Senate Faculty

Kent Puckett

Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, Ida May and William J. Eggers Jr. Chair in English
Critical Theory
Narrative & the Novel
19th-Century British
Poetry
Film

I did my graduate work at the University of Virginia and Columbia University and joined Berkeley's English Department in 2002. I teach courses on nineteenth-century British literature, the novel, literary theory, psychoanalysis, and narrative theory.

Poulomi Saha

Associate Professor & Co-Director of the Program in Critical Theory
Asian American
South Asian
Critical Theory
Cultural Studies
Gender & Sexuality Studies

As co-Director of the Program in Critical Theory, I work at the intersections of Asian American studies, psychoanalytic critique, feminist and queer theory, and postcolonial studies. I am interested in questions of racialization, regulation of gender and sexuality, and politics of resistance -- from the late 19th century decline of British colonial rule in the Indian Ocean through to the Pacific and the rise of American global power in the 20th century.

Currently, I'm working on book about America’s long obsession with Indian spirituality and why so often those groups come to be...

Scott Saul

Professor
20th- and 21st-Century American
African American
Cultural Studies
Drama
Film

I enjoy writing for both academic and popular audiences. My latest book, Becoming Richard Pryor (HarperCollins, 2014), offers the first deeply researched account of the great performer's life. More information about me and the book can be found at www.scott-saul.com.

Becoming Richard Pryor also has a digital companion at www.becomingrichardpryor.com: a fully curated, multi-media website that opens up the biographer's workshop and gives...

Solmaz Sharif

Shirley Shenker Assistant Professor
Creative Writing
Poetry

Katherine Snyder

Associate Professor and Director of Berkeley Connect in English
20th- and 21st-Century British
20th- and 21st-Century American
Gender & Sexuality Studies
Narrative & the Novel

My first book, Bachelors, Manhood, and the Novel, 1850-1925, considered the rise of British and American modernist narrative in relation to the history of masculinity. Over the past several years, I have turned in my research and teaching to contemporary fiction, with a particular interest in post-apocalyptic, post-traumatic, and post-9/11 novels.

My current book project, Novel Traces: Rewriting the Past in the Post-9/11 Present, identifies a hitherto unrecognized cluster of post-9/11 novels that extensively rewrite canonical works of literature from various...

Janet Sorensen

Professor
18th-Century British

Elisa Tamarkin

Professor
19th-Century British
Early American
19th-Century American
Atlantic

Elisa Tamarkin received her Ph.D. from Stanford and joined English at Berkeley after several years in the English Department at UC, Irvine. She teaches and writes about American literature as well as topics in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century intellectual history, philosophy, and art.

She is the author of Apropos of Something: A History of Irrelevance and Relevance (University of Chicago Press, 2022) and Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America (Chicago, 2008). She is now writing Melville’s Vision on Melville’s lifelong fascination with...

James Grantham Turner

James D Hart Chair and Distinguished Professor
18th-Century British
Gender & Sexuality Studies
Renaissance and Early Modern
Narrative & the Novel
Poetry
Drama

James Turner publishes extensively in literature and art history across the early modern period (1500-1800), in Britain, France and Italy: his most recent book The Villa Farnesina: Palace of Venus in Renaissance Rome (Cambridge University Press, 2022), won the PROSE Award for best art history title from the American Association of Publishers, and glowing reviews in Times Literary Supplement and New York Review of Books. Seven other books have appeared from Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge and Yale. His interests focus on sexuality and gender, but also reach out to...

Bryan Wagner

Professor
19th-Century American
20th- and 21st-Century American
African American

Bryan Wagner is Professor in the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on African American expression in the context of slavery and its aftermath, and he has specific interests in legal history, vernacular culture, urban studies, and digital humanities.

His first book, Disturbing the Peace: Black Culture and the Police Power after Slavery (Harvard University Press, 2009), offers a new theory of black vernacular tradition based on the tradition’s historical engagement with criminal law. By interpreting outlaw legends and blues...

Kara Wittman

Associate Teaching Professor

I study and teach in two sometimes-related fields: the history and theory of the literary and philosophical essay; and critical pedagogy, especially pedagogies of writing and rhetoric. My work on the essay examines the critical and sometimes political resistance of an aesthetic form more often characterized by its winking relationship to argument, certainty, ideological commitment. I’m also interested in the essay as a form of “unknowing,” a literary expression of the philosophical passion of wonder. I am currently working with a visual anthropologist/filmmaker on a project about the...