Faculty

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...

Tom McEnaney

Associate Professor; Director, Berkeley Center for New Media
Comparative Literature
Spanish and Portuguese

McEnaney works on the history of media and technology, Argentine, Cuban and U.S. literature, sound studies, linguistic anthropology, computational (digital) humanities and new media studies. He is the current director of the Berkeley Center for New Media. He also holds a joint appointment in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese and serves on the Executive Board of UC Cuba. Additionally, he is part of the...

Ramsey McGlazer

Associate Professor
Comparative Literature

McGlazer writes about 20th-century European and Latin American literature, film and critical theory. He works in Italian, English, Spanish and Portuguese, with interests in poetry and poetics, politics and aesthetics and feminist, queer and psychoanalytic theory.

His first book, Old Schools: Modernism, Education, and the Critique of Progress (Fordham University Press, Lit Z Series, 2020), won the American Association for Italian Studies First Book Prize in 2021. The book identifies a “...

Ramona Naddaff

Associate Professor
Rhetoric

Ramona Naddaff is an associate professor in the Department of Rhetoric and director, The Art of Writing, Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities. She is currently researching a book on censorship and the novel in 19th and 20th-century France, England and the United States. Her forthcoming study, "Exiling the Poets: The Production of Censorship in Plato's Republic" (University of Chicago, Fall 2002) examines the relation, forged through the mechanism of censorship, between philosophy and literature. Drawing on this work, she is examining Western philosophical and literary...

Alva Noë

Professor; Chair, Department of Philosophy
Philosophy

Alva Noë is a philosopher of mind whose research and teaching focus is perception and consciousness, and the philosophy of art. He is the author of Action in Perception (MIT, 2004); Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2009); Varieties of Presence (Harvard, 2012); Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature (Farrar Strauss and Giroux, 2015), Infinite Baseball: Notes from a Philosopher at the Ballpark...

Maura Nolan

Associate Professor
English

Nolan works on late medieval English literature, with a special focus on the 14th and 15th centuries, and the vexed relationship between the “medieval” and the “Renaissance.” She is especially interested in defining and articulating the role of the aesthetic in late medieval vernacular literature, particularly in relation to variable cultural understandings of sensation and cognition. She is currently working on two projects. The first focuses on the place of contingency and sensation in the work of John Gower, while the second addresses notions of the beautiful and the sublime in medieval...

Fumi Okiji

Assistant Professor
Rhetoric

Okiji arrived at the academy by way of the London jazz scene in which I took an active part as a vocalist and improvisor. She works across Black study, critical theory and sound and music studies. Her research and teaching look to Black expression for ways to understand modern and contemporary life, which is to say, she explores works and practices for what they can provide by way of social theory. For instance, her book Jazz as Critique: Adorno and Black Expression Revisited (Stanford University Press, 2018) is a sustained engagement with Theodor Adorno’s idea concerning the...