Overview
Literature is a cultural site where the present is negotiated, the past is excavated, and the future is envisioned. In a globalized world where the circulation of blogs, legal documents, political manifestos, manuscripts, online journals, and images constantly shape and reshape human experience, understanding texts is utterly essential.
Comparative Literature provides students with tools for analyzing texts, writing, editing, translating, and thinking across disciplinary and national boundaries. Our graduates engage a variety of literary traditions and historical periods, from Latin American concrete poetry to the discourses of political and race theory to Yiddish experimental fiction. The department offers rigorous training in the following areas of strength of our internationally recognized faculty: French, German, Italian, Hebrew Studies, Classics, Critical Theory, East Asian Literatures and Arts, Performance Studies, Film and Media, Poetry and Poetics, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Postcolonial Theory, English and American Literatures, Early Modern and Renaissance Studies, and Slavic Literatures and Cultures.
All members of the department are deeply invested in the academic development of our students and value you as an integral part of the Comparative Literature community at UC Berkeley. The department aims to develop your creative and intellectual interests and talents. Students receive the opportunity to pursue rigorous research in a variety of fields according to their interests; engage in team-based projects; participate in discussions about political, aesthetic, and social issues; and develop a nuanced cross-cultural understanding of historical and social processes. All of our students work closely with cutting-edge scholars in their fields in small seminars, with extensive individualized work. Our students form a well-integrated community, and have access to all of the resources of all other Berkeley campus departments and faculty: in fact, our program requires that students take seminars in other departments for interdisciplinary training. We have one of the most successful placement records for our graduates of any program in the country, and of any Berkeley graduate program. Our doctoral graduates are prominent comparative literature and national literature faculty across the country and the world.
Our students benefit from training in comparative literature and go on to work in a variety of professions, including journalism, media, publishing, translation, theater, and politics; as well as taking many roles in the legal, corporate, social, medical, and arts sectors. Additionally, we prepare our students to enter top graduate programs in the U.S. and abroad.
"That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you are not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong." —F. Scott Fitzgerald
Undergraduate Program
Graduate Program
Faculty and Instructors
+ Indicates this faculty member is the recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award.
Faculty
+ Karl A. Britto, Associate Professor. Africa, cultural studies, the Caribbean, literature, francophone literature, colonial and postcolonial literature, Vietnam, gender and identity.
Research Profile
Judith Butler, Professor. Critical theory, gender and sexuality studies, comparative literature, 19th and 20th century continental philosophy, social and political thought, philosophy and literature.
Research Profile
Anthony J. Cascardi, Dean of Arts & Humanities. English, comparative literature, literature, Spanish, Portuguese, philosophy, aesthetics, early modern literature, French, Spanish Baroque.
Research Profile
Anne-Lise Francois, Associate Professor. Popular culture, English, comparative literature, the modern period, comparative romanticisms, lyric poetry, the psychological novel, novel of manners, gender, critical theory, literature, philosophy, fashion.
Research Profile
+ Timothy Hampton, Professor. Culture, politics, English, comparative literature, French, renaissance and early modern European culture, the romance languages, the ideology of literary genre, the literary construction of nationhood, the rhetoric of historiography.
Research Profile
Victoria Kahn, Professor. Rhetoric, comparative literature, Renaissance literature, poetics, early modern political theory, the Frankfurt School.
Research Profile
Robert G. Kaufman, Associate Professor. Modern/contemporary poetry and poetics, aesthetics, literary theory, and history of criticism, Frankfurt School Critical Theory and the arts.
Research Profile
Chana Kronfeld, Professor. Comparative literature, modernism, Hebrew, Yiddish, modern poetry, minor literatures, politics of literary history, feminist stylistics, intertextuality, translation studies.
Research Profile
+ Leslie V. Kurke, Professor. Classics, Greek literature and culture, archaic Greek poetry, Herodotus.
Research Profile
Niklaus Largier, Professor. Religion, literature, German, history of medieval and early modern German literature, theology, mysticism, secularism, senses, sensuality, history of emotions, passions, asceticism, flagellation, sexuality.
Research Profile
Michael Lucey, Professor. Pragmatics, the novel, sexuality studies, comparative literature, French, French literature, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, British literature and culture, social and literary theory, cultural studies of music, studies of language in use, theories of practice, twentieth-century American literature .
Research Profile
Tom McEnaney, Associate Professor. Latin American literature of the 19th and 20th centuries, media studies, radio, 20th century American literature, architecture, linguistic anthropology, digital humanities.
Research Profile
Eric Naiman, Professor. Sexuality, history, comparative literature, Slavic language, ideological poetics, history of medicine, Soviet culture, the gothic novel.
Research Profile
Ellen Oliensis, Professor. Latin Literature, Ovid.
Research Profile
Harsha Ram, Associate Professor. Russian and European romanticism and modernism, Russian and European avant-gardes, Russian, European, Near Eastern and South Asian poetic traditions, Indian literature, Italian literature, Georgian history and literature, theories of world literature, literary theory, comparative poetics, genre theory, literary history, comparative modernisms and modernities, vernacular and high culture, cultural and political history of Russia-Eurasia and the Caucasus, postcolonial studies, theories of nationalism, imperialism and cosmopolitanism, the city and literature .
Research Profile
Miryam Sas, Professor. Comparative literature, 20th century avant-gardes, Japanese literature, film, theater and dance, contemporary art, critical theory, gender theory.
Research Profile
Barbara Spackman, Professor. Feminist theory, psychoanalysis, culture, fascism, gender studies, comparative literature, Italian studies, narrative, European decadence, travel writing.
Research Profile
Sophie Volpp, Associate Professor. East asian languages and cultures, history of performance, gender theory, the history of sexuality, material culture, material objects in late-imperial literature.
Research Profile
Dora Zhang, Assistant Professor. Critical theory, linguistics, narrative and the novel, 20th and 21st century Britain.
Research Profile
Lecturers
Maria Kotzamanidou, Lecturer.
Karina Palau, Lecturer.
Annalee Rejhon, Lecturer.
Emeritus Faculty
Robert B. Alter, Professor Emeritus. Comparative literature, Near Eastern studies, 19th-century European and American novel, modernism, literary aspects of the bible, modern and biblical Hebrew literature.
Research Profile
+ Bertrand Augst, Professor Emeritus. Literary criticism, semiology.
Research Profile
Phillip W. Damon, Professor Emeritus.
Eric O. Johannesson, Professor Emeritus.
+ Francine R. Masiello, Professor Emeritus. Gender theory, culture, globalization, comparative literature, Spanish, Latin American literature of the 19th and 20th centuries, comparative North and South literatures.
Research Profile
James T. Monroe, Professor Emeritus.
Contact Information
Undergraduate Adviser
Anatole (Tony) Soyka
4118 Dwinelle Hall
Phone: 510-642-1202
Graduate Student Services Adviser
Rita Lindahl-Lynch
4120 Dwinelle Hall
Phone: 510-642-2629