Mohamed Wajdi Ben Hammed is Assistant Professor of Arabic Literature and Islamic Culture in the Department of Comparative Literature. He obtained his B.A. in 2009 from the University of Tunis and his Master’s from the University of Notre Dame in 2016. In 2022, he completed his Ph.D. in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies and the Institute of Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University.
Ben Hammed works on modern Arabic literature and thought, with particular interest in questions of time concepts and temporality, receptions of the...
Karl Britto is jointly appointed in the Departments of French and Comparative Literature. He is a recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award, the Berkeley campus's highest honor for teaching, and is currently serving as Associate Dean of Arts & Humanities. (Ph.D., Yale University)
Judith Butler is Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School and former Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. They served as Founding Director of the Critical Theory Program as well as the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs at UC Berkeley, funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation. They received theirPh.D. in Philosophy from Yale University in 1984.
Books include Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (1987), Gender...
Anthony J. Cascardi works on literature and philosophy, aesthetic theory, and early modern literature, with an emphasis on Spanish, English, and French. He teaches courses on literature and philosophy, aesthetic theory and the early modern period. Most recently he published Cervantes, Literature, and the Discourse of Politics and the Cambridge Introduction to Literature and Philosophy. His new book is Francisco de Goya: Art of Critique (forthcoming from Zone Books). (Ph.D., Harvard University).
Professor Cascardi served for ten years as the Dean of Arts...
Anne-Lise François works in the modern period, comparative romanticisms; lyric poetry; the psychological novel and novel of manners; gender and critical theory; literature and philosophy; and ecocriticism. Her book – Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience (Stanford University Press, 2008) –was awarded the 2010 René Wellek Prize by the American Comparative Literature Association. A study of the ethos of affirmative reticence and recessive action found in the fiction of Mme de Lafayette and Jane Austen, and the poetry of William Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson and Thomas...
Timothy Hampton works on Renaissance and early modern European culture, in both English and the Romance languages. His research and teaching involve the relationship between politics and culture, and focus on such issues as the ideology of literary genre, the literary construction of nationhood, and the rhetoric of historiography. He regularly teaches courses on the early modern period, on travel literature, on the Baroque, on historiography, on lyric. He works on Montaigne, Tasso, Cervantes, Rabelais, Corneille, Lafayette, Shakespeare, Camões, Rimbaud, and Bob Dylan, among other authors....
Victoria Kahn specializes in Renaissance literature, rhetoric and poetics, early modern political theory, and the history of literary theory. She is the author of Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the Renaissance (Cornell, 1985), Machiavellian Rhetoric (Princeton, 1994), and Wayward Contracts: The Crisis of Political Obligation in England, 1640-1674 (Princeton, 2004), and The Future of Illusion: Political Theology and Early Modern Texts (Chicago, 2014). A new book, entitled The...
Robert Kaufman’s teaching and research emphasize several interrelated areas: 20th-21st-century American poetry and its dialogues with modern Latin American, German, French, and British poetry; romantic and 19th-century poetry and poetics; philosophical aesthetics, literary theory, and the history of criticism (esp. since Kant and romanticism); and Frankfurt School Critical Theory and the arts (poetry and the other literary genres; music; cinema; painting, etc.).
Leslie Kurke has specialties that span archaic and classical Greek literature and cultural history, with particular emphasis on archaic Greek poetry in its social context, Herodotus, and early prose. She is fascinated by the various interactions of word and world, literature and its “others”: the economics of literature, poetry and/as ritualization, text and popular culture, and the dialectic of performed song and place/monuments. She is the author of The Traffic in Praise: Pindar and the Poetics of Social Economy (Cornell UP, 1991), Coins, Bodies, Games, and Gold: The Politics of...
Largier’s research focuses on historical interactions between literature, philosophy, and theology with a particular interest in the history of affects, the senses, and the imagination. His most recent books explore the relation between bodily ascetic practices, eroticism, and the literary imagination (In Praise of the Whip: A Cultural History of Arousal. ZONE Books, 2007); the fascination of decadent literature with such religious practices (Die Kunst des Begehrens: Dekadenz, Sinnlichkeit und Askese. Beck, Munich, 2007);...
