Faculty

Robert Kaufman

Associate Professor

Robert Kaufman’s teaching and research emphasize several interrelated areas: 20th-21st-century American poetry and its dialogues with modern Latin American, German, French and British poetry; romantic and 19th-century poetry and poetics; philosophical aesthetics, literary theory and the history of criticism (esp. since Kant and Romanticism); and Frankfurt School Critical Theory and the arts (poetry and the other literary genres; music; cinema; painting, etc.).

Celeste Langan

Associate Professor
English

Celeste Langan, associate professor in the UC Berkeley Department of English, is the author of Romantic Vagrancy: Wordsworth and the Simulation of Freedom; another essay, “Mobility Disability,” considers more contemporary issues related to freedom of movement. She’s written several essays on Romantic “Media Studies,” including “Understanding Media in 1805: Audiovisual Hallucination in The Lay of the Last Minstrel,” "Pathologies of Communication from Coleridge to Schreber" and “The Medium of Romantic Poetry” (co-authored with Maureen McLane). More recently, she’s published...

Niklaus Largier

Professor
German
Comparative Literature

Grace Lavery

Associate Professor
English

Lavery studies the history and theory of interpretation since 1800, especially with respect to sexuality and gender. Her research across these fields of inquiry is linked by a concern with historical claims about aesthetic efficacy: the idea that certain aesthetic effects might simply work and that though that efficacy might be deeply responsive to context, it is possessed of its own hypothetical logic. Such claims, whose “subjective universal” condition is definitively theorized in Kant’s Critique of Judgment and often implicit within psychoanalytic accounts of the...

Zeus Leonardo

Professor
Berkeley School of Education

Zeus Leonardo has published numerous articles and book chapters on critical social thought in education. Among other books, he is the author of Race Frameworks and Edward Said and Education. His articles have appeared in Educational Researcher; Race, Ethnicity, and Education; and Educational Philosophy and Theory. Some of his essays include: "Critical Social Theory and Transformative Knowledge," "The Souls of White Folk" and "The Color of Supremacy."

Leonardo's current research interests involve the study of ideologies and discourses in...

Michael Lucey

Sidney and Margaret Ancker Professor of Comparative Literature and French
Comparative Literature
French

Lucey specializes in French literature and culture of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. He also teaches about social, literary and critical theory, sexuality studies, 19th- and 20th-century British literature and culture and 20th-century American literature and culture. His latest book, What Proust Heard: Novels and the Ethnography of Talk, which includes discussions of Balzac, Eliot, Dostoevsky, Woolf, Sarraute and Cusk alongside Proust, was published by the University of Chicago Press in early 2022. He is currently working on two new projects: "Thinking About Sexuality with...

Colleen Lye

Associate Professor
English

Lye (Ph.D., Columbia) is an associate professor of English at UC Berkeley, where she teaches courses on Marxism and critical theory, Asian American studies and 20th- and 21st-century literature. She is affiliated with the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory and the Department of Rhetoric. She is a founding member of the Marxist Institute for Research (MIR). Lye is a member of the editorial boards of Representations, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies and Postmodern Culture. Besides these venues, her writing has appeared in Modern Languages Quarterly, PMLA, South...

Saba Mahmood, In Memoriam

Professor Emerita
Anthropology

Professor Mahmood specialized in sociocultural anthropology and was a scholar of modern Egypt. Born in Lahore, Pakistan, in 1962, she came to the United States in 1981 to study architecture and urban planning at the University of Washington in Seattle. She received her PhD in Anthropology from Stanford University in 1998 and taught at the University of Chicago before coming to the University of California at Berkeley in 2004, where she offered her last seminar in fall 2017. At Berkeley, in addition to the Department of Anthropology, Mahmood was affiliated with the Center for Middle Eastern...

Salar Mameni

Assistant Professor
Ethnic Studies

Salar Mameni is an art historian specializing in contemporary transnational art and visual culture in the Arab/Muslim world with interdisciplinary research on racial discourse, transnational gender politics, militarism, oil cultures and extractive economies in West Asia. Mameni is the author of Terracene: A Crude Aesthetics (Duke, 2023), which considers the emergence of the Anthropocene as a new geological era in relation to the concurrent declaration of the War on Terror in the early 2000s. Playing on the words “terror” and “terra,” Mameni proposes the term “Terracene” in order...

Francine Masiello

Sidney and Margaret Ancker Professor Emerita
Comparative Literature
Spanish and Portuguese

Masiello is a Sidney and Margaret Ancker Professor Emerita in the Comparative Literature and Spanish & Portuguese departments. Her teaching and research arc covers Latin American literatures of the 19th through 21st centuries and comparative North/South cultures. She has focused on the relationship between politics and literature, culture under dictatorship and the transition to democracy and, more recently, the global south as a problem for literature and philosophy. The author of eight books, and several critical editions and edited volumes, she publishes in venues in the...