Faculty

Kevin Shadel

Assistant Professor
East Asian Languages and Cultures

Shadel received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UC Davis in 2019. His research and teaching focus on modern Korean literature and culture with emphasis on poetry and poetics. His scholarly practice is concerned broadly with aesthetics and politics in colonial Korea and its aftermath, pursuing questions of uneven development, literary form and periodization comparatively across East Asia and Euro-America. His theoretical influences include Western Marxism, posthumanism and psychoanalysis.

He has published articles on Korean and Japanese modernist poetry, painting and...

Matthew Shutzer

Assistant Professor
History

I am an environmental historian of South Asia. My research and teaching are concerned with the place of the environment in global history since the eighteenth century, with a dual emphasis on how environments have been transformed by modern regimes of science, economy, law, and infrastructure, and the ways in which such transformations have come to shape global politics.

My book in progress, Subterranean Lands: India, Fossil Fuels, and the Limits of the Earth (under contract with Princeton University Press), is an environmental history of the making of India’s fossil economy. The...

Hans Sluga

William and Trudy Ausfahl Professor Emeritus
Philosophy

Sluga has broad philosophical interests of both a systematic and a historical kind. These cross the boundaries of so-called “analytic” and “Continental” philosophy. From the latter tradition, he has acquired a strongly historical bent. From the analytical tradition, he has gained an appreciation of clarity and logical order.

Sluga's knowledge of philosophy began with the study of classical languages and culture in the German Gymnasium. At the Universities of Bonn and Munich, he subsequently developed an interest in symbolic logic and, in particular, in the work...

Barbara Spackman

Distinguished Professor Emerita; Former Giovanni and Ruth Elizabeth Cecchetti Chair of Italian Literature
Italian Studies
Comparative Literature

Barbara Spackman, Ph.D. Yale University, is a distinguished professor emerita of Italian studies and comparative literature, and former Giovanni and Ruth Elizabeth Cecchetti Chair of Italian Literature. She works on 19th- and 20th-century Italian literature and culture, with special interests in decadence, the cultural production of the fascist period, feminist theory, travel writing and Italian Orientalism. She has published on topics as diverse as Macaronic poetry, film of the fascist period, the rhetoric of sickness at the fin de siècle, Italian futurism, contemporary feminist...

Eric Stanley

Associate Professor; Haas Distinguished Chair in LGBT Equity
Gender and Women's Studies

Stanley is the Haas Distinguished Chair in LGBT Equity and an associate professor in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where they are also affiliated with the Program in Critical Theory.

Stanley's first manuscript Atmospheres of Violence: Structuring Antagonism and the Trans/Queer Ungovernable (Duke 2021) argues racialized anti-trans/queer violence is foundational to, and not an aberration of, Western modernity. Atmospheres of Violence was awarded the Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies from CLAGS. Eric...

Elisa Tamarkin

Professor
English

Elisa Tamarkin received her Ph.D. from Stanford and joined English at Berkeley after several years in the English Department at UC, Irvine. She teaches and writes about American literature as well as topics in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century intellectual history, philosophy, and art.

She is the author of Apropos of Something: A History of Irrelevance and Relevance (University of Chicago Press, 2022) and Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America (Chicago, 2008). She is now writing Melville’s Vision on Melville’s lifelong fascination with...

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...