Faculty Profile

UC Berkeley English Welcomes Professor Farah Bakaari

August 28, 2025

This fall semester, we are delighted to welcome Farah Bakaari as Assistant Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of English. Farah Bakaari is a scholar of 20th and 21st century African literature. She joins Berkeley English after receiving her Ph.D. from Cornell University. Her teaching and research interests include postcolonial studies, questions of comparison, political theory and the novel as well as the relationship between aesthetics and politics. Bakaari's writing has appeared in Journal...

Remembering the Life of Professor Donald Anthony McQuade | Obituary by Kelefa Sanneh

October 3, 2025
We were deeply saddened to hear that Donald Anthony McQuade, Professor Emeritus of English and a founder of the American Studies program at UC Berkeley, passed away in late August 2025.

To honor Don’s enduring influence on our department, the broader campus community, and his students, we share an obituary by Kelefa Sanneh, Staff Writer at The New Yorker, commemorating his life and legacy. We thank Kelefa Sanneh and Professor McQuade's family for permission to republish this here.

Q&A with Professor Alexandra Lossada: "I don’t find that the story of immigration can be told by exclusively focusing on one demographic, but rather I want to see how different groups are narrating their histories and stories through literature."

September 26, 2025
Dana Swensen
We’re delighted to welcome you to UC Berkeley English, Professor Lossada! Can you tell us a bit about yourself, your research interests, and what excites you about UC Berkeley?

Hello, I’m Alexandra Lossada and I’m a new assistant professor in Chicanx/Latinx studies. I’m originally from Los Angeles and I love to fly or drive down to see my family and cats, eat at my favorite restaurants, hang out with my friends, and enjoy everything that LA has to offer. I have a strong relationship with the country of Japan, since I lived in Kyushu for three...

"What is the appropriate form with which to tell the story of the African postcolonial state?" A Q&A with Professor Farah Bakaari

September 22, 2025
Dana Swensen


Welcome to UC Berkeley English! Can you tell us a little bit about yourself, your research, and what drew you to the field and/or UC Berkeley?

Thank you, Dana! I am delighted to be here. I was born and raised in East Africa. I start here, in the proverbial beginning to say, if it weren’t obvious already, that my becoming a scholar of African literatures is an aberration of sorts, an accident really! I began learning the English language in high school when I entered the American schooling system (though I wasn’t yet living in the U.S.), and from that point on my education...

"Downtime: The Twentieth Century in Slow Motion," a Q&A with Professor Mark Goble

As you say of slow motion as a visual technology, “we know where it ends up: everywhere.” Before reading your book, I was really struck by that thought - just the sheer volume of examples, the complete ubiquity of slow motion (even leaving aside the volume of the academic discourse on it). How does that work from a practical point of view as a writer? Was there a thought of how to manage this volume of evidence as an initial problem in conceiving of the book?


While I was working on the book and the examples kept adding up, I began to realize that part of my job as a...

John Shoptaw

Senior Continuing Lecturer
19th-Century American
20th- and 21st-Century American
Creative Writing
Poetry

Keats: "The poetry of earth is never dead."

For the past several years I've been writing and teaching ecopoetry and ecopoetics. In the spring of 2025, I'll be teaching an English 90 on Ecopoetry and Ecopoetics, and an English 190 research seminar on Emily Dickinson.

Read more about my new collection Near-Earth Object in Jenny Odell's recent essay in the Paris Review.

Grace Lavery

Associate Professor
19th-Century British
Critical Theory
Cultural Studies
Gender & Sexuality Studies

My work addresses the history and theory of interpretation under capitalism, with a focus on the ascription of sexual meaning to flesh. Embarking from the psychoanalytic insight that flesh is both meaningless and the means by which meaning becomes possible, I have studied rarefied and complex construals of flesh in a set of highly-specific historical circumstances: the late-Victorian obsession with Japanese effeminacy (in my first book, Quaint, Exquisite); the emergence of the transsexual as a focal point for modern ideas about bodily technique (in my second scholarly monograph, Pleasure...

Faculty Voices: Professor David Marno on Teaching, UC Berkeley, and Attention

June 16, 2025
Dana Swensen


I'm curious about how it is that your experience with teaching has been shaped by UC Berkeley itself, and how it's changed over the years. What were, if any, your expectations when you began teaching here and how did the reality match with them? As someone who did a PhD at Stanford and came here from there, I'm wondering if UC Berkeley changed how you thought about teaching.


In retrospect, I was not prepared for the leap into teaching, even though I did a little bit of it at Stanford and before that a little bit in Budapest. But I was not prepared to be a teacher. I...

"Latinx Literature in Transition, Vol. 2," Edited by Professor John Alba Cutler and Marissa K. López, Published

April 24, 2025

April 2025 marks the publication of Latinx Literature in Transition, 1848 -1992, Vol. 2, co-edited by UC Berkeley English Professor John Alba Cutler and Professor Marissa K. López We offer our congratulations to Professors Cutler and López! "Latinx Literature in Transition, Vol. 2 is a rare work of true collaboration," Professor Cutler told us, "the product of several years of dialogue and workshopping not only...

Professor Elisa Tamarkin to Deliver 2025 Charles Mills Gayley Lecture

April 25, 2025

Please join the Department of English for the annual Charles Mills Gayley Lecture, delivered by Professor Elisa Tamarkin. This year’s lecture, “The Phenomenology of Looming,” is on ideas of visibility in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and on the paintings that shape them. The lecture will be held on Friday, May 2, at 4 pm in the Maude Fife Room (Wheeler 315).

Elisa Tamarkin is...