Faculty

Bryan Wagner

Professor
19th-Century American
20th- and 21st-Century American
African American

Bryan Wagner is Professor in the English Department, Director of the Folklore Program, and Professor in the American Studies Program at the University of California, Berkeley.

His research focuses on African American expression in the context of slavery and its aftermath, and he has interests in legal history, vernacular tradition, urban studies, and digital humanities.

His first book,Disturbing the Peace: Black Culture and the Police Power after Slavery(Harvard University Press, 2009),...

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, novel theory, literature and philosophy, affect theory, visual culture, and aesthetics. More recently, my worked has also turned to contemporary literature, especially Asian American and Asian diasporic literature, and cultural studies.

My first book, Strange Likeness: Description and the Modernist Novel ("Thinking Literature" series, University of Chicago Press, 2020) turns to some experiments of modernist form - by Henry James, Marcel Proust, and, most centrally, Virginia Woolf - in order...