30 pm Maude Fife Room (Wheeler 315) Lauren Groff is the author of...

Shakespeare’s Tragedies

Published date September 23, 2022

Professor: Kent Puckett Go here to see the course-description page on our website. We’ll read and discuss three of Shakespeare’s tragedies—Hamlet, King Lear, and Antony and Cleopatra—with an eye to how they work as aesthetic objects and how they shed light on the nature of tragedy. In addition to exploring Shakespeare’s sense of the tragic as a response to his own...

Form and Invention in Native American Literature

Published date September 23, 2022

Professor: Beth Piatote Go here to see the course-description page on our website. This course explores literary production by Native American/Indigenous writers from the nineteenth century to present, drawing out the various linguistic and literary influences present in the works. We’ll emphasize the foundations of Indigenous languages, literacies, and form, while also analyzing how Native American writers have consistently appropriated...

Read Along with Berkeley English

Published date September 23, 2022

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 courses highlighted below. For each seminar, we provide selected readings and discussion questions, along with an invitation to join an ongoing online discussion and monthly Open...

An interview with Colleen Lye on After Marx

Published date September 12, 2022

An interview with Colleen Lye, co-editor of After Marx Here Lindsay Choi — English graduate student and co-coordinator of the Interdisciplinary Marxist Working Group at Cal — interviews Professor Colleen Lye about After Marx: Literature, Theory, and Value in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge University Press, 2022), a collection of essays which she co-edited with Christopher Nealon. In the resulting interview,...

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

Published date August 29, 2022

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)

Faculty Recruitment–Assistant Professor of Medieval English

Published date August 16, 2022

For information on the recruitment and application instructions, see the full posting. (Image: The British Library, Additional 47967 f. 65v)

Jo Alvarado wins the American Cultures Essay Prize

Published date July 25, 2022

Berkeley English honors student Jo Alvarado has received the American Cultures Essay Prize for her essay “Loving What Goes Away: Ross Gay’s Gratitude for Loss and Life.” Alvarado’s essay was written in Professor John Alba Cutler’s 166AC course “Racial Joy,” offered in the Department of English this past Spring. Congratulations, Jo! The prizewinning essay responds to a prompt from the...

Berkeley English ranked #1 graduate program by U.S. News

Published date July 25, 2022

The English Department has been ranked #1 in U.S. News & World Report’s 2023 national graduate program rankings. The high ranking of the department as a whole resulted from the high ranking of our field specialties, as follows: #1 in American Literature After 1865 #1 in Gender and Literature #2 in 18th Through 20th Century British Literature #2 in African-American...

Elisa Tamarkin’s Apropos of Something: A History of Irrelevance and Relevance

Published date July 7, 2022

Professor Elisa Tamarkin’s Apropos of Something: A History of Irrelevance and Relevance (University of Chicago Press, 2022) is released this month. Before 1800 nothing was irrelevant. So argues Elisa Tamarkin’s sweeping meditation on a key shift in consciousness: the arrival of relevance as the means to grasp how something that was once disregarded, unvalued, or lost to us becomes interesting...

Featured Summer Courses

Published date April 28, 2022

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...

Edwidge Danticat | Once Upon an Endless Night: Storytelling and the legends that made me a writer

Published date April 28, 2022

For information on the Bedri Distinguished Writer Series, including past and forthcoming events, please visit the Series’ website. Join us for a public lecture with Edwidge Danticat, the Spring 2022 Bedri Distinguished Writer, on Thursday, April 28th at 8:00 PM in 315 Wheeler Hall (the Maude Fife Room). A smaller, department-only Q&A will take place earlier in the day at...

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

Published date April 13, 2022

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...