Student Profile

Sebastian Cahill, class of '23, "Archival research was the highlight of my undergraduate career at UC Berkeley."

January 16, 2024

Sebastian Cahill, class of '23, is a recent graduate of UC Berkeley, where he received a B.A. in English and Comparative Literature. Currently, he works as a news reporter for Business Insider. He hopes to return to graduate school in the coming years to do a Ph.D. program combining his studies of Irish Literature and gender dynamics post-colonialism in Ireland. He resides in the Bay Area with his fiancé and their two cats, Edward and Fish Stick. For our series on undergraduate archival experiences, he wrote about his time researching his honors thesis on the ancient Irish...

Violet Spurlock

20th- and 21st-Century American
Critical Theory
Creative Writing
Cultural Studies
Poetry
Gender & Sexuality Studies
My current research considers discourses of obviousness in literature and literary criticism alongside the development of the non-obviousness requirement in US patent law. I examine the parallels between law's assertion of the unique capacity of non-obvious ideas to serve as intellectual property and criticism's valorization of subtlety, difficulty, and ambiguity as stylistic qualities that mark genuinely distinctive authorship. Some of my other academic interests include film and new media, psychoanalysis, trans studies, Marxism, aesthetics, and ordinary language philosophy. In addition to...

Andrew David King

My current research pertains to disability, class, and the history of medicine and technology. I'm interested in how debates about formalism in literary culture, the life sciences, and clinical practice have shaded into, or served as proxies for, sites for the negotiation of what it means to be an embodied being. Part of this work involves recuperating and reconfiguring the history of medicine for disability studies. A longstanding concern in which these interests have found some traction is the science, social construction, and aesthetic representation of pain--as a non-object that...

Helen Halliwell: "For my honors thesis, I asked questions about place, learning, language, and community: what could Clare’s poetry of acute attention to place tell us about belonging?"

October 19, 2023

Field Research, of a Kind

by Helen Halliwell

Geoffrey Grigson, in the introduction to his edited collection of John Clare’s poetry (1950), wrote that “No one will find it very rewarding to visit ‘John Clare’s Country’ instead of visiting and revisiting John Clare’s poetry.” How embarrassing, then, to find myself in Helpston, Clare’s home village, not even a year after I was introduced to him. The first Clare poem I read was “The Yellowhammers Nest,” which begins with the invitation: “let us stoop / And...

Graduate Student Poets: Noah Warren

June 23, 2023

This piece is the third in a series about graduate student poets in the Department of English at Berkeley.

Noah Warren joined the Berkeley English Department as a Ph.D. student in 2018. He is the author of The Complete Stories (Copper Canyon, 2021) and...

Graduate Student Poets: Lindsay Choi

December 6, 2022

This piece is the second in a series about graduate student poets in the Department of English at Berkeley.

Lindsay Choi joined the English Department as a Ph.D. student in 2018 after completing their undergraduate work in English and Philosophy at Berkeley earlier that year. They are the author of Transverse (Futurepoem Books, 2021), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in...

Graduate Student Poets: Jessica Laser

November 16, 2022

This piece is the first in a series about graduate student poets in the Department of English at Berkeley.

Jessica Laser joined the English Department as a Ph.D. student in Fall 2017. She is the author of Sergei Kuzmich from All Sides (Letter Machine Editions, 2019) and Planet...

Ryan Lackey’s essay forthcoming in Simpsonistas

October 6, 2022

“Beyond the Process,” an essay by fourth-year English Ph.D. student and recent Simpson fellow Ryan Lackey, will be included in the forthcoming fourth volume of Simpsonistas: Tales from the Simpson Literary Project due out in October 2022. Simpsonistas, which is published annually, collects work by associates of the New Literary Project (formerly the Simpson...