UC Berkeley English

Our Ranking

The Berkeley English Ph.D. program has been ranked the top graduate English program in the country, according to the most recent guide to "America's Best Colleges" published by the U.S. News and World Report. Faculty in the English Department have received more university Distinguished Teaching Awards—25—than any other department.

Recent Faculty Books

Philadelphia Stories: America's Literature of Race and Freedom

Samuel Otter

Oxford University Press: 2010

19th-Century American
African American

A historic and symbolic city on the border between slavery and freedom, antebellum Philadelphia was home to one of the largest and most influential "free" African American communities in the United States. The city was seen by residents and observers as the stage on which the possibilities of freedom would be tested and a post-slavery future would be played out for the nation. Philade....

Labors of Innocence in Early Modern England

Joanna M Picciotto

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS (JUNE 15, 2010)

Renaissance and Early Modern
18th-Century British

17th-century intellectuals discovered their idealized self-image in the Adam who investigated, named, and commanded the creatures in Eden. Reinvented as the agent of innocent curiosity, Adam was central to the project of redefining contemplation as a productive, public labor. Picciotto argues that practical efforts to restore paradise generated the modern concept of objectivity and ....

Metropole

Geoffrey G. O'Brien

University of California Press

Poetry

Geoffrey G. O’Brien’s third collection opens with a set of lyric experiments whose music and mutable syntax explore the social relations concealed in material things. O’Brien’s poems measure the “vague cadence” of daily life, testing both the value and limits of art in a time of vanishing publics and permanent war. The long title poem, written in a strict iam....

The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy: Négritude, Vitalism, and Modernity

Donna V. Jones

Columbia University Press (March 16, 2010)

Caribbean
20th- and 21st-Century American
African American

Winner of the Jeanne and Aldo Scaglione Prize in Comparative Literary Studies in 2010. The Prize citation reads: "Donna V. Jones’s Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy: Négritude, Vitalism, and Modernity is a groundbreaking study of négritude and its major theorists, the poets Léopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire, that examines t....