Faculty

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...

Dora Zhang

Associate Professor
20th- and 21st-Century British
Critical Theory
Cultural Studies
20th- and 21st-Century American
Narrative & the Novel
Asian American and Asian Diasporic

My research interests have focused on Anglo-American and European modernist fiction, literature and philosophy, novel theory, affect theory, visual culture, and aesthetics. More recently, my worked has also turned to contemporary literature, especially Asian American and Asian diasporic literature.

My first book, Strange Likeness: Description and the Modernist Novel, appeared in 2020 from the University of Chicago Press as part of the "Thinking Literature" series. It turns to some experiments of modernist form - by James, Proust, and, most centrally, Woolf - in order to...