Faculty

Abdul JanMohamed

Professor Emeritus
English

Born and raised in Kenya and educated in the United States (University of Hawaii, BA; Brandeis University, PhD), Abdul JanMohamed has taught in the English Department at UC Berkeley since 1983. His publications include Manichean Aesthetics: The Politics of Literature in Colonial Africa; The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse (co-edited with David Lloyd); The Death-Bound-Subject: Richard Wright's Archaeology Of Death; (ed.) Reconsidering Social Identification: Race, Gender, Class, and Caste. He was the founding editor (along with Donna Przybylowicz...

Martin Jay

Ehrman Professor of European History Emeritus
History
Jay is an American intellectual historian whose research interests include European intellectual history, visual culture and critical theory. Having received his B.A. from Union College in 1965, he went on to earn his doctorate from Harvard in 1971 before first joining Berkeley's faculty that same year.

Donna Jones

Associate Professor
English

Professor Jones serves as core faculty for the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory and the Science, Technology and Society Center. She is on the Advisory Board for the Interdisciplinary Studies Field Major and is also affiliated with Gender and Women's Studies.

Anton Kaes

Class of 1939 Professor of German and Film & Media
German
Film & Media Studies

After receiving his PhD from Stanford University in 1973, Professor Kaes taught German and comparative literature as well as film studies at the University of California, Irvine, serving as director of Comparative Literature from 1978 to 1981. In Berkeley since 1981, he holds a joint appointment between the German and Film & Media Studies departments. He served as director of the Film Studies Program from 1990-98 and was Chair of the German Department from 2001-06.

Kaes was awarded a Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Research Grant (1978); an Alexander v. Humboldt Foundation...

Robert Kaufman

Associate Professor
Comparative Literature

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...