Professor William Fitzgerald comes to Berkeley as a joint appointment to the Classics and Rhetoric departments from UCSD, where he served on the faculty there since 1980. He is a scholar of Latin literature who holds a B.A. from Oxford University with a "double first" in Classics, and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University. He is the author of two landmark books and has a new book, Living with Slaves, forthcoming this year from Cambridge University Press. His books as well as his various articles show a remarkable mastery of several diverse fields, including Greek and Latin authors and poetic forms, prose narrative and comedy, and the social institutions of ancient Rome.

Joe Goode is an internationally known choreographer, dancer, and performer who runs his own dance troupe in San Francisco, the Joe Goode Performance Group. Professor Goode will work for the Department of Dramatic Art on a half-time basis. His highly original, ground-breaking, combination of dance, narrative voice, song, and installation techniques have established him as one of the most creative and distinctive practitioners in the U.S. Professor Goode's unique blend of modern dance training and unorthodox approaches to movement and narrative will bring an extraordinary element to the department. Professor Goode is not unfamiliar with Berkeley; in 1999, he served as a Regents' Lecturer and created the "Leavers," a new work for the University Dance Theater performed by student actors and dancers.

R. Marcial Gonzalez, who recently completed his Ph.D. at Stanford University in Modern Thought and Literature, is a recent hire for the English Department. Dr. Gonzalez's specialty is twentieth-century American literature; he has specific interest in Chicana/o literature, literary and cultural theory, and comparative studies in race and ethnicity. Professor Gonzalez’s background includes working for ten years as a farm worker and union organizer in California’s central valley before going on to earn his B.A. at Humboldt State University (summa cum laude.) Professor Gonzalez is described by several reviewers as an extraordinarily talented and promising scholar. He is currently working on a collection of short story fiction.

Christopher Berry has joined both the Film Studies Program and the Dramatic Art Department. Dr. Berry works in the area of postcolonial studies. After receiving an Honours B.A. in Chinese Studies from Leeds University, he completed a Ph.D. in Film and Television Studies at UCLA. His dissertation concerns postsocialist cinema in the People’s Republic of China from 1976-1981. Professor Berry is considered a founder in the field of contemporary Chinese cinema studies. He also has interests in Korean and Japanese cinema, women’s and gay studies and the role of the cinema in the production of individual and collective identities. Prior to coming to Berkeley, Dr. Berry taught for 10 years in the Cinema Studies department at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia.

Niklaus Largier of the German Department received his Ph.D. from the University of Zurich, where he studied German, Russian, and philosophy. Dr. Largier is interested in medieval and early modern German literature and culture, and gives particular attention to mysticism in the late Middle Ages. Dr. Largier has published a number of books, including a study of exemplarity in medieval literature, philosophy, and historiograph; examinations of Meister Eckhar's mystical literature; and an investigation of the concepts of time and temporality in late medieval thought. Soon, a new book will explore the relationships between eroticism, literary imagination, and practices of asceticism, such as self flagellation, in the Middle Ages and the early modern times. Prior to his Berkeley appointment, Dr. Largier taught at DePaul University and spent several years at the University of Zurich.

Italian Studies is pleased to welcome to the department Mia Fuller, who completed both her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees at Berkeley in the Anthropology department. Dr. Fuller is interested in modern Italian culture: colonialism and post colonialism, as well as politics, architecture, urbanism and interpretations of Fascism. Professor Fuller received a fellowship from the American Academy in Rome that allowed her to complete her forthcoming book. Colonial Constructions: Architecture, Cities, and Italian Imperialism in the Mediterranean and East Africa draws on several fields to explore the physical, social, and mental constructions of Italian colonialism. Professor Fuller taught briefly at the University of Louisville and at Rice University before accepting the appointment in Italian Studies.

Shahwali Ahmadi was appointed to fill a position in Persian literature in the Department of Near Eastern Studies. He completed his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at UCLA and taught at the University of Virginia before coming to Berkeley. He was born in Afghanistan and his research focuses on Persian literature (both classical and modern) and cultural history. Professor Ahmadi is currently studying the emergence of the novel in Persian literature and the thematics of modern Persian poetry. The geographical range of Professor Ahmadi's work includes Iran, Afghanistan, and Central Asia. An accomplished poet, Dr. Ahmadi edits Naqd va Arman (Critique & Vision), an Afghan journal of culture, politics, literature, and history.

Marian Feldman also joins Near Eastern Studies as an Assistant Professor. Dr. Feldman completed her Ph.D. in Fine Arts at Harvard and taught in the past as a lecturer both at Harvard and Berkeley. She is a scholar of Bronze Age culture in the eastern Mediterranean and is experienced as a field archeologist. Her current research examines luxurious prestige items—gold, ivory, faience, and alabaster—that were exchanged among the rulers of the Near East and eastern Mediterranean during the 14th and 13th centuries BCE. These items include furnishings from palaces and royal burials such as the Tomb of Tutankhamun. Professor Feldman places specific emphasis on international art styles and cross-cultural interactions. Her work takes her to Syria, Turkey, Egypt, and Greece.

The Philosophy Department is pleased to hire John MacFarlane. Professor MacFarlane recently completed his Ph.D. at the University of Pittsburgh. His specialties are in the philosophy of logic, philosophy of language, and ancient philosophy. It is expected that Dr. MacFarlane will contribute to the Math Department's Logic and Methodology program. In his dissertation, he offers a diagnosis of the unfruitfulness of current debates about the demarcation of logic. By providing a detailed and often surprising historical account of how we came to have the intuitions about logicality that drive these debates, Professor MacFarlane shows how we can make the debates less intractable. He is now engaged in related work on the evaluation of logicism in the philosophy of mathematics.

The Rhetoric Department also welcomes Caroline Humfress. Dr. Humfress completed her B.A. and Ph.D. degrees at Queen's College, Cambridge, where she received several prestigious awards including the Carlyle Research Fellowship. She was trained as an historian of late antiquity with a special emphasis on Roman political theory and has completed a book on the history of the development of law and rhetoric in Imperial Rome. Her interests include law and legal rhetoric of the classical and late antique periods; history of political thought; Roman intellectual history and its legacy; development of canon (ecclesiastical) law and Christian 'orthodoxy'; and the philosophy of history. Before coming to Berkeley, she taught a wide range of courses at both Oxford and Cambridge.

Ramona Naddaff is a familiar face to the Rhetoric Department, despite her new role as Assistant Professor. Dr. Naddaff has held an appointment as a lecturer in the department for several years, during which time she received strong teaching evaluations from her students. Dr. Naddaff completed her Ph.D. in philosophy from Boston University, where she wrote her dissertation on Plato’s banishment of the poets. Professor Naddaff is interested in an especially wide range of topics, such as ancient Greek philosophy and literature; politics and the novel; 20th century French thought; the history of philosophy, and the rhetoric of fiction, especially as it relates to the relationship between philosophy and literature. Her new book, Censorship and the Novel: Case Studies in the Politics of Reading, will be published by The New Press.

Estelle Tarica joins the Department of Spanish & Portuguese. Dr. Tarica recently received her Ph.D. from Cornell in Comparative Literature, with specializations in Latin American Studies, Women's Studies, and postcolonial theories. Her teaching and research focus on twentieth-century Latin American literature and culture. In her dissertation Dr. Tarica developed a comparative analysis of ideas of mestizaje and creolization in the modern Americas. She brought together texts from Mexico, the Andes and the French Caribbean in order to understand how these racial and cultural ideals can be instrumental to concepts of national identity, and also generate a particular literary aesthetic. Dr. Tarica is fluent in Spanish and French. She is currently learning Quechua, an indigenous Andean language, as part of a project on bilingual Quechua-Spanish writers.