Faculty

Wendy Brown

Professor Emerita
Political Science

Wendy Brown is a professor emerita in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. She received her PhD in political philosophy from Princeton University in 1983. Before coming to Berkeley in 1999, she taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Williams College.

Brown’s fields of interest include the history of political theory, feminist theory, contemporary critical theories of law, 19th- and 20th-century Continental theory and contemporary American political culture. She is best known for intertwining the insights of Marx, Nietzsche,...

Michael Burawoy, In Memoriam

Professor Emeritus
Sociology

Michael Burawoy has been a participant observer of industrial workplaces in four countries: Zambia, United States, Hungary and Russia. His projects attempted to illuminate, in turn, the contradictions of postcolonialism; the organization of consent to advanced capitalism; the peculiar forms of class consciousness and work organization under state socialism; and,...

William Burton

Assistant Professor
French

Burton's research examines how 'literary' authors position their work concerning other disciplines and domains in the 18th and 20th centuries. The authors Burton studies are concerned with imaginative writing's political potential and its capacity to produce knowledge. In their often formally daring, genre-defying texts, they both adopt and contest philosophical, political and scientific concepts to articulate their views on what we now call 'literature.'

The End of Sex, Burton's current project, approaches this topic through a case study of Monique Wittig and Jean-Jacques...

Judith Butler

Distinguished Professor, Graduate School; Former Maxine Elliot Professor
Comparative Literature

Judith Butler is a Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School and formerly the Maxine Elliot Chair in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. They received their Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale University in 1984. They are the author of several books: Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (1987); Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990); Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive...

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

Professor, Geography; 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...

Michael M. Cohen

Associate Teaching Professor
American Studies and African American Studies

Michael Mark Cohen is currently an Associate Teaching Professor at UCB with a joint appointment in American Studies and African American Studies. Michael was born in Denver, Colorado, the child of two public school teachers. He holds a BA in History from the University of Colorado and a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University (2004). He is the author of The Conspiracy of Capital: Law, Violence and American Popular Radicalism in the Age of Monopoly (2019). His writings have appeared in American Quarterly, Gawker, Radical History Review, Monthly Review, The Comics Journal, Southern...

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...