Projects & Groups

In Spring 2019, a number of Comparative Literature Department undergrads, grad students, and faculty organized a new group within Comp Lit.  This new group decided to call itself--and why not?/¿y por qué no?--"EL GRUPO."

The idea was, and is, for El Grupo to be a place and an ongoing process of meeting, dialogue, and activity for all those in the Department whose work engaged--a lot, or just in ways that those doing it considered significant to them, and that they wanted to sustain--the literatures, related art, and cultures of Latin America (including within the U.S.) and/or the Iberian Peninsula.

 We also wanted--in bringing together CL undergrads, grad students, and faculty whose studies involve these materials, issues, and areas--to get a chance (which we otherwise too rarely experience) to talk collectively about shared interests and commitments outside of formal classroom situations and official academic events. We had a sense this would be generative for all of us, and a terrific way to extend our collective literary/cultural education and experience.

We  had some preliminary talks with folks in the Spanish & Portuguese Department, who indicated they'd likewise be interested in the possibility of doing some joint-department events with us. That possibility came to fruition, and we've had some faculty, grad students, and undergrads in the Spanish &Portuguese Dept, as well as in the English Dept, who've become grupistas; so while EL GRUPO began in, and has a very strong base in, the Comparative Literature Department, it's not limited only to Comp Lit.

Over the last two years, El Grupo has organized talks and forums; done a number of combined events with both UC Berkeley's Latinx Resource Center (LRC) and Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS); organized film-viewings (so far, films from México and Guatemala); generated a reading group that focused on reading novels in Spanish; established information networks for students interested in opportunities for additional information and guidance in accessing campus and off-campus grant, scholarship, and other programs/means of both financial and scholarly-intellectual support; and begun to pair undergrads and graduate students, within and across the Comp Lit and Spanish & Portuguese Departments, into mentorship opportunities for those undergraduates and graduate students interested in working together (with a particular focus on what grad students might offer to undergrad grupistas in terms of their present studies, as well as offering advice and guidance about the possibility of undergrads eventually doing doctoral work themselves).  Among our key plans for 2022-2022 is to build up and strengthen this El Grupo mentoring initiative.

Like every other aspect of academic and extra-academic life today, our current planning takes place in the context of multiple challenges: above all, COVID-19 and what we hope is an ongoing return towards "normal," in-person campus life; but also, as we all know, the ongoing political crises--not least, those involving urgent questions of racial and ethnic justice--that have become inseparable from the coronavirus pandemic.

If you're not already signed up with EL GRUPO's email districbution list and you think you'd like to be onit,  please email Professor Robert Kaufman at:  robkaufman@berkeley.edu(link sends e-mail)

--Tom McEnaney, Associate Professor
Comparative Literature Department; Spanish & Portuguese Department; Co-Coordinator, EL GRUPO

--Robert Kaufman, Associate Professor
Comparative Literature Department; Program in Critical Theory; Co-Coordinator, EL GRUPO

Across our campus, we are celebrating one hundred and fifty years of women at the University of California.  On October 3, 1870, the Regents voted to admit women “on equal terms in all respects with young men,” only 13 months after the University opened its doors in September 1869 to its first 38 students.  It would be hard to overestimate the influence of this single decision on the future fortunes of the state of California. Generations of women were given access to a first-class education on an equal basis with men; by comparison, the first women matriculated at Princeton and Yale in 1969, just about 100 years later.

Our reminiscences from retired faculty Louise George Clubb and Francine Masiello vividly bring to life the experiences of women faculty in the decades after our department’s founding. Reading their recollections, I am struck that they have omitted a few facts about their own contributions. Louise was not only Chair of the Department of Italian but Dean of the Arts and Humanities, one of only a few women to have held the position to this day, while Francine was Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature in the early 1990s.

As Francine notes, women graduate students in Comparative Literature changed the curriculum, successfully petitioning to add courses on women writers.  These graduate students also were instrumental in the creation of the Women Studies’ major (now Gender and Women’s Studies) at Berkeley; they petitioned the Executive Committee in Letters and Science not once but twice before succeeding.  

Our former student advisors Erica Citret Roberts and Kathy Barrett attended U.C. Berkeley themselves, in the 1960s and 1980s respectively; their recollections of their time as students and as staff reveal how much our campus has changed.

Many thanks to our contributors, and to Kathryn Crim, Paul de Morais, and Lydia Yoon for their help in the formation of this website.

—Sophie Volpp, Professor of Comparative Literature & East Asian Languages and Culture

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