Languages: Chinese, Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese Periods: 20th Century Academic Area: Psychoanalysis, Film and Media (DE), Socialist China, Postwar Italy
Matteo studied Comparative Literature and East Asian Studies at Brown University, where he wrote a thesis on the China travel narratives of Curzio Malaparte and Tiziano Terzani. At UC Berkeley, he is preparing a dissertation on the impact of Italian Neo-Realism on PRC, ROC and Hong Kong culture from the 1950s to the 2000s. He is also interested in the films of the Late Maoist era and how they influenced China's Fourth...
Office Hours: Tuesdays 12:30-2:30pm PST Languages: Spanish, Russian, French (reading knowledge) Periods: 20th/21st Century
Courses:
English 166/Slavic 134 -- Nabokov, Fall 2019 (GSR for Eric Naiman) Comlit R1A -- Seeing Things: Specters and the Intermundane, Fall 2020 (Co-Instructor with Max Kaisler) Comlit 60AC --Boroughs and Barrios, Spring 2021 (GSI for Karina Palau)
Barbara Spackman, Ph.D. Yale University, is Professor of Italian Studies and Comparative Literature, and holder of the Giovanni and Ruth Elizabeth Cecchetti Chair in Italian Literature. She works on nineteenth and twentieth century Italian literature and culture, with special interests in decadence, the cultural production of the fascist period, feminist theory, travel writing and Italian...
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...
Office Hours: Tuesdays and Thursdays 10-11am, and by appointment Languages: English, Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese Periods: 20th and 21st centuries Academic Area: Black Diaspora Studies
Danielle Stephenson is a writer, musician, and third-year PhD student in Comparative Literature, specializing in twentieth-century literature, music, and critical theory of the Black diaspora. Working with texts and media in English, Italian, Spanish, French and Portuguese, her writing asks questions of abolition and solidarity, with interests in surrealism, Afrofuturism, affect theory, the...
Languages: Spanish, French, English, German, Luxembourgish Periods: 19th, 20th & 21st centuries Academic Area: Latin American literatures, Latin American art, environmental art and literature Courses: "Dreamers, Crackpots and Lunatics" - Reading and Composition Course Fall 2020 "Idleness and Insubordination" - Reading and Composition Course Spring 2021 Spanish 2 - Spanish Language Course Fall 2021
Office: Dwinelle 4319 Office Hours: M 10-12 Languages: German, Italian, French, Latin Academic Area: Renaissance & Early Modern Studies; Sound Studies; 18th Century Studies; Gender and Sexuality Studies
Evan Strouss came to Berkeley in the fall of 2018 after receiving his BA in German Studies and Comparative Literature from Brown University, and his MA in Comparative Literature from Dartmouth College. His dissertation, "Distant Voices: Vocal Philology in Early Modernity," examines the German folk song tradition in a period spanning 1523-1779. He argues therein that voice takes on a...
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...
