Senate Faculty

Andrew Way Leong

Assistant Professor
20th- and 21st-Century American
Asian American
19th-Century American
Cultural Studies
Gender & Sexuality Studies
Critical Theory

I am a comparativist who works primarily in Japanese and English with additional interests in Spanish and Portuguese. I approach the study of Asian American literature (and literatures of Asia and the Americas) with special attention to the generative frictions within and among multiple languages.

My research focuses on the literature of Japanese diasporas in the Americas as well as queer and critical theoretical approaches to the study of literary genre, gendered embodiment, and generational time. I am the translator of Lament in the Night (Kaya Press 2012), a collection...

Colleen Lye

Associate Professor
20th- and 21st-Century American
Asian American
Critical Theory
Cultural Studies

Colleen Lye (Ph.D., Columbia) is Associate Professor of English at UC Berkeley, where she teaches courses on marxism and critical theory, Asian American Studies, and 20th and 21st century literature. She is affiliated with the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory and the Department of Rhetoric. She is a founding member of the Marxist Institute for Research (MIR). Lye is a member of the editorial boards of Representations, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies and Postmodern Culture. Besides these venues, her writing has appeared in Modern Languages Quarterly, PMLA,...

David Marno

Associate Professor
Drama
Renaissance and Early Modern
Critical Theory
Poetry

Much of my work concentrates on the intersection between literature and religious practice in Renaissance literature and culture, in particular on the relationship between prayer, meditation, spiritual exercises, and poetry. I have published on religious and secular concepts of attention, on apocalypse as a literary and political figure, and on philosophy of history and comparative literature. My first book Death Be Not Proud: The Art of Holy Attention (Chicago, 2016) interprets John...

Fiona McFarlane

Associate Professor
Narrative & the Novel
Creative Writing

Jennifer Miller

Associate Professor
Old English
Textual Criticism
Drama
Disability Studies
Gender & Sexuality Studies
Cultural Studies
Scottish
Renaissance and Early Modern
Middle English
Professor Miller works on historiography, hagiography, medieval rhetorical culture, insular political relations, multilingualism, translation and textual transmission, philology, dialectology, and paleography.

Maura Nolan

Associate Professor
Middle English
Renaissance and Early Modern
Drama

I work on late medieval English literature, with a special focus on the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and the vexed relationship between the “medieval” and the “Renaissance.” I am especially interested in defining and articulating the role of the aesthetic in late medieval vernacular literature, particularly in relation to variable cultural understandings of sensation and cognition. I am currently working on two projects. The first focuses on the place of contingency and sensation in the work of John Gower, while the second addresses notions of the beautiful and the sublime in...

Geoffrey G. O'Brien

Professor
Poetry
20th- and 21st-Century American
20th- and 21st-Century British
19th-Century American
Creative Writing

Samuel Otter

Professor and Clyde and Evelyn Slusser Chair in English
Early American
19th-Century American
African American

Samuel Otter has taught in the English Department at the University of California at Berkeley since 1990. He served as department chair from 2009 to 2012. His research and teaching focus on nineteenth-century United States literatures. He is particularly interested in the relationships between literature and history, the varieties of literary excess, and the ways in which close textual interpretation also can be deep and wide.

He has published Melville’s Anatomies (California, 1999), an analysis of how Melville, in his long fiction of the 1840s and 1850s, portrayed the ways...

Beth Piatote

Associate Professor
Native American

Beth Piatote is an associate professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California Berkeley. She is the author of two books: the scholarly monograph Domestic Subjects: Gender, Citizenship, and the Law in Native American Literature (Yale 2013), which received honorable mention from the Modern Language Association for the 2014 Prize for Studies in Native American Literatures, Cultures, and Languages; and the mixed-genre collection, The Beadworkers: Stories (Counterpoint 2019), which was long-listed for the Aspen Words Literary Prize and the PEN/Bingham Prize for...

Joanna M Picciotto

Associate Professor
Renaissance and Early Modern
18th-Century British