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 From the Ground Up -- 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. 

BOOKS

Pleasing Everyone: Mass Entertainment in Renaissance London and Golden-Age Hollywood.  New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.

Shakespeare Only.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.

Shakespeare's Tribe: Church, Nation, and Theater in Renaissance England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.

An Empire Nowhere: England, America, and Literature from Utopia to The Tempest. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.

 ARTICLES

“Entertainment.”  In Entertaining the Idea: Shakespeare, Philosophy, Performance.  Ed. Julia Lupton, Lowell Gallagher, and James Kearney.  Forthcoming from the University of Toronto Press.

"Selma and the Place of Fiction in Historical Films."  Representations 142 (2018): 91-123.  Online version at http://www.representations.org/advance-publications/. 

"Hamlet and the Sovereignty of Reasons."  The Review of Politics 78 (2016): 645-62.

"Shakespeare's Pains to Please."  In Forms of Association: Making Publics in Early Modern Europe.  Ed. Paul Yachnin and Marlene Eberhart.  Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015.  256-71.  

"'Throw That Junk!'  The Art of the Movie in Citizen Kane."  Representations 122 (2013): 110-42.

"Mass Entertainment Before Mass Entertainment."  New Literary History 44 (2013): 93-115.

"The Confession of Authorship in Shakespeare's Sonnets."  In Word and Rite: Ceremony in Selected Works of Shakespeare.  Ed. Beatrice Batson.  Cambridge: Cambridge Publishers, 2010.

"Author, King, and Christ in Shakespeare's Histories."  In Shakespeare and Religious Change.  Ed. Kenneth Graham and Philip Collington.  New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009.  217-37.

"Shakespeare as Coauthor."  Shakespeare Studies 36 (2008): 49-59.

"'Sacred Songs, Popular Prices': Secularization in The Jazz Singer."  Critical Inquiry 34 (2008): 313-35.

"Religious Pluralization and Single Authorship in Shakespeare's Histories."  In Representing Religious Pluralization in Early Modern Europe.  Ed. Andreas Höfele et al.  Berlin: Lit-Verlag, 2007. 153-73.

"Nations into Persons."  In ReReading the Black Legend: The Discourses of Racism in the Renaissance Empires.  Ed. Margaret R. Greer, Walter Mignolo, and Maureen Quilligan.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.  293-311.

"What is a Co-Author?"  Representations 89 (2005): 1-29.

“Spenser the Priest.” Representations 81 (2003): 61-78.

“Jonson, Shakespeare, and the Religion of Players.” Shakespeare Survey 54 (2001): 57-70.

“Rogue Nationalism.” In Centuries’ Ends, Narrative Means. Ed. Robert Newman. Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1996. 138-50.

“Preachers and Players in Shakespeare's England.” Representations 44 (Fall 1993): 29-59.

“Elizabethan Tobacco.” Representations 21 (Winter 1988): 26-66.

“Error as a Means of Empire in The Faerie Queene 1.” ELH 54 (Winter 1987): 801-34.

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.