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Department Chair:

KATHLEEN MCCARTHYClassics — specializes in the social and cultural analysis of Latin poetry. Her recent book, Slavery and the Art of Authority in Plautine Comedy, offers a new analysis of the potential subversiveness of this early body of dramatic comedy, focusing especially on the paradoxical desire of each audience member to inhabit simultaneously the positions of rebel and authority figure. Her current work centers on the political and social functions of Augustan love elegy. (Ph.D., Princeton University)
[ Courses | Email: kmccarth AT berkeley.edu ]


ROBERT ALTERNear Eastern Studies (Hebrew) — teaches courses on the 19th-century European and American novel, on modernism, and on literary aspects of the Bible, and he also teaches and writes on modern Hebrew literature. His publications range from critical biography (Stendhal) to literary theory (The Pleasures of Reading in an Ideological Age) to two recent volumes of Bible translation accompanied by literary commentary --Genesis and The David Story. His forthcoming book is titled Recasting the Canon. (Ph.D., Harvard University)"
[ Courses | Email: altcos AT berkeley.edu ]

MICHAEL BERNSTEINEnglish — works primarily on literature and history, high modernism, ethics and literature, and prosaics. His course offerings frequently include Symbolist and post-Symbolist Poetry, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Robert Musil and fin-de-siècle Vienna, and the European nineteenth and twentieth century novels. His publications include Five Portraits: Modernity and the Imagination in Twentieth-Century German Writing ; Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History; Bitter Carnival: Ressentiment and the Abject Hero; and The Tale of the Tribe: Ezra Pound and the Modern Verse Epic. His most recent book, Conspirators: A Novel ,has been translated into six languages. (D. Phil., Oxford University)
[ Courses | Email: mab AT berkeley.edu ]

KARL BRITTOFrench — teaches courses in modern French literature, particularly francophone colonial and postcolonial literatures of Vietnam, Africa, and the Caribbean. His interests also include anglophone colonial and postcolonial studies, as well as gender and sexuality studies. His publications include Disorientation: France, Vietnam, and the Ambivalence of Interculturality (Hong Kong University Press, 2004), an analysis of Vietnamese francophone novels from the colonial and immediate postcolonial periods. (Ph.D., Yale University)
[ Courses | Email: kbritto AT berkeley.edu ]

JUDITH BUTLERRhetoric — teaches in literary theory, modern philosophical fiction, feminist and sexuality studies. She teaches various courses in Comparative Literature focusing on 19th-20th century European literature and philosophy. Recent courses have included a senior seminar on Kafka and another on loss, mourning, and war. She is the author of several books, including Gender Trouble, Bodies that Matter, The Psychic Life of Power, Antigone's Claim, Precarious Life, and Undoing Gender. Her forthcoming book is on narratives of the self and the problem of ethics. (Ph.D., Yale University).
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[ Courses | Email: N/A ]

ANTHONY CASCARDIRhetoric, Spanish — works on literature and philosophy, aesthetics, and early modern literature, with an emphasis on Spanish, English, and French. He is especially interested in the Spanish Baroque and frequently teaches courses on Cervantes. Most recently he published Consequences of Enlightenment: Aesthetics as Critique. He is currently working towards a book on emotion and agency in art and is devising a new course on aesthetics, called "Speaking of the Arts." (Ph.D., Harvard University).
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[ Courses | Email: ajcascardi AT berkeley.edu ]

LOUISE CLUBB — Emerita, Ph.d., L.H.D. Columbia University
[ Courses | Email: clubb AT berkeley.edu ]

JOSEPH DUGGANFrench, Grad. Division — specializes in medieval epic, romance, and lyric poetry, and the theory and practice of editing medieval texts. His publications include books on the Chanson de Roland, the Cantar de mio Cid, and the romances of Chrétien de Troyes. He is the General Editor of the edition of the French corpus of the Chanson de Roland (2005) and the editor within that work of the Châteauroux-Venice 7 version. He teaches a course on the medieval book that draws on Berkeley's collection of medieval manuscripts. His main interests are oral literature, theory of genres, editing, and the relationship between literature and social context. (Ph.D., Ohio State University)
[ Courses | Email: joed AT berkeley.edu ]

ANNE-LISE FRANCOISEnglish — works in the modern period, comparative romanticisms; lyric poetry; the psychological novel and novel of manners; gender and critical theory; literature and philosophy; and fashion and popular culture. She is currently revising for publication Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience. Recent publications include The Seventies: The Age of Glitter in Popular Culture. She has also published on falsetto in seventies disco and on the "gentle force" of habit in Hume and Wordsworth. (Ph.D., Princeton University)
[ Courses | Email: afrancoi AT berkeley.edu ]

BLUMA GOLDSTEIN
[ Courses | Email: blumag AT berkeley.edu ]

TIMOTHY HAMPTONFrench — works on Renaissance and early modern European culture, in both English and the Romance languages. His research and teaching involve the relationship between politics and culture, and focus on such issues as the ideology of literary genre, the literary construction of nationhood, and the rhetoric of historiography. He is the author of Garden of Letters: Literature and Nationhood in Renaissance France. (Ph.D., Princeton University)
[ Courses | Email: thampton AT berkeley.edu ]

ROBERT HUGHES — Emeritus, Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley
[ Courses | Email: rph AT berkeley.edu ]

VICTORIA KAHNRhetoric — specializes in Renaissance literature, rhetoric and poetics, early modern political theory, and the Frankfurt School./ /She is the author of /Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the Renaissance/ (Cornell, 1985), /Machiavellian Rhetoric/ (Princeton, 1994), and /Wayward Contracts: The Crisis of Political Obligation in England, 1640-1674/ (Princeton, 2004). (Ph.D., Yale University)
[ Courses | Email: vkahn AT berkeley.edu ]

ROBERT KAUFMANComparative Literature — works in several interrelated areas: 20th-21st-century American poetry and its dialogues with modern Latin American, German, French, and British poetry; romantic and 19th-century poetry and poetics; philosophical aesthetics, literary theory, and the history of criticism (esp. since Kant and romanticism); and Frankfurt School critical theory and the arts (poetry and the other literary genres; music; cinema; painting, etc.). He is the author of Negative Romanticism: Adornian Aesthetics in Keats, Shelley, and Modern Poetry (forthcoming), and is at work on two related books: Why Poetry Should Matter--to the Left, and Modernism after Postmodernism? Robert Duncan and the Future-Present of American Poetry. (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley)
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[ Courses | Email: robkaufman AT berkeley.edu ]

CHANA KRONFELDNE Studies — teaches Hebrew, Yiddish and Comparative Literature with a special emphasis on modern poetry. She is interested in modernism, minor literatures, the politics of literary history, feminist stylistics, intertextuality, and translation studies. Her book On the Margins of Modernism won the MLA Scaglione Prize in 1997 for Best Book in Comparative Literary Studies. Her co-translation (with Chana Bloch) of Yehuda Amichai's Open Closed Open won the National Endowment for the Arts and the Marie Syrkin Awards. She is the recepient (with Chana Bloch) of a 2005-6 National Endowment for the Arts award for the translation of The Poetry of Dahila Ravikovitch (forthcoming from Norton).
[ Courses | Email: Kronfeld AT berkeley.edu ]

LESLIE KURKEClassics — has specialties that span archaic and classical Greek literature and cultural history, with special emphasis on archaic Greek poetry in its social context, Herodotus and early prose, the constitution of ideology through material practices, and the relations of economics and literature. Her most recent book is Coins, Bodies, Games, and Gold: The Politics of Meaning in Archaic Greece. She has received a MacArthur Fellowship for the years 1999-2004, and plans to use the funding to pursue a project on Aesop and Greek popular culture. (Ph.D., Princeton University)
[ Courses | Email: kurke AT berkeley.edu ]

MICHAEL LUCEYFrench — specializes in French literature and culture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He also teaches about nineteenth and twentieth-century British literature and culture, and twentieth-century American literature and culture. Other areas of interest include sexuality studies; social and literary theory; cultural studies of music. He is the author of Gide's Bent: Sexuality, Politics, Writing and The Misfit of the Family: Balzac and the Social Forms of Sexuality. His new book, Never Say I: Sexuality and the First Person in Colette, Gide, and Proust, traces the development of a variety of complicated strategies for saying ‘I’ within literary texts dealing with same-sex sexuality. It will be published in 2006 by Duke University Press. He is currently at work on a sequel to Never Say I dealing with the latter part of the twentieth century.(Ph.D., Princeton University)
[ Courses | Email: mlucey AT berkeley.edu ]

FRANCINE MASIELLOSpanish — works on topics related to Latin American literature of the 19th and 20th centuries, gender theory, and comparative North/South literatures. Her books include Lenguaje e ideología: los movimientos de vanguardia de los años 20, Between Civilization and Barbarism: Women, Nation, and Literary Culture in Modern Argentina, El periodismo femenino del s. xix, and The Art of Transition: Neoliberalism and Latin American Culture. She is also co-author or co-editor of numerous volumes, most recently a book on Manuel Puig's Kiss of the Spider Woman. Currently, she is writing on Joyce in Latin America. (Ph.D., University of Michigan)
[ Courses | Email: frm AT berkeley.edu ]

JAMES MONROENear Eastern Studies (Arabic) — works in the areas of lyric poetry, the Middle Ages, and East-West relations with particular interest in the importance of the Arab contribution to Spanish civilization. He has published numerous books and articles in the field of Arabic literature with special emphasis on its Hispano-Arabic component, including Ten Hispano-Arabic Strophic Songs in the Modern Oral Tradition: Music and Texts, with Benjamin M. Liu, and The Art of Badi az-Zaman al-Hamadhani as Picaresque Narrative. (Ph.D., Harvard University)
[ Courses | Email: monroe AT berkeley.edu ]

ERIC NAIMANSlavic Languages and Literature (Russian) — works in the fields of ideological poetics, sexuality and history, history of medicine, Soviet culture, the gothic novel, Vladimir Nabokov, Andrei Platonov, and Mikhail Bakhtin. His most recent book is Sex in Public: The Incarnation of Early Soviet Ideology. He is currently working on Nabokov, Perversely and Monumental Intimacy: The Art of Healing and the Art of Terror. (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley)
[ Courses | Email: naiman AT berkeley.edu ]

HARSHA RAMSlavic — teaches late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century Russian literature, Romanticism, the Russian avant-garde, Russian lyric poetry, theory of literature, poetics, literary and cultural history, literature and crosscultural encounters, European modernism, twentieth-century Italian literature, Indian literature
[ Courses | Email: ram AT berkeley.edu ]

MIRYAM SASFilm Studies (Japanese) — Film Studies (Japanese); 20th Century literature, film, theater and critical theory (Japanese, French, English, German); gender, performance, experimental and avant-garde arts. (Ph.D., Yale University)
[ Courses | Email: mbsas AT berkeley.edu ]

BARBARA SPACKMANItalian — has teaching and research interests in gender studies and feminist theory, psychoanalysis, narrative, fascism and culture, European Decadence, and travel writing. She is the author of Decadent Genealogies: The Rhetoric of Sickness from Baudelaire to D'Annunzio and Fascist Virilities: Rhetoric, Ideology, and Social Fantasy in Italy, winner of the 1998 MLA Howard Marraro and Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prizes. She is working on a study of travel writing and geopolitical fantasy in Italy, as well as on a comparative project on ideological fantasy at the fin-de-si裬e. (Ph.D., Yale University)
[ website ]
[ Courses | Email: spackman AT berkeley.edu ]

SOPHIE VOLPPEast Asian Languages & Cultures (Chinese) — writes about Chinese literature of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. Teaching and research interests include material culture and the history of consumption, gender theory, the history of sexuality, performance studies, and the study of autobiography. Her forthcoming book, Worldly Stage, examines the ideological niche occupied by the theater in seventeenth-century China. Her present project focuses on the representation of objects and the history of consumption. (Ph.D., Harvard
[ Courses | Email: volpp AT berkeley.edu ]