Faculty

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

Kent Puckett

Professor and 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
Critical Theory
Cultural Studies
Cults
American Studies
Gender & Sexuality Studies
Postcolonial Theory

Co-Director of the Program in Critical Theory, Poulomi Saha works at the intersections of American studies, psychoanalytic critique, feminist and queer theory, and postcolonial studies. They are 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, they're finishing a book about our abiding...

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

Associate Professor, Shirley Shenker Chair
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...