About the Program

The Berkeley English Department offers a wide-ranging PhD program, engaging in all historical periods of British and American literature, Anglophone literature, and critical and cultural theory. The program aims to assure that students gain a broad knowledge of literature in English as well as the highly-developed skills in scholarship and criticism necessary to do solid and innovative work in their chosen specialized fields.

Please note that the department does not offer a Master’s Degree program or a degree program in Creative Writing. Students can, however, petition for an MA in English with an emphasis in Creative Writing upon completion of the PhD course requirements (one of which must be a graduate writing workshop) and submission of a body of creative work.

Students interested in combining a PhD in English with studies in another discipline may pursue designated emphases programs in Film Studies, Medieval Studies, and Women, Gender, and Sexuality.

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Admissions

Admission to the University

Uniform minimum requirements for admission

The following minimum requirements apply to all programs and will be verified by the Graduate Division:

1. A bachelor’s degree or recognized equivalent from an accredited institution;
2. A minimum grade-point average of B or better (3.0);
3. If the applicant comes from a country or political entity (e.g. Quebec) where English is not the official language, adequate proficiency in English to do graduate work, as evidenced by a TOEFL score of at least 570 on the paper-and-pencil test, 230 on the computer-based test, 90 on the iBT test, or an IELTS Band score of at least 7 (note that individual programs may set higher levels for any of these); and
4. Enough undergraduate training to do graduate work in the given field.

Applicants who already hold a graduate degree

The Graduate Council views academic degrees as evidence of broad research training, not as vocational training certificates; therefore, applicants who already have academic graduate degrees should be able to take up new subject matter on a serious level without undertaking a graduate program, unless the fields are completely dissimilar.

Programs may consider students for an additional academic master’s or professional master’s degree if the additional degree is in a distinctly different field.

Applicants admitted to a doctoral program that requires a master’s degree to be earned at Berkeley as a prerequisite (even though the applicant already has a master’s degree from another institution in the same or a closely allied field of study) will be permitted to undertake the second master’s degree, despite the overlap in field.

The Graduate Division will admit students for a second doctoral degree only if they meet the following guidelines:

1. Applicants with doctoral degrees may be admitted for an additional doctoral degree only if that degree program is in a general area of knowledge distinctly different from the field in which they earned their original degree. For example, a physics PhD could be admitted to a doctoral degree program in music or history; however, a student with a doctoral degree in mathematics would not be permitted to add a PhD in statistics.
2. Applicants who hold the PhD degree may be admitted to a professional doctorate or professional master’s degree program if there is no duplication of training involved.

Applicants may only apply to one single degree program or one concurrent degree program per admission cycle.

Any applicant who was previously registered at Berkeley as a graduate student, no matter how briefly, must apply for readmission, not admission, even if the new application is to a different program.

Required documents for admissions applications

1. Transcripts:  Upload unofficial transcripts with the application for the departmental initial review. Official transcripts of all college-level work will be required if admitted. Official transcripts must be in sealed envelopes as issued by the school(s) you have attended. Request a current transcript from every post-secondary school that you have attended, including community colleges, summer sessions, and extension programs.
   If you have attended Berkeley, upload unofficial transcript with the application for the departmental initial review. Official transcript with evidence of degree conferral will not be required if admitted.
2. Letters of recommendation: Applicants can request online letters of recommendation through the online application system. Hard copies of recommendation letters must be sent directly to the program, not the Graduate Division.
3. Evidence of English language proficiency: All applicants from countries in which the official language is not English are required to submit official evidence of English language proficiency. This requirement applies to applicants from Bangladesh, Burma, Nepal, India, Pakistan, Latin America, the Middle East, the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia, and most European countries. However, applicants who, at the time of application, have already completed at least one year of full-time academic course work with grades of B or better at a U.S. university may submit an official transcript from the U.S. university to fulfill this requirement. The following courses will not fulfill this requirement: 1) courses in English as a Second Language, 2) courses conducted in a language other than English, 3) courses that will be completed after the application is submitted, and 4) courses of a non-academic nature. If applicants have previously been denied admission to Berkeley on the basis of their English language proficiency, they must submit new test scores that meet the current minimum from one of the standardized tests.

Doctoral Degree Requirements

Curriculum

The general goal of the first two years of the program is to assure that the student has a broad and varied knowledge of the fields of British and American literature in their historical dimensions, and also is familiar with a wide range of literary forms, critical approaches, and scholarly methods.  A coherent demonstration of this knowledge is the aim of the course requirement, the breadth requirement, and the system of regular advising and evaluation of student work.  At the end of the two‑year period, the student's record is reviewed in its entirety in order to ascertain whether he or she is able and ready to proceed to the qualifying examination and the more specialized phase of PhD study.

Students will complete twelve graduate-level courses, and remove all incomplete grades, before taking the qualifying examination.  (A required thirteenth course in reading and composition pedagogy may be taken later.)  If a student has not previously completed a college course in Shakespeare, such a course (graduate or upper‑division) must be taken at Berkeley. If the Shakespeare course has been taken prior to enrollment at Berkeley, credit for this course counts as one of a maximum of three classes for which a student can get graduate level course credit (see page 3) The distribution of the 12 courses is as follows:

Courses

English

Faculty

Professors

Elizabeth Abel, Professor. Feminist theory, psychoanalysis, Virginia Woolf, race and gender.
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Charles F. Altieri, Professor. Literature and the visual arts, Wittgenstein, Modern American poetry, Contemporary American poetry, history of aesthetic philosophy.
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Mitchell Breitwieser, Professor. American literature, philosophy and religion.
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Ian Duncan, Professor. English, the novel, British literature 1750-1900, Scottish literature, history and theory of fiction, Scottish enlightenment/romanticism, Scott, literature and the human sciences, Darwin.
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Cecil S. Giscombe, Professor.

Steven Goldsmith, Professor.

Dorothy J. Hale, Professor. English, American literature, the novel, narrative theory, Faulkner and the modern novel of consciousness, American Gothic.
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Robert L. Hass, Professor. English, poetry, poetry writing, American poetry, history of the short poem in English, contemporary literature, translation, environmental writing, literature and the environment, the natural history tradition in American writing.
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Lyn Hejinian, Professor. English, American literature, poetry writing, translation, modernist and postmodern literature, American postwar experimental literature, Gertrude Stein, the objectivists, language writing, Soviet Russian poetry, small press publishing, feminism.
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Abdul R. Janmohamed, Professor. English, third world literature in English, African American fiction, colonial literature and critical theory, Richard Wright and the theory of subjection, lynching.
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Steven Justice, Professor. English, late medieval literature, medieval Latin, Langland, Chaucer, hagiography, Latin religious thought, literary criticism.
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Jeffrey Knapp, Professor. Religion, nationalism, theater, English literature, Shakespeare, English renaissance, Spenser, drama, imperialism, epic poetry, authorship, mass entertainment.
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Jerome Mcgann, Professor.

Donald Mcquade, Professor. English, advertising, 20th century American literature and culture, theory and practice of non-fiction, literature and popular culture, the American Renaissance, the essay as literature.
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D.A. Miller, Professor. The novel, gay and cultural studies, classic cinema.
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Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe, PhD, Professor. Old English language and literature, textual editing.
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Samuel Otter, Professor. English, African American literature, 19th century American literature, 17th and 18th century American literature, Herman Melville, race in American culture, literature and history, discourse and ideology, close reading.
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Genaro M. Padilla, Professor. English, American literature, Chicano literature, minority literature, ethnic autobiography.
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Susan Schweik, Professor. Feminist theory, cultural studies, English, American poetry, disability studies, 20th-century poetry, literature and politics, war literature.
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George A. Starr, Professor. English, the novel, history, English literature, social and intellectual history 1660-1800, prose style, biography and autobiography, especially in relation to fiction, bibliography and textual criticism, literature of California and the west.
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James G. Turner, Professor. Gender, sexuality, English, 16th-18th-Century English, Italian and French literature, and literature, 17th-Century political writing, landscape and the city, Enlightenment materialism, sexuality in Renaissance art.
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Associate Professors

Oliver Arnold, Associate Professor.

Stephen Michael Best, Associate Professor. Film, English literature, African American literature, literary culture, legal culture.
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Charles Daniel Blanton, Associate Professor. Modernism, modern poetry, 19th- and 20th-century British literature, aesthetic and cultural theory.
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Kathleen Donegan, Associate Professor. Colonial America, early America, Native America, early Caribbean.
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Eric Falci, Associate Professor. 20th-Century Irish and British literature, contemporary Irish and British poetry, poetry and music.
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Mark A. Goble, Associate Professor.

Marcial Gonzalez, Associate Professor. Theory, marxism, Chicano literature, twentieth-century American ethnic literatures, novel, Mexican American, migrant farm worker narratives.
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Kevis Goodman, Associate Professor. Psychoanalysis, English, 18th-century and romantic literature, later 17th-century poetry, sensibility, history of science.
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Kristin Hanson, Associate Professor. Linguistics, English, poetry, meter, rhyme, and alliteration, phonological theory, English grammar and usage.
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Donna V. Jones, Associate Professor. Critical theory, English, modernism, literature and philosophy, literature of the Americas, literature of the African Diaspora, postcolonial literature and theory, narrative and historiography.
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David Landreth, Associate Professor. English Renaissance literature 1500-1660.
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Celeste Langan, Associate Professor. English, romantic poetry, 19th century literature, Wordsworth, Carlyle, Hardy, Rousseau, the French Revolution, Marxist theory, literature and the social sciences.
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Colleen Lye, Associate Professor. Postcolonial theory, critical theory, cultural studies, Asian American literature, 20th and 21st century literature, world literature.
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Jennifer Miller, Associate Professor. English, philology, paleography, hagiography, medieval literature, literature in old & middle English, historiography, medieval rhetorical culture, insular political relations, multilingualism, translation & textual transmission, dialectology.
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Maura Bridget Nolan, Associate Professor. Chaucer, drama, Middle English literature, Gower, Lydgate, medieval, 16th century, literary form, style.
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Geoffrey O'Brien, Associate Professor. Modernism, Creative Writing, 20th and 21st century poetry and poetics.
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Joanna M Picciotto, Associate Professor.

Kent Puckett, Associate Professor. English, the novel, nineteenth-century British literature and literary theory, sociability, psychoanalysis and affect.
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Scott Andrew Saul, Associate Professor. English, African American studies, 20th century American literature and culture, performance studies, jazz studies, histories of the avante-garde.
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Katherine Snyder, Associate Professor. Gender studies, masculinity, late 19th-20th- and 21st-century British and American Literature and Culture, narrative and the novel, the city, post-apocalyptic fiction.
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Janet Linda Sorensen, Associate Professor.

Elisa C. Tamarkin, Associate Professor. American literature to 1900.
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Bryan Wagner, Associate Professor. Critical theory, African American literature, historiography.
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Hertha D. Sweet Wong, Associate Professor. English, American literature, native American literature, autobiography, ethnic American literature.
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Assistant Professors

Catherine Flynn, Assistant Professor.

Joseph Lavery, Assistant Professor.

Steven Sunwoo Lee, Assistant Professor.

David Marno, Assistant Professor.

C. Namwali Serpell, Assistant Professor.

Emily V. Thornbury, Assistant Professor. Anglo-Saxon and medieval literature.
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Lecturers

Mrs. Melanie Abrams, Lecturer.

Vikram Chandra, Lecturer.

Thomas Farber, Lecturer.

Georgina Kleege, Lecturer.

John Shoptaw, Lecturer.