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...
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 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...
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...
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.
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...
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...
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).
The UC Berkeley Department of English is delighted to announce that Professor Colleen Lye has received Honorable Mention for the 2025 Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) Excellence in Mentoring Award! As the AAAS award notes, "Moving testimony from many of her previous students demonstrated the extent to which Dr. Lye mentored her students’ intellectual growth and cultivated their academic passions. She demonstrates attentive care through her commitment to academic promise and rigor. We are delighted to recognize Dr. Lye for her fantastic contributions to the mentorship of...
First off, welcome to Berkeley! As someone who is not only a writer/poet but also works in arts administration, activist communities and restorative justice programs, I’m wondering how you see the relationship between those practices/communities and your own writing. It seems like you have such a rich diversity of experience in both the art world and the poetry world, so I wonder how writing fits into these things, and how your relationship to these various spaces relates to it.
Thank you! I appreciate these questions. I strive to be involved and accountable at a community level...
