Faculty

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

Department Chair, Professor and Katharine Bixby Hotchkis Chair in English
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 transatlantic topics in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art, philosophy, and intellectual history.

She is the author of Apropos of Something: A History of Irrelevance and Relevance (Chicago, 2022), a study of the idea and logic of "relevance," which calls for shifts in forms of attention and perceptions of importance with enormous social stakes. The book engages 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
Ecology, Environment and Landsacape

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...