Faculty

Liesl Yamaguchi

Assistant Professor
French

Liesl Yamaguchi is Assistant Professor in the Department of French, specializing in 19th-century French literature, poetics, linguistics, literary theory, and translation.

Her first book On the Colors of Vowels: Thinking Through Synesthesia is forthcoming in the Verbal Arts Series of Fordham University Press. It asks why poets and scientists of the nineteenth century began imputing colors and brightnesses to vowels and studies how these discourses were valorized and invalidated as synesthesia came to be constituted as a legitimate object of modern science....

Damon Young

Associate Professor
French
Film & Media Studies

Young is co-appointed with the Department of French and is affiliated with the Program in Critical Theory, the Berkeley Center for New Media, the Institute for European Studies and the Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender & Sexuality. He teaches courses on art cinema, sexuality and media and topics in digital media and film theory (including classical film theory, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, semiotics, feminist and queer theory). His first book, Making Sex Public and Other Cinematic Fantasies,was published in the Theory Q series at Duke University Press in 2018...

Alexei Yurchak

Professor
Anthropology

Yurchak received his Ph.D. in cultural and linguistic anthropology from Duke University in 1997 (after having received a graduate degree in physics from Russia). His interests and areas of expertise include Soviet history and the processes of post-socialist transformation in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe; political institutions and ideologies in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia; political philosophy and language philosophy; the interface between language/discourse and power; comparative studies of communism and capitalism anthropology of media; visual anthropology; experimental...

Nasser Zakariya

Associate Professor
Rhetoric

Zakariya is an associate professor in the Department of Rhetoric at UC Berkeley. His research interests concern science and narrative, as well as varied topics in the history and philosophy of science. His book, A Final Story: Science, Myth and Beginnings, centers on the emergence of the so-called “scientific epic” as one among a set of possible frames or genres for synthesizing branches of knowledge according to a narrative, historical structure.

He has also been involved in interrelated collaborative research, including studies of the genealogy and structure of...

Hannah Zeavin

Assistant Professor
History

Hannah Zeavin is a scholar, writer, and editor whose work centers on the history of human sciences (psychoanalysis, psychology, and psychiatry), the history of technology and media, feminist science and technology studies, and media theory. Zeavin is an Assistant Professor of the History of Science and New Media in the Department of History and The Berkeley Center for New Media at UC Berkeley.

Dora Zhang

Associate Professor
English

Dora Zhang is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature. Her research encompasses novel studies and novel theory, contemporary multiethnic U.S. fiction, Anglo-European modernism, literature and philosophy, and cultural studies. Her first book, Strange Likeness: Description and the Modernist Novel ( "Thinking Literature" series, University of Chicago Press, 2020) turns to some experiments of modernist form - by Henry James, Marcel Proust, and, most centrally, Virginia Woolf - in order to reinvigorate our thinking about the ubiquitous but still under-...