Faculty

Ivonne Del Valle

Associate Professor
Spanish and Portuguese

Associate Professor of Colonial Studies. She received her Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley in 2004, and before returning to the Bay Area in 2009, she taught at the University of Michigan. Her research and teaching make connections between the past and the present which try to show the relevance of the colonial period for an understanding of contemporary times. She was co-director of the Berkeley research group “Mexico and the Rule of Law.” She has written a book and a series of articles on the Jesuits (José de Acosta and Loyola, and Jesuits in the northern borderlands of New Spain) as a...

Mary Ann Doane

Class of 1937 Professor of Film & Media
Film & Media Studies

Professor Doane’s research has focused recently on the organization of time and space in cinema in relation to other discursive regimes such as philosophy, physics, geography, art history, physiognomy and psychoanalysis. Her book manuscript, ‘Bigger Than Life’: The Close-Up and Scale in the Cinema (Duke University Press, 2021) addresses the way in which cinematic scale is strongly implicated in a more general reconfiguration of the subject’s relation to space, distance, location and scale in modernity and beyond. Cinema’s deployment of differently scaled shots,...

Samera Esmeir

Associate Professor
Rhetoric

Samera Esmeir is an associate professor of rhetoric at UC Berkeley. Her research and teaching are at the intersection of legal and political thought, Middle Eastern history and colonial and post-colonial studies. Her central intellectual focus thus far has been to examine how late-modern colonialism, with a particular focus on the Middle East, has introduced liberal juridical logics and grammars that in turn shaped modalities of political praxis and how those have persisted in the post-colonial era and have traveled in different countries in the Middle East. Her first book, ...

Karen Feldman

Professor; Chair, Department of German
German

Professor Feldman received her B.A. at the University of Chicago in General Studies in the Humanities and her Ph.D. at DePaul University in Philosophy. In 2000, she came to UC Berkeley’s Department of Rhetoric as a visiting assistant professor and joined the Department of German in 2007.

Feldman has been a Fulbright Scholar, an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow, a Hellman Family Faculty Award recipient and a Townsend Center for the Humanities Fellow. She has been an invited researcher at the research cluster “Cultural Foundations of Europe” at the University of Konstanz, Germany; at the...

Keith Feldman

Associate Professor; Chair, Department of Ethnic Studies
Ethnic Studies

At its core, my research program takes cultural studies approaches to theorize and narrate the interface between race, culture, knowledge, and state power. My work explores race as a “master category” (following Omi and Winant) and as a “medium” (following WJT Mitchell) by crafting comparative, relational, intersectional, and transnational analyses situated in localized and embodied contexts. By turning to the domain of culture, I investigate how power differentials become sedimented and contested in narrative, subject and identity formations, memory, and knowledge production.

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Daniel Fisher

Associate Professor
Anthropology

Across a range of ethnographic and other projects my work focuses on questions of indeterminacy and those aspects of social and material worlds that lend insight into their unfinished, plastic character. In part this has meant an ethnographic and analytical focus on the political, epistemic and worldly work of undecidabilty. These conceptual interests animate writing that concerns sound, image, fire, and the emergent material, ecological, and social coordinates of the urban.

I am currently pursuing several ethnographic and archival projects, grounded on long term work in...

Catherine Flynn

Associate Professor; Director, Irish Studies; Director, Berkeley Connect
English

Catherine Flynn works on British and Irish modernist literature in a European avant-garde context. Her book, James Joyce and the Matter of Paris(link is external), appeared with Cambridge University Press (2019).

For the one-hundredth anniversary of Ulysses, she has put together...

Anne-Lise François

Associate Professor
English
Comparative Literature

Anne-Lise François joined the Departments of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley as an assistant professor in 1999 after receiving her doctorate in Comparative Literature from Princeton University. Her teaching and research focus on (mostly) 19th-century British, American and European (French and German) fiction, poetry and thought, with some excursions into the 17th, 18th and early 20th centuries. She has taught courses on the modern period in British and American literary history, Henry James, Emily Dickinson, as well as seminars and graduate...

Daena Funahashi

Assistant Professor
Anthropology

Daena Funahashi is a sociocultural anthropologist interested in examining the force of speechlessness, the uncanny, and what lies in the shadow of what can be named. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Cornell University and is currently a member of the Medical Anthropology Program, the Center for Southeast Asia Studies (CSEAS), Institute of European Studies, The Program in Critical Theory and an affiliated faculty with the DE in Political Economy. Her work has been funded by the IIE-Fulbright program, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, Aarhus University Research Foundation and the...

Deniz Göktürk

Professor
German
Film & Media Studies

Professor Göktürk earned her DPhil at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, in 1995, with a dissertation on literary and cinematic imaginations of America in early 20th-century German culture. She also worked as a certified translator of Turkish for law courts, hospitals and publishers for several years. Her first full-time teaching appointment was at the University of Southampton, UK, in the School of Modern Languages and the Film Program from 1995 to 2001. She joined the Department of German at Berkeley in fall 2001. She has served as graduate adviser and department chair.

She has...