Faculty

Stefania Pandolfo

Professor; Senior Research Scholar, Center for Middle Eastern Studies
Anthropology

Pandolfo studies theories and forms of subjectivity, and their contemporary predicaments in the Middle Eastern and Muslim world, investigating narrative, trauma, psychoanalysis and the unconscious, memory, historicity and the hermeneutics of disjuncture, language and poetics, experimental ethnographic writing, anthropology and literature, dreaming and the anthropological study of the imagination, intercultural approaches to different ontologies and systems of knowledge, modernity, colonialism and postcolonialism, madness and mental illness. Her current project is a study of emergent forms...

Diego Pirillo

Associate Professor
Italian Studies

Pirillo (Ph.D., Scuola Normale Superiore) is an associate professor of Italian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is currently serving as the director of REMS, the Designated Emphasis in Renaissance and Early Modern Studies, and he is affiliated faculty in the Center for the Study of Religion, the Institute of European Studies and the Program in Critical Theory.

His work focuses on early modern Italy, Europe, and the Atlantic world, with a strong interest in intellectual history, the history of books and reading, religious and migration studies and the history of...

Djordje Popović

Assistant Professor
Slavic Languages & Literatures

Popović is an assistant professor of South Slavic Studies in the Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures. His research and teaching interests include 20th- and 21st-century South Slavic literature, Yugoslav modernism and state socialism, critical theory (Frankfurt School) and intellectual history. His book project, “The Concept of Statelessness in Second-World Literature,” is a comparative study of the mutually constitutive relationship between homelessness as a cultural standpoint and statelessness as a political condition. His essays on the appropriation of the dialectical...

James Porter

Distinguished Professor; Irving Stone Chair in Literature
Rhetoric

Porter is Irving Stone Professor in Literature and Distinguished Professor in the Department of Rhetoric. His teaching and research have followed a few different trajectories. One is a study of Nietzsche’s thought, early and late (Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future and The Invention of Dionysus: An Essay on ‘The Birth of Tragedy’ (both Stanford University Press, 2000). Another is a study of models of aesthetic sensation, perception and experience in ancient Greece and Rome, which he explored in ...

Harsha Ram

Associate Professor
Slavic Languages & Literatures
Comparative Literature

Ram's first book, The Imperial Sublime (2003), addresses the relationship between poetic genre, aesthetic theory, territorial space and political power in 18th- and early 19th-century Russian literature. His recent publications chiefly concern Russian-Georgian, Russian-French and Russian-Italian literary relations in the context of theories of world literature and comparative modernisms. His forthcoming book, The Geopoetics of Sovereignty. Literatures of the Russian-Georgian Encounter, seeks to provide a historical account of cultural...

Juana María Rodríguez

Professor
Ethnic Studies

Juana María Rodríguez is a cultural critic, public speaker and award-winning author who writes about sexual cultures, racial politics and the many tangled expressions of Latina identity. A Professor of Ethnic Studies; Gender and Women’s Studies; and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley, she is the author of Puta Life: Seeing Latinas, Working Sex (Duke UP 2023); Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures,...

Poulomi Saha

Associate Professor; Co-Director, Program in Critical Theory
English

Poulomi Saha’s research and teaching agenda spans eastward and forward from the late 19th-century decline of British colonial rule in the Indian Ocean through to the Pacific and the rise of American global power and domestic race relations in the 20th century. Engaging postcolonial studies, ethnic American literature and gender and sexuality theory, she hopes to map an expansive view of empire and of what constitutes Anglophone literature routed not primarily through Great Britain and Western Europe but rather through circuits of affiliation and encounter between Asia and the Americas....

Leslie Salzinger

Associate Professor; Chair, Department of Gender and Women's Studies
Gender and Women's Studies

Leslie Salzinger is an associate professor and chair of the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley. She received her Ph.D. in sociology at UC Berkeley and previously taught in the sociology departments at the University of Chicago and Boston College. She writes and teaches on gender, capitalism, nationality and race and their ongoing co-formations. Her empirical research is ethnographic, mostly focused on Latin America, especially Mexico. Her primary research questions address the cultural constitution of economic processes and the creation of subjects within political...

Debarati Sanyal

Professor; Director, Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry
French

Sanyal is a professor of French and director of Berkeley's new Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry. She is affiliated with Critical Theory, the Center for Race and Gender and European Studies. Her research and teaching interests include critical refugee studies; aesthetics and biopolitics; postwar French and Francophone culture; and transcultural memory studies. Debarati's first book, The Violence of Modernity: Baudelaire, Irony and the Politics of Form (Johns Hopkins, 2006), reclaims Baudelaire's aesthetic legacy...

Aarti Sethi

Assistant Professor
Anthropology

Aarti Sethi is assistant professor at the Department of Anthropology at UC Berkeley. She is a socio-cultural anthropologist with primary interests in agrarian anthropology, political-economy, and the study of South Asia. Her research interests broadly focus on the transformation of rural life-worlds and agrarian capitalism. She is currently working on two projects. The first is a book that examines cash-crop agricultural economies to understand how monetary debt undertaken for transgenic cotton-cultivation transforms intimate, social, and productive relations in rural society. She is...