Student Research

2024 English Department Commencement Student Speeches

On May 16th, 2024, the English Department held its annual commencement ceremony, featuring speeches from students Alex Ullman, Bryce Wallace, and Isabella Sanford. We're delighted to bring you those speeches here from these three wonderful graduates of UC Berkeley English. For the keynote speech, delivered by Sara Guyer, Professor of English and Irving and Jean Stone Dean of Arts and Humanities, check out UC Berkeley's Arts and Humanities page.

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...

"I've expanded...from thinking about public art...to thinking about the concept of the public as such," Miguel Samano on Research and Publication as a Graduate Student

September 6, 2024
Dana Swensen
Miguel Samano (they/he) is a 5th year Ph.D. candidate in English at UC Berkeley. Their dissertation research studies the relationship between narrative form and the formal patterning of stranger-to-stranger talk as a means for understanding how Asian Americans and Latinxs since 1965 are both racialized as alien-citizens, that is, as strangers even among other strangers. To pursue this research agenda, they’ve drawn on insights...

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...

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...

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...

Undergraduate Research Experience: Joshua Gentry

September 13, 2023

The Joy of Novel Information

Joshua Gentry

In the summer of 2022, I visited the Truman Capote Archive Located at the New York Public Library to conduct research for my honors thesis. After my first day, a profound realization struck me: beyond the ever-expanding reach of the internet, outside of the texts in the endless rows of books in Main Stacks, is an undiscovered treasure trove of invaluable information waiting to see the light of day. Prior to my archival research experience at the...