Jeffrey Knapp is Distinguished Professor of the Graduate School at Berkeley, the Ida Mae and William J. Eggers Chair in English Emeritus, and a Faculty Affiliate Emeritus of Berkeley's Film & Media department. After undergraduate and then graduate study at Berkeley, Knapp taught at Harvard for three years before returning to Berkeley in 1990. He has received the campus’s Distinguished Teaching Award and its Faculty Service Award; he is also the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and an NEH Fellowship.
Knapp has published four books: An Empire Nowhere: England and America from Utopia to The Tempest (1992); Shakespeare’s Tribe: Church, Nation, and Theater in Renaissance England (2002), which won the Best Book in Literature and Language award from the Association of American Publishers, the Book of the Year award from the Conference on Christianity and Literature, and the Roland H. Bainton Prize for the Best Book in Literature from the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference; Shakespeare Only (2009), which Choice named an Outstanding Academic Title of the year; and Pleasing Everyone: Mass Entertainment in Renaissance London and Golden-Age Hollywood (2017) -- Knapp's first book on film as well as literature and theater. He recently completed the manuscript for an introduction to Shakespeare -- Shakespeare High and Low -- and he is working on a film book provisionally entitled Nowhere To Go: Freedom on the Run in Sixties Cinema.
Knapp has chaired Berkeley's Department of English and Department of Film & Media, as well as the campus committees on Privilege & Tenure and on the Budget & Interdepartmental Relations, and the UC system-wide Committee on Academic Personnel.
My most recent book compares the plays of Renaissance London to the movies of Golden-Age Hollywood in order to question the dominant view of mass entertainment as a distinctively modern phenomenon.
