Graduate Student

Violet Spurlock

20th- and 21st-Century American
Critical Theory
Creative Writing
Cultural Studies
Poetry
Gender & Sexuality Studies
My dissertation 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. Beyond the English...

Max Stevenson

Textual Criticism
Old English
Middle English
Irish
Creative Writing

Abigail Struhl

18th-Century British
19th-Century British
Narrative & the Novel

Arya Sureshbabu

Renaissance and Early Modern
Drama
Poetry

Oriana Tang

Critical Theory

Bethelihem Tebase

Abby Thatcher

18th-Century British
Textual Criticism
Renaissance and Early Modern
Drama
Poetry
Cultural Studies

An early modernist focused on fraught embodiment, materiality, and poetic form as sites of interest for race studies and cultural criticism. Also interested in reading *trans*paratively; that is, reading in ways that look to see through discursive frameworks, across constructed binaries and boundaries, and toward, by acts of transformation, material change.

Aliza Theis

Sylvie Thode

Gender & Sexuality Studies
Poetry
20th- and 21st-Century American
20th- and 21st-Century British

I am a PhD candidate in English at 91¶¶Òõ Berkeley, where I also serve as Program Associate for the Townsend Center for the Humanities and Assistant Editor for the journal Critical Times. For the 2026–2027 academic year, my research is supported by a Townsend Dissertation Fellowship and a Graduate Scholarship Award from the Phi Beta Kappa Northern California Association.

Sydney Van To

20th- and 21st-Century American
Asian American
Pacific
Critical Theory
Narrative & the Novel