Melanie Abrams is a writer, teacher, and developmental editor. Her last book, The Joy of Cannabis: 75 Ways to Amplify Your Life Through the Science and Magic of Cannabis is a comprehensive guide for the cannabis curious to the cannabis connoisseur. With a curated set of 75 activities to expand the mind, move the body, unlock creativity, boost productivity, fortify meaningful connections, and spark wonder, The Joy of Cannabis is a road map for an ancient plant that’s been bringing healing and happiness for thousands of years.
Her novel, Meadowlark, delves into the lasting effects of...
Balthazar I. Beckett holds a PhD from the City University of New York, Graduate Center. In addition to UC Berkeley, Balthazar has taught writing and literature at the American University in Cairo, San Francisco State University, Mount Tamalpais College at San Quentin State Prison, the Royal University of Bhutan, as well as Brooklyn and Queens Colleges in New York City, among other universities.
His work has appeared in The Strange Careers of the Jim Crow North (eds. Brian Purnell and Jeanne Theoharis, NYU Press, 2019), as well as in MELUS (Multi-Ethnic Literature of the...
Jasper Bernes specializes in 20th-century American literature, with an emphasis on postwar poetry and poetics, Marxism, and political economy. His first book, The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization (Stanford UP, 2017), examined the role poetry and art play in the postindustrial restructuring of labor. He is presently working on The Test of Communism for Verso.
I am a Lecturer in the Department of English at UC Berkeley, and a volunteer instructor at Mount Tamalpais College, formerly the Prison University Project, at San Quentin State Prison.
I received my PhD in English from Johns Hopkins University in 2021, where I wrote the dissertation that has become my current book project, The Reach of Criticism: Poetry and Historical Thinking from Romanticism to the Present (under advance contract with Stanford University Press). This book queries the overlapping ambitions of literary criticism and the humanistic social sciences as they bear on an...
Besides my books—short fiction, novels, creative nonfiction, the epigrammatic, and screenplays—I'm Editor-in-Chief of El Leon Literary Arts, an independent nonprofit press (www.elleonliteraryarts.org) with 40 titles thus far, two by former students in this department.
Jesse Nathan's poems appear in the New York Review of Books, the Paris Review, The Nation, the Kenyon Review, BOMB, and elsewhere. His first collection, Eggtooth, was acquired by Peter Campion for Unbound Edition Press, and published in September 2023 with a foreword by Robert Hass. The book won the 2024 New Writers Award in Poetry, and was a finalist for the Golden Poppy, the Nossrat Yassini Poetry Prize, and the Medal Provocateur/Eric Hoffer Award. Nathan's criticism been published in the Threepenny Review and Tin House, and he contributes essays to the New York Times. His critical essay...
I work at the crossroads of literature, philosophy, and the arts. My work explores how literature and art illuminate ways we live—how they help us think and understand the world and offer much more than fictions. I have been happily teaching for fifteen years.
My published work focuses on nineteenth-century literature and culture; Romanticism; literature and everyday life; literature and ethics; gender and sexuality; and philosophical approaches to literature, art, and film. I have recently published essays on Ludwig Wittgenstein (Cambridge Studies in Literature and Philosophy...
Dr. Rebecca Rainof is an Associate Researcher in the Department of English. Her research specialty is Victorian and Modernist literature, with an emphasis on interdisciplinary studies of literature and the visual arts. Her scholarship and teaching also focus on novel and narrative theory, religion and literature, gender and authorship, as well as the personal essay and memoir. She is the author of The Victorian Novel of Adulthood (Ohio UP, 2015), which charts an alternative novelistic tradition to the bildungsroman, narratives of midlife. She is currently completing a book manuscript on “...