Faculty Research

Imaginative Experience in the Arts: Promoting Liberal Education

Charles F. Altieri
2025

In this significant contribution to aesthetic philosophy from one of the foremost writers on American poetry, Charles Altieri champions the neglected, non-cognitive aspects of our encounters with works of art.

In contrast to literary critics and philosophers who subordinate the importance of aesthetic experience to knowledge and practical concerns, Altieri defends a view of subjective imaginative experience as important in itself, and already socially oriented. To do so, he proposes a distinction between “experience of” and “experience as,”...

Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own," Edited by Dora Zhang

Dora Zhang
2026

The Norton Library edition of A Room of One’s Own features Virginia Woolf’s original 1929 text. Dora Zhang crafts a thoughtful introduction and targeted notes that highlight the continued prevalence of the piece’s themes today and provide a solid foundation for readers to engage with Woolf’s rich, complex, and at times contradictory writing style.

The Norton Library

Raúl Coronado

Associate Professor
19th-Century American
comparative/hemispheric/transnational American studies
Chicanx and/or Latinx
Gender & Sexuality Studies
Critical Theory
Cultural Studies
Raúl Coronado is an Associate Professor of English and of Spanish and Portuguese at UC Berkeley. His teaching and research interests are in Latina/o literary and intellectual history, from the colonial period to the 1940s. In a sense, this field and period allow—indeed force—us to rethink the literature of the Americas in a transnational, hemispheric framework. That is, Latina/o literature has usually been described as a twentieth-century phenomenon, emerging for the most part during the Civil Rights movements of the 1960s and 70s. Yet a return to the literary-historical archive reveals a...

Holocaust and Hope

Kevis Goodman
2026

Holocaust and Hope shows one of our preeminent critics grappling with a subject to which he had returned for decades: literary, cultural, political, and historiographical implications of the Holocaust and its aftermath in Europe and America. In his last planned book, Geoffrey Hartman confronts contradictions that pose a challenge for our present and future. The passing of Holocaust survivors and their immediate families makes continued acts of witnessing more necessary even as distance in time makes the identities and acts of future witnessing more complicated. In addition, the...

Reckonings

Thomas Farber
2026

Describing America’s deeply unsettling politics, at age eighty-one Thomas Farber appraises personal accountability, impending second childhoods, mortality, and the hunger for immortality. Weighing the functions of satire and the meaning of art, his short takes illuminate, debunk, commiserate, and celebrate by rejoinder.

“Framed by two insights—no one chooses to be born and no one can help being what they are—and punctuated by visual images of apocalypse and final judgment, Thomas Farber reckons with the calamitous figure of Donald Trump,...

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...

UC Berkeley English Lecturer Magdalena Ostas' "What We Are in Literature and Art," Published

September 10, 2025

UC Berkeley English is delighted to announce the publication of Lecturer Magdalena Ostas' new book, What We Are in Literature and Art. We offer our congratulations to Ostas on the publication of the book, which, "proceeds with sensitive questioning, treating works of art as sites of thinking, not examples of theories," and is a "testament to the continued value of synthetic sweep even—especially—in an age of narrow scholarly specialization." (Ben Roth, Emerson College...

"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.