Faculty

Shu-han Luo

Assistant Professor
Old English
Poetry

I am a scholar of medieval English literature, specializing in Old English and with broader interests in poetics, literary form, and the relationship between aesthetics and instruction. My work is interested also in the ways disciplinary history can offer fresh tools for literary inquiry, and in new comparative methodologies for close reading through and beyond disciplinary bounds. My current book project interweaves the formal strategies of Old English didactic poetry with Tang Chinese verse and later imperial commentary, to deepen the questions we can ask about learning and aesthetic...

Colleen Lye

Associate Professor and Chair of Asian American Research Center (AARC)
20th- and 21st-Century American
Asian American
Cultural Studies

Colleen Lye (Ph.D., Columbia) is Associate Professor of English and Chair of the Asian American Research Center (AARC) at 91抖阴 Berkeley, where she teaches courses on historical materialism and critical theory, Asian American Studies, and 20th and 21st century literature. She is affiliated with the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory and the Department of Rhetoric. Lye currently serves on the editorial boards of Representations, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies and Postmodern Culture. Besides these venues, her writing has appeared in Modern Languages Quarterly,...

Tadiwa Madenga

Assistant Professor
African
African American
Cultural Studies
Gender & Sexuality Studies
Festivals

Tadiwa Madenga is a scholar of African and Black diasporic literature, gender and sexuality, and print cultures. Her research is concerned with the relationship between literature and sexuality which she traces through 20th and 21st century African book fairs and their subgenres: keynotes, book stalls, magazines, poetry. Across her academic and creative projects, her reading practice centers archival work and site specificity as critical methods for literary analysis.

These interests converge in her current research project which focuses on the emergence of...

David Marno

Associate Professor
Drama
Renaissance and Early Modern
Critical Theory
Poetry

Much of my work concentrates on the intersection between literature and religious practice in Renaissance literature and culture, in particular on the relationship between prayer, meditation, spiritual exercises, and poetry. I have published on religious and secular concepts of attention, on apocalypse as a literary and political figure, and on philosophy of history and comparative literature. My first book (Chicago, 2016) interprets John...

Fiona McFarlane

Associate Professor
Narrative & the Novel
Creative Writing

Jennifer Miller

Associate Professor
Old English
Textual Criticism
Drama
Disability Studies
Gender & Sexuality Studies
Cultural Studies
Scottish
Renaissance and Early Modern
Middle English
Professor Miller works on historiography, hagiography, medieval rhetorical culture, insular political relations, multilingualism, translation and textual transmission, philology, dialectology, and paleography.

Maura Nolan

Associate Professor
Middle English
Renaissance and Early Modern
Drama

I work on late medieval English literature, with a special focus on the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and the vexed relationship between the 鈥渕edieval鈥� and the 鈥淩enaissance.鈥� I am especially interested in defining and articulating the role of the aesthetic in late medieval vernacular literature, particularly in relation to variable cultural understandings of sensation and cognition. I am currently working on two projects. The first focuses on the place of contingency and sensation in the work of John Gower, while the second addresses notions of the beautiful and the sublime in...

Geoffrey G. O'Brien

Professor
Poetry
20th- and 21st-Century American
20th- and 21st-Century British
19th-Century American
Creative Writing

Samuel Otter

Professor and Clyde and Evelyn Slusser Chair in English
Early American
19th-Century American
African American

Samuel Otter has taught in the English Department at the University of California at Berkeley since 1990. He served as department chair from 2009 to 2012. His research and teaching focus on nineteenth-century United States literatures. He is particularly interested in the relationships between literature and history, the varieties of literary excess, and the ways in which close textual interpretation also can be deep and wide.

He has published Melville鈥檚 Anatomies (California, 1999), an analysis of how Melville, in his long fiction of the 1840s and 1850s, portrayed the ways...

Beth Piatote

Associate Professor
Native American

Beth Piatote is an associate professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California Berkeley. She is the author of two books: the scholarly monograph Domestic Subjects: Gender, Citizenship, and the Law in Native American Literature (Yale 2013), which received honorable mention from the Modern Language Association for the 2014 Prize for Studies in Native American Literatures, Cultures, and Languages; and the mixed-genre collection, The Beadworkers: Stories (Counterpoint 2019), which was long-listed for the Aspen Words Literary Prize and the PEN/Bingham Prize for...