Beth Piatote is an associate professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California Berkeley. She is the author of two books: the scholarly monograph Domestic Subjects: Gender, Citizenship, and the Law in Native American Literature (Yale 2013), which received honorable mention from the Modern Language Association for the 2014 Prize for Studies in Native American Literatures, Cultures, and Languages; and the mixed-genre collection, The Beadworkers: Stories (Counterpoint 2019), which was long-listed for the Aspen Words Literary Prize and the PEN/Bingham Prize for...
Jocelyn Saidenberg earned her doctoral degree in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on ancient Greek, Latin, and contemporary Anglophone poetry and is informed by her interests in linguistics, social anthropology, and psychoanalysis. Her dissertation, Echo Otherwise, an elaboration of Lucretius’s atomic poetics, explores the relationship between didactic poetry’s transformational capacity and sonic and linguistic patterning. She also writes on contemporary poetry and art and has several published collections of poetry....
Miryam Sas’s research specializations include Japanese literature, film, theater, and dance; 20th century literature and critical theory (Japanese, French, English, German); and avant-garde and experimental visual and literary arts. She began as a scholar of the experimental arts of the early twentieth century with a focus on modernist poetics and literary theory in Japan and France, reflected in her first book, Fault Lines: Cultural Memory and Japanese Surrealism (...
Christopher is the Lecturer of Modern Greek Literature & Language at UC Berkeley. Ongoing research in the fields of modern Greek poetry, postwar Italian cinema, and psychoanalysis addresses the turn in modern aesthetics to Greek rituals of mourning to help fathom historically specific forms of violence and loss in the twentieth century. His book manuscript in progress, titled Ash, Bone, Dirt, Stone: Destruction and the Aesthetics of Survival in Greek Literature, focuses on works written in the aftermath of the Greco-Turkish War and Population Exchange alongside Freud's theory...
In my scholarship, I seek to place antiquity in dialogue with modernity, defamiliarizing and destabilizing widely accepted critical positions by exploring the emancipatory potential of textual and visual form. Aristophanes and the Cloak of Comedy: Affect, Aesthetics, and the Canon(University of Chicago Press, 2016) theorizes the nexus between canonicity and sensory—especially haptic—materiality. On the threshold between critique and post-critique, my monograph, Archive Feelings: A Theory of Greek Tragedy (Ohio State University Press, “Classical Memories/Modern Identities...
Sophie Volpp is professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures and Comparative Literature. She works in Chinese literature of the 16th through 19th centuries, and is the author of Worldly Stage: Theatricality in Seventeenth-Century China (Harvard, 2011) and The Substance of Fiction: Literary Objects in China, 1550-1775 (Columbia, 2022). She has also translated the work of pre-modern women poets and dramatists. She is currently at work on two projects: a book about the efforts of the National Peiping Library (now the National Library of...
My research interests have focused on Anglo-American and European modernist fiction, literature and philosophy, novel theory, affect theory, visual culture, and aesthetics. More recently, my worked has also turned to contemporary literature, especially Asian American and Asian diasporic literature.
My first book, Strange Likeness: Description and the Modernist Novel, appeared in 2020 from the University of Chicago Press as part of the "Thinking Literature" series. It turns to some experiments of modernist form - by James, Proust, and, most centrally, Woolf - in order to reinvigorate...
