Past Berkeley Book Chats

Victoria Kahn argues that the literature of the English Reformation (written during the fraught years of the late 16th and 17th centuries) marks a turning point in Western thinking about literature and literariness.

Christopher Tomlins offers a new interpretation of Nat Turner and the slave rebellion that stunned the American South.

Ian Duncan offers a major rethinking of the European novel and its relationship to early evolutionary science.

Ellen Oliensis offers a fresh approach to the Amores emphasizing the masochistic pleasures of the elegiac writing project.

Catherine Flynn explores the ways in which James Joyce's imaginative consciousness was shaped by the paradigmatic city of European urban modernity.

Beth Piatote’s debut short story collection is a reflection on modern Native American life.

In their study of the poet Pindar of Thebes, coauthors Leslie Kurke and Richard Neer develop a new methodological approach to classical Greece.

This collected volume offers a critical interdisciplinary view on how and why social media is at the heart of contemporary political discourse.

In her response to surrealist painter Leonora Carrington’s feminist novella, The Hearing Trumpet, Anne Walsh uses a variety of media to cast herself as an “apprentice crone” who studies and rehearses the trauma of old age.

Grace Lavery examines the contradictory role — as both rival empire and cradle of exquisite beauty — played by Japan in the Victorian imagination.