Faculty

Mario Telò

Professor
Comparative Literature
Ancient Greek & Roman Studies

In his scholarship, Telò seeks to place antiquity in dialogue with modernity, defamiliarizing and destabilizing widely accepted critical positions by exploring the emancipatory potential of textual and visual form. Aristophanes and the Cloak of Comedy: Affect, Aesthetics, and the Canon (University of Chicago Press, 2016) theorizes the nexus between canonicity and sensory—especially haptic—materiality. The edited volume The Materiality of Greek Tragedy (Bloomsbury, 2018) tests the advantages and limits of the so-called new materialisms in the interpretation of drama. On...

Soraya Tlatli

Associate Professor
French

Tlatli is an associate professor in the Department of French. Her research interests are in francophone literature—particularly from North Africa—as well as colonial and postcolonial historiography. She has also written and researched on 20th-century French psychoanalysis, philosophy and intellectual history. She is currently writing an essay on the relationship between psychoanalysis and Islam, from a double perspective: Western and Muslim.

Christopher Tomlins

Elizabeth Josselyn Boalt Professor of Law
UC Berkeley School of Law

Tomlins joined the Berkeley Law faculty in 2014. Trained as a historian at The Johns Hopkins University, his teaching career began in 1980 at La Trobe University, Melbourne, where he was successively lecturer, senior lecturer and university reader in Legal Studies. In 1992, Tomlins joined the research faculty of the American Bar Foundation, Chicago, where he remained until 2009, when he became Chancellor’s Professor of Law at the University of California, Irvine. Tomlins’ primary affiliation at Berkeley Law is to the Jurisprudence and Social Policy (Ph.D.) program, in which he teaches...

Sarah E. Vaughn

Associate Professor
Anthropology

Vaughn’s research agenda entails developing an ethnographic approach and critical social theory of climate adaptation. Over the past decade, she has conducted archival research and ethnographic fieldwork of experts and ordinary citizens implementing climate adaptation projects throughout the circum-Caribbean. This research has primarily focused on Guyana and Bermuda. She is particularly interested in the way climate adaptation addresses the politics of potentiality in cultures of engineering, wetlands and coastal-scapes and historical narratives of settlement. Her research is based around...

Leti Volpp

Robert D. and Leslie Kay Raven Professor of Law in Access to Justice
UC Berkeley School of Law
Volpp is a scholar of immigration law and citizenship theory whose research examines how law is shaped by culture and identity. Her most recent publications include “Protecting the Nation from ‘Honor Killings’: the Construction of a Problem" in Constitutional Commentary (2019); “Refugees Welcome?” in Berkeley La Raza Law Journal (2018); “...

Loïc Wacquant

Professor
Sociology

Wacquant is a professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is affiliated with the Center for the Study of Law and Society, the Global Metropolitan Studies Program, the Institute of Governmental Studies, the Center for Race and Gender, the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory and the Center for Ethnographic Research. He is also a research associate at the Centre européen de sociologie et de science politique in Paris.

Born and raised in Southern France, Wacquant was educated in Montpellier, Paris, Chapel Hill and Chicago, where he received his Ph.D. in...

Rhiannon Noel Welch

Associate Professor; Giovanni and Ruth Elizabeth Cecchetti Chair of Italian Literature
Italian Studies

Welch works on modern Italian literature, film and critical theory. Her first book, Vital Subjects: Race and Biopolitics in Italy, reads a range of canonical and lesser-known texts through the lens of biopolitics in order to demonstrate how race and colonialism have long been central to Italian modernity and national culture, rather than a fascist aberration or a contemporary phenomenon resulting from immigration.

Her current book project, Crisis and the Aesthetics of Deceleration, examines recurring figures of deceleration, dilation and/or slowness, in Italian...

Nathaniel Wolfson

Assistant Professor
Spanish and Portuguese

Wolfson is an assistant professor of Spanish and Portuguese and affiliated faculty of the Program in Critical Theory. He teaches primarily Brazilian literature and visual culture. His work engages media theory, language philosophy and the history of art.

He is currently finishing a book manuscript called Life of the Sign: Literature, Design and the Cybernetic Imaginary in Brazil. This project explores the crossings of experimental writing, design and critical technological thought in Brazil from the 1940s through the 1970s. Through a framework focusing on exchanges between...

Damon Young

Associate Professor
French
Film & Media Studies

Young is co-appointed with the Department of French and is affiliated with the Program in Critical Theory, the Berkeley Center for New Media, the Institute for European Studies and the Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender & Sexuality. He teaches courses on art cinema, sexuality and media and topics in digital media and film theory (including classical film theory, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, semiotics, feminist and queer theory). His first book, Making Sex Public and Other Cinematic Fantasies,was published in the Theory Q series at Duke University Press in 2018...

Alexei Yurchak

Professor
Anthropology

Yurchak received his Ph.D. in cultural and linguistic anthropology from Duke University in 1997 (after having received a graduate degree in physics from Russia). His interests and areas of expertise include Soviet history and the processes of post-socialist transformation in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe; political institutions and ideologies in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia; political philosophy and language philosophy; the interface between language/discourse and power; comparative studies of communism and capitalism anthropology of media; visual anthropology; experimental...