Faculty Research

"The Cambridge History of Irish Poetry," edited by Professor Eric Falci, Published

August 24, 2026

The UC Berkeley Department of English celebrates the publication of The Cambridge History of Irish Poetry, a new volume edited by Professor Eric Falci and published by Cambridge University Press. Bringing together scholars of Irish poetry across periods and traditions, the volume offers a wide-ranging history of poetry on the island of Ireland and its relationship to poetic traditions beyond its shores.

As Professor Falci...

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/cambridge-history-of-irish-poetry/863C6E624…

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.

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...

Prof. Eric Falci to Give 2026 Charles Mills Gayley Lecture

April 17, 2026
Dana Swensen

UC Berkeley English is delighted to announce that Professor Eric Falci will deliver the 2026 Charles Mills Gayley Lecture. Professor Falci's lecture, “Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Conditions of Music,” will take place on Friday, April 24, at 4 pm in the Maude Fife Room (Wheeler 315).

Eric Falci joined the faculty at U.C. Berkeley in Fall 2006 after finishing his PhD at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His first book, ...

Done in a Day: Telex from the Fall of Saigon

Elisa Tamarkin
2026

Named one of Lit Hub’s most anticipated books of the year.

A searing reflection on the last day of the Vietnam War and the beginning of the end of foreign reporting in the nation’s daily newspapers.

Done in a Day turns on a single event: the April 30, 1975, departure of the last helicopter evacuating civilians from the rooftop of the US embassy in Saigon. Elisa Tamarkin’s interest in that helicopter begins with the fact that her stepfather, the Saigon bureau chief for the Chicago Daily News, was on it—the last American...

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

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...