Senate Faculty

Kevis Goodman

Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies
Critical Theory
Renaissance and Early Modern
18th-Century British
Poetry

I teach and write in the fields of later 17th-Century British literature (especially Milton), 18th-Century British Literature (especially after 1740), and Romanticism. Within those historical periods, my interests gravitate toward questions in aesthetics and poetics, science and literature, and literary historiography. My first book was Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediation of History (Cambridge 2004; paperback edition 2008). My new book, Pathologies of Motion: Historical Thinking in Medicine, Aesthetics and Poetics (Yale University Press,...

Sara Guyer

Professor and Dean, Arts and Humanities
19th-Century British
Critical Theory
Poetry

Sara Guyer researches, writes, and lectures on romanticism and its legacies. She is the author of Romanticism After Auschwitz (Stanford 2007) and Reading with John Clare: Biopoetics, Sovereignty, Romanticism (Fordham 2015) and has edited special issues of Diacritics, Romantic Circles, and South Atlantic Quarterly. With Brian McGrath, she coedits the book series Lit Z.

From 2016 to 2022, Guyer served as the President of the international Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (...

Kristin Hanson

Professor
Linguistics
Poetry

My principal research interest is poetic meter. I've worked on developing a general theory of meter as a stylization of the phonology of rhythm in natural language, with a special interest in how such a theory can illuminate formal, historical and aesthetic properties of modern English meters. From a similar perspective I've also explored rhyme and alliteration; rhythmic aspects of setting words to music; and occasional related characteristics of dance. These inquiries all bear on broader questions of how art forms relate to natural human perceptual faculties, and why aesthetic qualities...

Cathy Park Hong

Professor and Class of 1936 First Chair in the College of Letters and Science
Creative Writing
Poetry

Donna V. Jones

Associate Professor
African
Caribbean
Critical Theory
Narrative & the Novel
20th- and 21st-Century British

Professor Jones serves as Core Faculty for the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory and the Science, Technology and Society Center. She is on the Advisory Board for the Interdisciplinary Studies Field Major, and is also affiliated with Gender and Women's Studies.

Victoria Kahn

Professor and Katharine Bixby Hotchkis Chair in English
Renaissance and Early Modern
Critical Theory

I have been teaching at Berkeley since 1997. Before coming to Berkeley, I taught at Princeton University (1985-96) and UC, Irvine (1996-97). For the English department, I teach courses on Milton, seventeenth-century English literature, and the history of literary theory. For Comparative Literature, I teach courses on the continental Renaissance and literary theory, including The History and Theory of Mimesis, Idols and Ideology, and Tragedy and Trauerspiel. I have a longstanding interest in the history of philosophy and in political theory, and have published widely on Machiavelli and...

David Landreth

Associate Professor
Renaissance and Early Modern
Drama
Poetry

I work on the literature and culture of Tudor and early Stuart England. My main expertise is in materialism (in its Marxist, ancient, and "new materialist" manifestations); I am also engaged by problems of word and image, religiosity, and humanist learning.

Celeste Langan

Associate Professor
19th-Century British
Critical Theory
Disability Studies
Poetry

Celeste Langan, Associate Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of English, is the author of Romantic Vagrancy: Wordsworth and the Simulation of Freedom; another essay, “Mobility Disability,” considers more contemporary issues related to freedom of movement. She’s written several essays on Romantic “Media Studies,” including “Understanding Media in 1805: Audiovisual Hallucination in The Lay of the Last Minstrel,” "Pathologies of Communication from Coleridge to Schreber," and “The Medium of Romantic Poetry” (co-authored with Maureen McLane). More recently, she’s...

Grace Lavery

Associate Professor
19th-Century British
Critical Theory
Cultural Studies
Gender & Sexuality Studies

I study the history and theory of interpretation since 1800, especially with respect to sexuality and gender. My research across these fields of inquiry is linked by a concern with historical claims about aesthetic efficacy: the idea that certain aesthetic effects might simply work, and that though that efficacy might be deeply responsive to context, it is possessed of its own hypothetical logic. Such claims, whose “subjective universal” condition is definitively theorized in Kant’s Critique of Judgment and often implicit within psychoanalytic accounts of the clinical...

Steven Lee

Associate Professor
Asian American
Atlantic
Pacific
African American
Cultural Studies
20th- and 21st-Century American

My research interests include American literature, comparative ethnic studies, Soviet and post-Soviet studies, and Northeast Asia during the interwar years. I have been teaching at Berkeley since 2009, and am affiliated with the Asian American Research Center, the Center for Korean Studies, the Center for Race and Gender, and the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures.

I am the author of The Ethnic Avant-Garde: Cultures and World Revolution (Columbia UP, 2015), co-winner of the MLA’s Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies; and co-editor (with Amelia Glaser...