Faculty

Anthony Cascardi

Sidney and Margaret Ancker Distinguished Professor
Comparative Literature
Rhetoric
Spanish

Cascardi is a professor of Rhetoric; Comparative Literature; and Spanish, and served for 10 years as dean of the Division of Arts and Humanities. He is also the former director of the Townsend Center for the Humanities and the Arts Research Center. Cascardi’s research interests include the relations between literature and philosophy; aesthetic theory; the novel; and early modern Europe. His books include The Subject of Modernity; Consequences of Enlightenment; Cervantes, Literature, and the Discourse of Politics; and The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and Philosophy. His most recent...

Sharad Chari

Associate Professor, Geography; Critical Theory Co-Director; Critical Theory Advisor
Department of Geography

Geography as history of the present and as Earth/world-writing, social theory, political economy, development, agrarian studies, labor and work, racial/sexual capitalism, Black radical tradition, biopolitical struggle, oceanic humanities, photography, South Asia, South Africa, Indian Ocean.

chari@berkeley.edu

I am a geographer, but it has taken me a quarter century since signing up to this vocation to ask “what is this form of writing?” I call it a vocation because I fell into it by accident (and never looked back), while an undergraduate at Berkeley...

Lawrence Cohen

Professor
Anthropology
South and Southeast Asian Studies

Cohen is a cultural anthropologist whose primary field is the critical study of medicine, health and the body. He wrote No Aging in India, a book on Alzheimer's disease, the body and the voice in time and the cultural politics of senility. He is now working on two projects. India Tonite examines homoerotic identification and representation in the context of political and market logics in urban north India. The Other Kidney * engages the nature of immunosuppression and its accompanying global traffic in organs for transplant. It is part of a larger collaborative project with...

Stephen Collier

Professor
City and Regional Planning

Stephen Collier studies city planning and urban governance from the broad perspective of the critical social science of expertise and expert systems. His work addresses a range of topics, including climate resilience and adaptation, emergency preparedness and emergency management, neoliberal reform, infrastructure and urban social welfare. Collier examines both contemporary and historical topics and is engaged with several sub-disciplinary fields, including science and technology studies, actor-network theory, governmentality studies and cultural geography.

Collier’s current...

Marianne Constable

Professor
Rhetoric

Marianne Constable is a widely interdisciplinary legal scholar whose work on law crosses into both humanities and social sciences. Recipient of the James Boyd White Award from the Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities in 2011, she is the author of Our Word is Our Bond: How Legal Speech Acts (Stanford U. Press, 2014); Just Silences: the Limits and Possibilities of Modern Law (Princeton U. Press, 2005); and The Law of the Other: The Mixed Jury and Changes in Conceptions of Citizenship, Law and Knowledge (U. of Chicago Press, 1994; winner of...

Raúl Coronado

Associate Professor
Ethnic Studies

Coronado's teaching and research interests are in Latina/o literary and intellectual history, from the colonial period to the 1940s. In a sense, this field and period allow—indeed force—us to rethink the literature of the Americas in a transnational, hemispheric framework. That is, Latina/o literature has usually been described as a 20th-century phenomenon, emerging for the most part during the Civil Rights movements of the 1960s and '70s. Yet, a return to the literary-historical archive reveals a quite different genealogy. Beginning in the late 18th century, Spanish Americans—including...

Whitney Davis

Professor
History of Art

Whitney Davis is George C. and Helen N. Pardee Professor of History and Theory of Ancient and Modern Art. He has taught at UC Berkeley since 2001. He is also Honorary Visiting Professor of Art History at the University of York, UK, where he leads the annual York Summer Theory Institute in Art History (YSTI). Previously, he taught at Northwestern University, where he was John Evans Professor of Art History, Director of the Alice Berline Kaplan Center for the Humanities and a member of the Program in African Studies. Focusing on ancient African, ancient Egyptian and Near Eastern,...

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, ...