Faculty Research

Cathy Park Hong: "I wanted to write to people like me, people who could be my kin. As I became more confident in the form, and the book, my idea of kin grew more inclusive and bigger."

October 18, 2023
Dana Swensen

This semester we were pleased to welcome Cathy Park Hong to the UC Berkeley Department of English as Professor and Class of 1936 First Chair in the College of Letters and Science. We spoke to her about poetry, AI and UC Berkeley as an intellectual homecoming.

Cathy Park Hong’s New York Times bestselling book of creative nonfiction, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, was published in Spring 2020 by One World/Random House and Profile Books (UK). Minor Feelings was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for...

James Grantham Turner’s The Villa Farnesina: Palace of Venus in Renaissance Rome

October 19, 2022

Professor James Grantham Turner’s The Villa Farnesina: Palace of Venus in Renaissance Rome (Cambridge University Press, 2022) studies in depth, for the first time in English, a building that has enraptured admirers from Rubens and Fragonard to Goethe and Edith Wharton — a villa that Turner compellingly evokes as the most beautiful dwelling of the Renaissance. Drawing on a treasure trove of evidence, much of it neglected or unknown, from documents, drawings, archaeological traces, and parallels in other projects connected with the commissioner Agostino Chigi and his...

An interview with Colleen Lye on After Marx

September 12, 2022

An interview with Colleen Lye, co-editor of After Marx

Here Lindsay Choi — English graduate student and co-coordinator of the Interdisciplinary Marxist Working Group at Cal — interviews Professor Colleen Lye about After Marx: Literature, Theory, and Value in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge University Press, 2022), a collection of essays which she co-edited with Christopher Nealon. In the resulting...