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 (...

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,...

Michael Burawoy

Professor Emeritus
Sociology

Michael Burawoy has been a participant observer of industrial workplaces in four countries: Zambia, United States, Hungary and Russia. His projects attempted to illuminate, in turn, the contradictions of postcolonialism; the organization of consent to advanced capitalism; the peculiar forms of class consciousness and work organization under state socialism; and,...

William Burton

Assistant Professor
French

Burton's research examines how 'literary' authors position their work concerning other disciplines and domains in the 18th and 20th centuries. The authors Burton studies are concerned with imaginative writing's political potential and its capacity to produce knowledge. In their often formally daring, genre-defying texts, they both adopt and contest philosophical, political and scientific concepts to articulate their views on what we now call 'literature.'

The End of Sex, Burton's current project, approaches this topic through a case study of Monique Wittig and Jean-Jacques...

Judith Butler

Distinguished Professor, Graduate School; Former Maxine Elliot Professor
Comparative Literature

Judith Butler is a Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School and formerly the Maxine Elliot Chair in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. They received their Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale University in 1984. They are the author of several books: Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (1987); Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990); Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (1993); The Psychic Life of Power:...