15 New Faculty in the Arts & Humanities

By L&S Deans' Office Staff

May 20, 2002

Art & Humanities Dean Ralph Hexter welcomes to campus 15 new faculty to the Division. These professors, already working on campus, have been appointed to the Departments of Art History, Art Practice, Classics, East Asian Languages & Cultures, English, German, Music, Near Eastern Studies, South and Southeast Asian Studies, and Theater, Dance & Performance Studies. Their interests span from prehistoric cave paintings to internet art, and from Renaissance literature to modern Japanese fiction.

The Art History Department welcomes two new faculty:

Whitney Davis received his Ph.D. from Harvard and taught at Northwestern University before being appointed to the Art History Department. He studies visual culture ranging from prehistoric rock art and Egyptian art to modern Europe. He has five published books and is under contract with Oxford University Press for a new book, Transcendence of Imitation: Male Homoeroticism and the Visual Arts, 1750-1920. One of his recent books, Replications, won the 1998 Gradiva Award for best book on psychoanalysis and the arts. He has recently been a Fellow at the Getty Center in Los Angeles. Archaeologist, art historian, contemporary critic, and theorist, Professor Davis will chair the Art History Department beginning July 1, 2002.

Christopher Hallett has a joint appointment in Classics and Art History and specializes in Roman art and material culture. He received his B.A. at the University of Bristol, his M.Phil. at Oxford, and his Ph.D. at Berkeley in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology. His Berkeley dissertation has been revised and will be published by Oxford University Press under the title The Roman Nude: Heroic Statuary 200 BC - 300 AD. He has worked widely in the field, including in Israel, Egypt, and Turkey. He was recently awarded an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship. He taught at the University of Washington before returning to Berkeley.

The Art Practice Department has hired Greg Niemeyer:

Greg Niemeyer holds a joint appointment in Art Practice and Film Studies in the area of digital media and media theory. After initial study in Switzerland, Professor Niemeyer received the M.F.A. at Stanford, where he specialized in the area of New Genres. He was Director of the Stanford University Digital Art Center (SUDAC), which he founded. He is truly an intermedia artist in the range of his formal and technical skills. His work is not limited to the screen, or the net for that matter, but is expansive in its address to phenomenal space.

The Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures introduces Daniel O'Neill:

Daniel O'Neill was recently appointed as Acting Assistant Professor in East Asian Languages and Cultures in the area of Japanese Literature and Culture. O'Neill has broad educational experience on both sides of the Pacific (Tokyo, Yokohama, and Stanford). He is completing his Ph.D. at Yale; his dissertation project, "Ghostly Feelings and Novelistic Matters in Modern Japan," examines the development of the novel in Japan in relation to discourses of the supernatural. Professor O'Neill enjoys teaching; his interests include modern Japanese fiction, history of reading and narrative theory, film and popular culture. He has taught at Connecticut College and Waseda University, Tokyo, in both literature and film.

Six new faculty are working on campus in the Department of English:

Lorna Hutson received both her B.A. and D.Phil from Oxford University. She was first Lecturer and then Reader in Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary College, University of London until 1998, when she was appointed to a Chair (Professorship) at the University of Hull. Her best known book, The Usurer's Daughter, argued that Renaissance humanist learning changed the nature of male homosociality by textualising male friendships, and that a prominent effect of this was the displacement of consequent anxieties about male friendship onto the representation, in vernacular prose fiction and Shakespearean drama, of women. Professor Hutson's work characteristically thus combines an interest in formal questions of poetics and rhetoric with a desire to explore the economic and affective workings of culture. She is the editor of Feminism and Renaissance Studies (Oxford, 1999), and co-editor, with Professor Victoria Kahn, of Rhetoric and Law in Early Modern Europe (Yale, 2001).

Ian Duncan comes to the English Department from the University of Oregon, where he was Barbara and Carlisle Moore Distinguished Professor. Professor Duncan is a leading scholar in Scottish Studies and, more broadly, in nineteenth-century British literature. His first book, Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel: The Gothic, Scott, Dickens demonstrated the significance of the persistence of romance narrative forms in the development of the nineteenth-century realist novel. His second book, Scott's Shadow: The Cultural Politics of Fiction in Post- Enlightenment Edinburgh, is a study of Scott, his contemporaries, and cultural production in early nineteenth-century Scotland. Since earning his Ph.D. from Yale, he has published many influential essays on figures ranging from Adam Smith and Samuel Johnson to Charles Darwin and John Ruskin.

D.A. Miller returned to the Berkeley faculty after teaching a decade first at Harvard and then Columbia. He earned his Ph.D. at Yale and is noted for his work in the Victorian novel, theory, film, and gay studies. He is one of the top literary critics working today. His writing has transformed the fields of queer theory, novel criticism, and Victorian studies. Shortly before his return as a faculty member he gave the Beckman Lectures, on the deceptively simple topic of "Jane Austen's Style," which is of course anything but simple. His lectures exemplified his own peerless style. An admired teacher, he is the first incumbent of the John F. Hotchkis Chair in English.

Dorri Beam was appointed as Assistant Professor in the Department of English in the area of nineteenth-century American literature. She recently completed her Ph.D. at the University of Virginia. Her dissertation, "Purple Pleasures: Highly Wrought Fiction by Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers," explored the ways in which the sentimental novel and the domestic ethos competed with a more radical mode of feminine expression that contemporary reviewers called the 'highly wrought novel.' Her recovery of these novels revises our understanding of nineteenth-century fiction, particularly fiction written by women. Professor Beam comes to Berkeley with a significant amount of teaching experience.

Lyn Hejinian holds a half-time appointment in the English Department as our "autumn poet." She is a prolific poet-critic with nearly two dozen books published and two new books of poetry forthcoming. She held a prior appointment in the department as the Roberta Holloway Lecturer. Professor Hejinian is described as one of the most important contemporary poets in the United States. She has a long list of critical prose, translations, and other publications to her credit. She has received numerous awards including the Pushcart Prize (twice) and the James Phelan Award in Literature. A long-time Berkeley resident, she has given readings and workshops world-wide, including in Sweden, Finland, France, and the USSR.

Heather McHugh holds the other half-time poetry position in the English Department, our "spring poet." She holds an A.B. from Harvard and an M.A. from Denver University. Her publication record embraces six books of poetry, a book of essays, and translations (some of the latter collaborations with her husband Nikolai Popov). She has garnered an impressive list of major awards including the Pushcart Prizes ("regularly since 1978"), Lila Wallace/Woodrow Wilson Fellowships, the Witter Bynner Prize, and the O.B. Hardison Prize from the Folger Shakespeare Library. She was recently appointed to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She has had an active career as a university teacher and before coming to Berkeley taught at the University of Washington as the Milliman Distinguished Writer-in-Residence for a portion of every year since 1983. Her students find her a brilliant and passionate teacher.

The German Department has hired Deniz Göktürk:

Deniz Göktürk was appointed as Assistant Professor in the German Department and has degrees from the University of East Anglia and Freie University in Berlin. Interested in literature as well as film, Professor Göktürk's first book was entitled Künstler, Cowboys, Ingenieure: Kultur- und Mediengeschichtliche Studien zu deutschen Amerikatexten (Artists, Cowboys, Engineers: Cultural and Media Historical Studies on Texts about America in German). Professor Göktürk is currently active in the study of German-Turkish cultural interaction. It is a field she knows well, having grown up bilingual in German and Turkish.

The Music Department welcomes a new harpsichordist:

Davitt Moroney returns to the Music Department where he earned his Ph.D. degree after many years performing as a professional harpsichordist based in Paris. He has nearly 50 cds out including organ, harpsichord, fortepiano, and chamber music. He has been described as one of today's finest classical musicians as well as a brilliantly entertaining speaker, as he recently demonstrated at University House, where he dedicated the University's new clavichord.

The Near Eastern Studies Department welcomes Niek Veldhuis:

Niek Veldhuis is an accomplished scholar in Assyriology, with primary expertise in Sumerian along with impressive strengths in Akkadian. Hired as an Assistant Professor, Dr. Veldhuis received his Ph.D. from the University of Groningen, and held there a prestigious Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences Research Fellowship in Assyriology. Professor Veldhuis' long-range research projects include studies of religion, literature, and scholarship in ancient Mesopotamia, and a computer project to digitize all of the cuneiform lexical texts.

The Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies has hired two new faculty:

Ashley Thompson was appointed as an Assistant Professor in South and Southeast Asian Studies. She is a specialist in Khmer studies with experience in comparative regional study of peninsular Southeast Asia and previously held an appointment as a lecturer in Khmer civilization at the University of Fine Arts, Phnom Penh. She worked in an education program in a Cambodian refugee camp on the Thai-Cambodian border following receipt of her B.A. She later returned to formal language and cultural study in various programs and earned her Ph.D. in the Department of Women's Studies from the Université de Paris VIII. Her dissertation, "Mémoires du Cambodge," was awarded the highest distinction. She is interested in many issues surrounding the preservation of the Cambodian cultural heritage. A 1999 co-authored book, Dance in Cambodia, was published by Oxford University Press, and Professor Thompson is a founding co-editor of a new journal of Khmer studies, Udaya.

Jeffrey Hadler was appointed as an Assistant Professor in the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies. He received his Ph.D. from Cornell, where he wrote a dissertation on the Minangkabau of Indonesia, Places Like Home: Islam, Matriliny, and the History of Family in Minangkabau. He was awarded a Guggenheim to work on a project about the history of the Jewish community in the Indies and Malay world. He is interested in studying Islam within Indonesia, and the breadth of his training and interests suggests that he will attract the attention of students in Jewish Studies, Dutch Studies as well as in his home department.

The Theater, Dance & Performance Studies Department welcomes Peter Glazer:

Peter Glazer was appointed in the Department of Theater, Dance, & Performance Studies in the area of stage directing. He recently completed his Ph.D. at Northwestern University. Professor Glazer has worked professionally for many years as a director, adapter, and playwright, and recently staged a show about the life and music of John Denver at the Denver Theater Center.

Dean Hexter welcomes these new professors to the Division of Arts & Humanities, the College of Letters & Science, and the Berkeley campus.

Photo of Lorna Hutson, Ashley Thompson, Jeffrey Hadler, and Peter Glazer by Genevieve Shiffrar; photos of Whitney Davis, Christopher Hallett, and Niek Veldhuis courtesy of UC Berkeley's Office of Public Affairs; photo of Greg Niemeyer courtesy of Greg Niemeyer; photo of Daniel O'Neill courtesy of the East Asian Languages and Cultures Department; photo of Ian Duncan courtesy of Ian Duncan; photo of Heather McHugh courtesy of Heather McHugh; photo of Deniz Götürk courtesy of Deniz Götürk.