Faculty

James Porter

Distinguished Professor; Irving Stone Chair in Literature
Rhetoric

Porter is Irving Stone Professor in Literature and Distinguished Professor in the Department of Rhetoric. His teaching and research have followed a few different trajectories. One is a study of Nietzsche’s thought, early and late (Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future and The Invention of Dionysus: An Essay on ‘The Birth of Tragedy’ (both Stanford University Press, 2000). Another is a study of models of aesthetic sensation, perception and experience in ancient Greece and Rome, which he explored in ...

Harsha Ram

Associate Professor
Slavic Languages & Literatures
Comparative Literature

Ram's first book, The Imperial Sublime (2003), addresses the relationship between poetic genre, aesthetic theory, territorial space and political power in 18th- and early 19th-century Russian literature. His recent publications chiefly concern Russian-Georgian, Russian-French and Russian-Italian literary relations in the context of theories of world literature and comparative modernisms. His forthcoming book, The Geopoetics of Sovereignty. Literatures of the Russian-Georgian Encounter, seeks to provide a historical account of cultural...

Juana María Rodríguez

Professor
Ethnic Studies

Juana María Rodríguez is a cultural critic, public speaker and award-winning author who writes about sexual cultures, racial politics and the many tangled expressions of Latina identity. A Professor of Ethnic Studies; Gender and Women’s Studies; and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley, she is the author of Puta Life: Seeing Latinas, Working Sex (Duke UP 2023); Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures,...

Poulomi Saha

Associate Professor; Co-Director, Program in Critical Theory
English

Poulomi Saha’s research and teaching agenda spans eastward and forward from the late 19th-century decline of British colonial rule in the Indian Ocean through to the Pacific and the rise of American global power and domestic race relations in the 20th century. Engaging postcolonial studies, ethnic American literature and gender and sexuality theory, she hopes to map an expansive view of empire and of what constitutes Anglophone literature routed not primarily through Great Britain and Western Europe but rather through circuits of affiliation and encounter between Asia and the Americas....

Leslie Salzinger

Associate Professor; Chair, Department of Gender and Women's Studies
Gender and Women's Studies

Leslie Salzinger is an associate professor and chair of the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley. She received her Ph.D. in sociology at UC Berkeley and previously taught in the sociology departments at the University of Chicago and Boston College. She writes and teaches on gender, capitalism, nationality and race and their ongoing co-formations. Her empirical research is ethnographic, mostly focused on Latin America, especially Mexico. Her primary research questions address the cultural constitution of economic processes and the creation of subjects within political...

Debarati Sanyal

Professor; Director, Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry
French

Sanyal is a professor of French and director of Berkeley's new Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry. She is affiliated with Critical Theory, the Center for Race and Gender and European Studies. Her research and teaching interests include critical refugee studies; aesthetics and biopolitics; postwar French and Francophone culture; and transcultural memory studies. Debarati's first book, The Violence of Modernity: Baudelaire, Irony and the Politics of Form (Johns Hopkins, 2006), reclaims Baudelaire's aesthetic legacy...

Kevin Shadel

Assistant Professor
East Asian Languages and Cultures

Shadel received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UC Davis in 2019. His research and teaching focus on modern Korean literature and culture with emphasis on poetry and poetics. His scholarly practice is concerned broadly with aesthetics and politics in colonial Korea and its aftermath, pursuing questions of uneven development, literary form and periodization comparatively across East Asia and Euro-America. His theoretical influences include Western Marxism, posthumanism and psychoanalysis.

He has published articles on Korean and Japanese modernist poetry, painting and...

Hans Sluga

William and Trudy Ausfahl Professor Emeritus
Philosophy

Sluga has broad philosophical interests of both a systematic and a historical kind. These cross the boundaries of so-called “analytic” and “Continental” philosophy. From the latter tradition, he has acquired a strongly historical bent. From the analytical tradition, he has gained an appreciation of clarity and logical order.

Sluga's knowledge of philosophy began with the study of classical languages and culture in the German Gymnasium. At the Universities of Bonn and Munich, he subsequently developed an interest in symbolic logic and, in particular, in the work...

Barbara Spackman

Distinguished Professor Emerita; Former Giovanni and Ruth Elizabeth Cecchetti Chair of Italian Literature
Italian Studies
Comparative Literature

Barbara Spackman, Ph.D. Yale University, is a distinguished professor emerita of Italian studies and comparative literature, and former Giovanni and Ruth Elizabeth Cecchetti Chair of Italian Literature. She works on 19th- and 20th-century Italian literature and culture, with special interests in decadence, the cultural production of the fascist period, feminist theory, travel writing and Italian Orientalism. She has published on topics as diverse as Macaronic poetry, film of the fascist period, the rhetoric of sickness at the fin de siècle, Italian futurism, contemporary feminist...

Eric Stanley

Associate Professor; Haas Distinguished Chair in LGBT Equity
Gender and Women's Studies

Stanley is the Haas Distinguished Chair in LGBT Equity and an associate professor in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where they are also affiliated with the Program in Critical Theory.

Stanley's first manuscript Atmospheres of Violence: Structuring Antagonism and the Trans/Queer Ungovernable (Duke 2021) argues racialized anti-trans/queer violence is foundational to, and not an aberration of, Western modernity. Atmospheres of Violence was awarded the Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies from CLAGS. Eric...