Emeritus Faculty

Elizabeth Abel

Professor Emeritus and John F. Hotchkis Chair Emeritus
20th- and 21st-Century British
20th- and 21st-Century American
African American
Cultural Studies
Gender & Sexuality Studies

My work spans two broad fields of inquiry. The first is gender and sexuality, psychoanalysis, and twentieth-century fiction (with a focus on Virginia Woolf). My first book, Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis (1989), uncovered the legacies of Freud and Melanie Klein in Woolf’s narrative strategies. My new book Odd Affinities: Virginia Woolf’s Shadow Genealogies (2024), explores the afterlives of Virginia Woolf in unexpected places and cultural traditions across the twentieth century: not the popular cultural appropriations, but the subtle resonances and subtextual...

Charles F. Altieri

Professor Emeritus and Rachael Anderson Stageberg Chair Emeritus
Poetry
20th- and 21st-Century American
20th- and 21st-Century British

I have been primarily interested in the varieties of Twentieth Century American poetry, especially in relation to philosophy and to the visual arts. I also recently wrote a book on the affects and that shapes my thinking on most topics. But I am in transition. I have been teaching Shakespeare and Hegel and will teach the epic because I want a grand stage on which to figure out what I can say about affect in literature. I am also working on book introducing ways of thinking about modern American poetry.

Joel B. Altman

Emeritus
Drama
Renaissance and Early Modern

Julia Bader

Emeritus
20th- and 21st-Century American
Gender & Sexuality Studies
Narrative & the Novel

Ann Banfield

Emeritus
Critical Theory
Linguistics
Narrative & the Novel

Mitchell Breitwieser

Emeritus
20th- and 21st-Century American
Early American
19th-Century American

B.A. in English, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1975.

Ph.D., State University of New York, Buffalo, 1979.

Faculty, UC-Berkeley, English, since July, 1979.

Carol T. Christ

Emeritus; Eleventh Chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley
19th-Century British

Thomas Farber

Emeritus
Creative Writing

Besides my books—short fiction, novels, creative nonfiction, the epigrammatic, and screenplays—I'm Editor-in-Chief of El Leon Literary Arts, an independent nonprofit press (www.elleonliteraryarts.org) with 40 titles thus far, two by former students in this department.

Visit www.thomasfarber.org

Richard Feingold

Emeritus
18th-Century British

Catherine Gallagher

Emeritus; Former Ida May and William J. Eggers Jr. Chair in English
19th-Century British
Gender & Sexuality Studies
Narrative & the Novel

Catherine Gallagher is the Emerita Eggers Professor of English Literature, and she taught at Berkeley from 1980 until her retirement in 2012. Her teaching and research focus on the British novel and cultural history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She taught courses on the history of the British novel, the historiography and theory of the novel, alternate-history narratives, and various other topics in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature. She received NEH, ACLS, and Guggenheim fellowships and has been a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the...