Jeffrey Knapp is Distinguished Professor of the Graduate School at Berkeley, the Ida Mae and William J. Eggers Chair in English Emeritus, and a Faculty Affiliate Emeritus of Berkeley's Film & Media department. After undergraduate and then graduate study at Berkeley, Knapp taught at Harvard for three years before returning to Berkeley in 1990. He has received the campus’s Distinguished Teaching Award and its Faculty Service Award; he is also the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and an NEH Fellowship.
Knapp has published five books: An Empire Nowhere: England and America from Utopia to The Tempest (1992); Shakespeare’s Tribe: Church, Nation, and Theater in Renaissance England (2002), which won the Best Book in Literature and Language award from the Association of American Publishers, the Book of the Year award from the Conference on Christianity and Literature, and the Roland H. Bainton Prize for the Best Book in Literature from the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference; Shakespeare Only (2009), which Choice named an Outstanding Academic Title of the year; Pleasing Everyone: Mass Entertainment in Renaissance London and Golden-Age Hollywood (2017) , Knapp's first book on film as well as literature and theater; and Shakespeare High and Low (2025), an introduction to Shakespeare. He is currently working on two separate book projects: the first, an introduction to Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton; and the second, a film book provisionally entitled Nowhere To Go: Freedom on the Run in Sixties Cinema.
Knapp has chaired Berkeley's Department of English and Department of Film & Media, as well as the campus committees on Privilege & Tenure and on the Budget & Interdepartmental Relations, and the UC system-wide Committee on Academic Personnel.
