Overview
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.
Normative time to complete the program is six years. The first two years are devoted to fulfilling the course and language requirements. The third year is spent preparing for and taking the PhD oral qualifying examination. The fourth through sixth years are devoted to researching and writing the prospectus and dissertation.
Graduate Program
English: PhD
Faculty and Instructors
* Indicates this faculty member is the recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award.
Faculty
* Elizabeth Abel, Professor. Feminist theory, psychoanalysis, Virginia Woolf, race and gender.
Research Profile
Oliver Arnold, Associate Professor. Drama, Renaissance and Early Modern.
Research Profile
Sukanya Banerjee, Associate Professor. 19th-century British literature, South Asian literature, critical theory, cultural studies, narrative and the novel.
Stephen Michael Best, Professor. Film, English literature, African American literature, literary culture, legal culture.
Research Profile
C. D. Blanton, Associate Professor. Modernism, modern poetry, 19th- and 20th-century British literature, aesthetic and critical theory.
Research Profile
Vikram Chandra, Teaching Professor. Creative writing.
John Alba Cutler, Associate Professor. US Latino/a/x literatures, with special emphasis on modernism, poetry, and print culture.
Research Profile
Mark D. Danner, Professor. Central America, politics, Balkans, foreign affairs, journalism, Haiti, documentaries.
Research Profile
* Kathleen Donegan, Associate Professor. Colonial America, early America, Native America, early Caribbean.
Research Profile
* 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.
Research Profile
* Nadia Ellis, Associate Professor. Black diaspora literature and culture, queer studies, the city.
Research Profile
Eric Falci, Professor. 20th-Century Irish and British literature, contemporary Irish and British poetry, poetry and music.
Research Profile
Catherine Flynn, Associate Professor. Modernism, Irish, British, comparative literature, critical theory, Avant-Gardes, James Joyce, Flann O'Brien.
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
Joshua Gang, Associate Professor. 20th- and 21st-century British literature, literature and the sciences of mind, literature and the history of philosophy (especially mind and language), modernism, contemporary literature, literary history, literary theory and criticism.
Research Profile
Cecil S. Giscombe, Professor. Creative writing.
Mark A. Goble, Associate Professor. 21st century British literature, narrative and the novel, critical theory, film, 19th, 20th, and 21st century American literature, poetry.
Research Profile
* Steven Goldsmith, Professor. 19th-century British literature, critical theory, poetry.
Research Profile
Amanda Jo Goldstein, Associate Professor. Poetry, 18th- and 19th-Century British Literature, Critical Theory.
Research Profile
* Kevis Goodman, Associate Professor. 18th-century and Romantic British literature, Milton, literature and the history of science, especially medicine .
Research Profile
Dorothy J. Hale, Professor. English literature, American literature, the novel, narrative theory, critical theory, Henry James, William Faulkner, the modern novel of consciousness.
Research Profile
Kristin Hanson, Professor. Linguistics, English, poetry, meter, rhyme, and alliteration, phonological theory, English grammar and usage.
Research Profile
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.
Research Profile
Victoria Kahn, Professor. Rhetoric, comparative literature, Renaissance literature, poetics, early modern political theory, the Frankfurt School.
Research Profile
David Landreth, Associate Professor. English Renaissance literature 1500-1660.
Research Profile
Celeste Langan, Associate Professor. English, romantic poetry, 19th century literature, Wordsworth, Carlyle, Hardy, Rousseau, the French Revolution, Marxist theory, literature and the social sciences.
Research Profile
Grace Lavery, Associate Professor. 19th-century British literature, pacific literature, cultural studies, critical theory, gender and sexual studies .
Research Profile
Steven Sunwoo Lee, Associate Professor. Twentieth-century American literature, comparative ethnic studies, diaspora, Soviet and post-Soviet studies.
Research Profile
Andrew Leong, Assistant Professor. Asian American and Transnational Asian Literatures and Cultures.
Research Profile
Colleen Lye, Associate Professor. Postcolonial theory, critical theory, cultural studies, Asian American literature, 20th and 21st century literature, world literature.
Research Profile
David Marno, Associate Professor. Renaissance and Early Modern literature, drama, poetry, critical theory .
Fiona McFarlane, Associate Professor. Creative writing, the novel, the short story.
Jennifer Miller, Associate Professor. English, philology, paleography, hagiography, medieval literature, literature in old and middle English, historiography, medieval rhetorical culture, insular political relations, multilingualism, translation and textual transmission, dialectology.
Research Profile
Maura Bridget Nolan, Associate Professor. Chaucer, drama, Middle English literature, Gower, Lydgate, medieval, 16th century, literary form, style.
Research Profile
Geoffrey O'Brien, Professor. Modernism, creative writing, 20th and 21st century poetry and poetics.
Research Profile
Samuel Otter, Professor. 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.
Research Profile
Beth Piatote, Associate Professor. Native American/Indigenous literature, history, law and culture; Global Indigenous Literature; Native American visual art; American literature and cultural studies; Nez Perce language and literature; indigenous language revitalization; creative writing.
Research Profile
* Joanna M. Picciotto, Associate Professor. 18th-century British literature, Renaissance and Earley Modern literature .
Research Profile
* Kent Puckett, Professor. The novel, nineteenth-century British literature and literary theory, sociability, psychoanalysis and affect .
Research Profile
Poulomi Saha, Associate Professor. South Asian literature, critical theory, Asian American literature, gender and sexuality studies, cultural studies .
Scott Andrew Saul, Professor. English, African American studies, 20th century American literature and culture, performance studies, jazz studies, histories of the avante-garde.
Research Profile
Solmaz Sharif, Assistant Professor.
Research Profile
Katherine Snyder, Associate Professor. 19th- through 21st-century Literature in English, narrative and the novel, gender studies, post-traumatic and post-apocalyptic fiction.
Research Profile
Janet Linda Sorensen, Professor. 18th-century British literature .
Elisa C. Tamarkin, Professor. American literature to 1900.
Research Profile
James G. Turner, Professor. Gender, sexuality, 16th-18th-Century English, Italian and French literature, art and literature, 17th-Century political writing, landscape and the city, Enlightenment materialism, sexuality in Renaissance Italian art and Antiquity .
Research Profile
Bryan Wagner, Professor. Critical theory, African American literature, historiography.
Research Profile
Dora Zhang, Associate Professor. Critical theory, linguistics, narrative and the novel, 20th and 21st century Britain.
Research Profile
Lecturers
Melanie Abrams, Continuing Lecturer.
Hilton Als, Senior Lecturer SOE.
Research Profile
Thomas Farber, Senior Lecturer.
John Shoptaw, Continuing Lecturer.
Emeritus Faculty
Charles F. Altieri, Professor Emeritus. Literature and the visual arts, Wittgenstein, Modern American poetry, Contemporary American poetry, history of aesthetic philosophy.
Research Profile
Joel B. Altman, Professor Emeritus. Rhetoric, Shakespeare, English renaissance, Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, history of literary theory.
Research Profile
Julia Bader, Professor Emeritus. Comedy, English novel, modern American literature, women writers, feminist criticism .
Research Profile
Ann Banfield, Professor Emeritus. Virginia Woolf, the novel, literary and linguistic theory, the industrial novel, recent French literary theory, literature and philosophy .
Research Profile
Robert Bloom, Professor Emeritus. 20th- and 21st-century British and American literature .
* Mitchell Breitwieser, Professor Emeritus. American literature, philosophy and religion .
Research Profile
Carol T. Christ, Professor Emeritus. 19th-century British literature .
* Frederick Crews, Professor Emeritus. American literature, modern British literature .
Richard Feingold, Professor Emeritus. 18th-century British literature .
Catherine Gallagher, Professor Emeritus. 19th-century British literature, British novels, Victorian non-fiction prose, British women's literature, history and literature of the Victorians, history of the novel, Victorian popular culture .
Research Profile
Marcial Gonzalez, Professor Emeritus. Chicano and Chicana literature, twentieth-century American ethnic literatures, theory of the novel, marxism, critical theory, farm worker social movements.
Research Profile
Robert L. Hass, Professor Emeritus. 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.
Research Profile
Lyn Hejinian, Professor Emeritus. 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.
Research Profile
Richard Hutson, Professor Emeritus. 19th- 20th-, and 21st- century American literature, critical theory, African American literature, narrative and the novel .
Research Profile
Abdul R. JanMohamed, Professor Emeritus. Critical theory, theory of subjection, postcolonial literature, culture, and theory, African American fiction, and minority discourse .
Research Profile
Steven Justice, Professor Emeritus. English, late medieval literature, medieval Latin, Chaucer, hagiography, Latin religious thought, literary criticism.
Research Profile
Maxine Hong Kingston, Professor Emeritus. Prose writing .
* Georgina Kleege, Professor Emeritus. Disability studies, creative writing.
Research Profile
* Jeffrey Knapp, Professor Emeritus. Religion, nationalism, theater, English literature, Shakespeare, English renaissance, Spenser, drama, imperialism, epic poetry, authorship, mass entertainment.
Research Profile
Ojars Kratins, Professor Emeritus. Chaucer, Romance, Arthurian literature, utopian literature, theory and practice of teaching .
Donald McQuade, Professor Emeritus. Advertising, 20th-century American literature and culture, theory and practice of non-fiction, literature and popular culture, the American Renaissance, the essay as literature.
Research Profile
D.A. Miller, Professor Emeritus. The novel, gay and cultural studies, classic cinema, Hitchcock.
Research Profile
Alan H. Nelson, Professor Emeritus. History of drama, medieval and Renaissance English literature, English Corpus Christi plays, English morality plays, medieval art and literature, history of staging in the middle ages and renaissance, medieval and early Renaissance paleography .
Research Profile
John D. Niles, Professor Emeritus. Old English, Scottish literature and poetry .
Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe, Professor Emeritus. Old English, cultural studies, textual criticism.
Raymond Oliver, Professor Emeritus. Beowulf, history and theory of the short poem, 1200-1900, verse .
Genaro M. Padilla, Professor Emeritus. American literature, Chicano/Latino literary and cultural studies, American autobiography.
Research Profile
Morton D. Paley, Professor Emeritus. British Romanticism, William Blake, literature and art .
Research Profile
Carolyn Porter, Professor Emeritus. American literature, American intellectual history, American Renaissance, Faulkner, James, Fitzgerald, Henry Adams, American Literature of the 1930s.
Research Profile
Ishmael Reed, Professor Emeritus. Short fiction and poetry .
* Hugh M. Richmond, Professor Emeritus. Shakespeare, Theatre, Comparative Literature (European) .
Research Profile
* Susan Schweik, Professor Emeritus. Feminist theory, cultural studies, English, American poetry, disability studies, 20th-century poetry, literature and politics, war literature.
Research Profile
Peter Scott, Professor Emeritus. Medieval European literature (especially Latin) before 1300, poetry .
George A. Starr, Professor Emeritus. 18th-century English literary, social and intellectual history, prose style, bibliography and textual criticism, literature of California and the west.
Research Profile
Hertha D. Sweet Wong, Professor Emeritus. English, American literature, Native American literature, autobiography, ethnic American literature.
Research Profile