Faculty

Elizabeth Abel

Professor and John F. Hotchkis Chair in English
English

Abel's work spans two broad fields of inquiry. The first is gender and sexuality, psychoanalysis and 20th-century fiction (with a focus on Virginia Woolf). Her first book, Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis (1989), uncovered the legacies of Freud and Melanie Klein in Woolf’s narrative strategies. Her forthcoming book Odd Affinities: Virginia Woolf’s Shadow Genealogies (2024), explores the afterlives of Virginia Woolf in unexpected places and cultural traditions across the twentieth century: not the popular cultural appropriations, but the subtle resonances and subtextual...

Charles Altieri

Professor Emeritus; Former Rachael Anderson Stageberg Endowed Chair
English

He has been primarily interested in the varieties of 20th-century American poetry, especially concerning philosophy and the visual arts. He also recently wrote a book on the affects, and that shapes his thinking on most topics. But he is in transition. He as been teaching Shakespeare and Hegel and will teach the epic because he wants a grand stage on which to figure out what he can say about affect in literature. He is also working on a book introducing ways of thinking about modern American poetry.

Nicholas Baer

Assistant Professor
German

Nicholas Baer received his B.A. in Cinema and Media Studies from the University of Chicago and his Ph.D. in Film & Media and Critical Theory from the University of California, Berkeley. He was a Harper-Schmidt Fellow in the Society of Fellows at the University of Chicago, and he held faculty appointments at the State University of New York at Purchase, University of Groningen and Utrecht University before joining UC Berkeley’s Department of German in 2023.

Baer’s research has been supported through yearlong grants from the Fulbright Program, German Academic Exchange Service (...

Hannes Bajohr

Assistant Professor
German

After studying philosophy, German literature, and modern history at Humboldt University, Berlin, and New York University, Hannes Bajohr received his Ph.D. from Columbia University with a dissertation on Hans Blumenberg’s theory of language. Prior to joining Berkeley’s Department of German in 2024, he held postdoctoral positions at Berlin’s Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research, the University of Basel, Switzerland, and Zurich’s institute of advanced studies, the Collegium Helveticum.

He has published extensively on the impact of digital writing technologies on language...

Weihong Bao

Associate Professor + Pamela P. Fong and Family Distinguished Chair in China Studies
Film and Media
East Asian Languages and Cultures

Weihong Bao is Pamela P. Fong and Family Distinguished Chair in China Studies and an Associate Professor of Film and Media & East Asian Languages and Cultures, UC Berkeley. She has published widely on comparative media history and theory, media and environment, early cinema, war and modernity, affect theory, propaganda theory and practice, and Chinese language cinema of all periods and regions. Her book Fiery Cinema: The Emergence of an Affective Medium in China, 1915-1945 (University of Minnesota Press, 2015) received an honorable mention for the Modernist Studies Association...

Stephen Best

Professor & Rachael Anderson Stageberg Chair in English; Director, Townsend Center for the Humanities
English

Stephen Best's scholarship encompasses a variety of fields and materials: American and African-American literature and culture, cinema and technology, rhetoric and the law, and critical theory. His research pursuits in the fields of American and African American criticism have been rather closely aligned with a broader interrogation of recent literary critical practice. To be specific, his interest in the critical nexus between slavery and historiography, in the varying scholarly and political preoccupations with establishing the authority of the slave past in black life, quadrates with an...

Rakesh Bhandari

Lecturer; 2022 Acting Director, Interdisciplinary Studies Field
Interdisciplinary Studies

Bhandari's research interests include heterodox political economy; theories of the self and the posthuman in the age of AI and biotechnology; history and theory of racism; critical theory; and classical social and political theory. His diverse interests come out of graduate studies in political theory at Harvard University, where he began his graduate work; comparative ethnic studies at UC Berkeley, where he wrote his dissertation; and the history of science at Princeton University, where he studied the history of Social Darwinism. He has also worked at a microprocessor firm and served on...

C. D. Blanton

Associate Professor
English

C. D. Blanton is an associate professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Epic Negation: The Dialectical Poetics of Late Modernism (Oxford) and co-editor of two volumes on postwar poetry: Pocket Epics: British Poetry After Modernism (Yale Journal of Criticism) and A Concise Companion to Postwar British and Irish Poetry (Blackwell).

Natalia Brizuela

Associate Professor; Class of 1930 Chair, Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies
Spanish and Portuguese
Film & Media Studies

Brizuela's work focuses on photography, film and contemporary art, critical theory and aesthetics of both Spanish America and Brazil. She is the author of two books on photography. The first, Fotografia e Império. Paisagens para um Brasil Moderno (Cia das Letras, 2012) is a study of 19th-century photography in Brazil in its relationship to modern state formation, nationalism, modernization and race. The second, Depois da fotografia. Uma literatura fora de si (Rocco, 2014) is a study of contemporary literature in an expanded field, looking particularly at the...

Wendy Brown

Professor Emerita
Political Science

Wendy Brown is a professor emerita in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. She received her PhD in political philosophy from Princeton University in 1983. Before coming to Berkeley in 1999, she taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Williams College.

Brown’s fields of interest include the history of political theory, feminist theory, contemporary critical theories of law, 19th- and 20th-century Continental theory and contemporary American political culture. She is best known for intertwining the insights of Marx, Nietzsche,...