Faculty Research

Professor Colleen Lye Receives Honorable Mention in AAAS Excellence in Mentoring Award

April 11, 2025

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...

"Collaborating with artists in the context of organizing...has been a constant to my community work," a Q&A with 2025 Holloway Poet Cecily Nicholson

April 7, 2025
Dana Swensen
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...

Fiona McFarlane's "Highway Thirteen," Wins The Story Prize

March 26, 2025

UC Berkeley English is delighted to announce that Professor Fiona McFarlane’s 2024 collection of short stories, Highway Thirteen, has won The Story Prize. We offer our warm congratulations to Professor McFarlane. The judges of the prize cited the “conceptual and thematic ingenuity of the collection as a whole and the precise execution of every story.” The Story Prize annually honors the author of an outstanding short-story collection and is among the largest cash-prize awards for a collection of short fiction. McFarlane’s work was selected from a pool...

Shakespeare High and Low: Character, Audience, Career

Jeffrey Knapp
2025

A critically sophisticated yet highly readable exploration of Shakespeare’s career as a mass entertainer

A critically sophisticated but highly readable analysis of eleven key Shakespeare plays and of Shakespeare’s career overall An introduction to Shakespeare that differs from others in showing how Shakespeare regarded his plays as neither high nor low culture but as a potent amalgam of both A revival of character study as essential to grasping the broader issues of class, race, gender, sexuality, psychology, politics, philosophy, and religion in Shakespeare’s plays

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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.

"Cambridge World History of Sexualities" Published, Featuring Chapters by Professor James Grantham Turner

October 24, 2024

UC Berkeley English is delighted to announce the publication of The Cambridge World History of Sexualities, featuring two chapters by Professor James Grantham Turner. As CUP tells us, "The Cambridge World History of Sexualities examines sexualities across time and around the world at varying geographic and chronological scales. Featuring over eighty contributions from scholars across more...

Celebrating Lyn Hejinian: Reflections from Students, Friends, and Colleagues

July 10, 2024
Dana Swensen
This year, as we continue to celebrate the incredible life and work of poet Lyn Hejinian, we’ll be publishing a new series of remembrances across our department channels. In July and August, we’ll feature a weekly remembrance from a friend, student, or colleague of Lyn’s on our website. Essay-length pieces will feature here, while shorter remembrances will appear on our department Instagram account. All pieces will depart from a passage of Lyn’s writing selected by the individual. As Lyn wrote in My Life and My Life in the Nineties, “Any work dealing with questions of...

2023-4 Holloway Poet Tim Wood: "These poetry readings bring together professors and graduate students who are practicing poets and catalyzes Berkeley’s wider poetry community."

August 7, 2024
Dana Swensen
So, the first question - what do you see as the role of the Holloway poet?

Yeah. So this is an interesting question, because you know that I have a very personal relationship with the Holloway. And we'll probably talk some about that. So besides that, asking about the role of the Holloway poet position is a funny thing because it’s almost self-evident. Right? It's whatever the contract says: teach a class and give a reading. But it's really to be a poet. And I think that’s, again, self-evident but important, because whoever's in this position has an opportunity...

Closures: Heterosexuality and the American Sitcom

Grace Lavery
2024

From The Mary Tyler Moore Show to Arrested Development to BoJack Horseman, the American sitcom revolves around crises that must be resolved by episode’s end, with a new crisis to come next week. In Closures, Grace Lavery reconsiders the genre’s seven-decade history as an endless cycle of crisis and closure that formally and representationally frames heterosexuality as constantly on the verge of both collapse and reconstitution. She shows that even the normiest family-based sitcoms rely on queer characters like Alice (The...

Cathy Park Hong: "I wanted to write to people like me, people who could be my kin. As I became more confident in the form, and the book, my idea of kin grew more inclusive and bigger."

October 18, 2023
Dana Swensen

This semester we were pleased to welcome Cathy Park Hong to the UC Berkeley Department of English as Professor and Class of 1936 First Chair in the College of Letters and Science. We spoke to her about poetry, AI and UC Berkeley as an intellectual homecoming.

Cathy Park Hong’s New York Times bestselling book of creative nonfiction, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, was published in Spring 2020 by One World/Random House and Profile Books (UK). Minor Feelings was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for...