Research Areas
LatinX literature and culture
LatinX literature and culture is one of the strengths in the department with our faculty focusing on both contemporary productions and historical Latinidades in relation to migration, print culture, racializations, Afrolatinidades, and Indigeneity. At the heart of our work is rigorous attention to language in its historical contexts, with particular attention to Spanish-language print as well as translanguaging, code-switching, and bilingual orientations. Our research areas include LatinX literary history, poetry, California history, archival studies, LatinX newspapers and racialized labor. Students can also take courses in the Department of Latin American and Latino Studies, which offers a graduate emphasis.
Faculty: Rodrigo Lazo, Kirsten Silva Gruesz
Creative/Critical Concentration
The Creative/Critical Concentration is a small cohort within the Literature Department PhD for writers who wish to think deeply and make work across creative and critical modes, especially those committed to rigor, experiment, and play. Our Creative-Critical Faculty operate across most, if not all, of the department’s research clusters, reimagining subject, area studies, discipline and form. Faculty specialize in the making and study of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, memoir, various essay forms, visual and sonic art, digital culture, theory, curation and performance. Our admitted students work in these singular and overlapping fields, and usually have MFA's and/or publications. Please familiarize yourself with our faculty, students, and concentration before applying.
Critical Americas
The Critical Americas cluster has strengths in US Studies,including Latino Studies, and Latin American Studies. It approaches the literature and culture of the Americas hemispherically, through a rigorous interdisciplinary comparativism that pays close attention to the particularities of local, national, regional, linguistic and intercultural contexts. Without ignoring US imperialism, our research works to decenter the imperial nation-state by illuminating entangled histories of Indigeneity, conquest and colonization, enslavement and emancipation, nation formation and race, knowledge production and extractivism across the Americas.
Faculty: Susan Gillman, Kirsten Silva Gruesz, Rodrigo Lazo, Hannah Cole, Zac Zimmer, Ronaldo V. Wilson
Latin American Literary and Cultural Studies
Multidisciplinary approaches to knowledge and media production in the region, with particular strengths in the Southern Cone, the Andes, Amazonia, and the Caribbean. A Spanish-language study program that prepares students to work in Spanish and Portuguese, Romance Studies, and/or Comparative Literature departments, among others.
Faculty: Amanda M. Smith, Zac Zimmer
Marxist theory and criticism
Marxist theory and criticism, ranging from primary texts to cultural analyses to social movements. Particular emphasis is given to the former socialist world and elsewhere outside the west.
Faculty: Hunter Bivens, Christopher Chen, Dorian Bell
Speculative Fiction and Fantasy
Faculty specialize in a range of speculative genres, many linked to research projects in the Humanities Division and beyond. These include, for example, Monster Studies, Fairy Tales, Fantasy literature, utopian and dystopian fiction, queer, disability and BIPOC speculative fictions, Afrofuturism. This focus includes historical, critical and creative approaches to the genre.
Faculty: Susan Gillman, Carla Freccero, Zac Zimmer, Micah Perks, Renée Fox, Ronaldo V. Wilson
Pre- and early modern cultural studies.
Faculty in Classics, Medieval, and Early Modern studies study the linguistic, cultural, political, economic, and literary production and inter-cultural exchanges in the “premodern” world. Sub-fields include classical antiquity, Mediterranean studies, 19-th century studies, comparative medieval and early modern history and literature,conquest studies, and include participating faculty in other disciplines and departments. Several faculty are linked to two Humanities Division research projects, the Dickens Universe and Shakespeare Workshop, with specific annual resources for graduate students.
Faculty: Carla Freccero, Jordi Aladro, Martin Devecka, Sean Keilen, Filippo Gianferrari
Feminist, Queer, Disability, Animal and Race Studies.
While also participating in other areas of study, many faculty engage with theoretical approaches under these rubrics, often in their interrelation, examining representational strategies, political commitments, lived experiences, genealogies and histories of their emergence as fields of analysis. Particular areas include: African American and Black Diasporic Studies; Asian American, and Asian Diasporic Imaginaries, Critical Whiteness Studies, Popular Culture, Visual Art and Culture, Animal Studies
Faculty: Carla Freccero, Vilashini Cooppan, Jennifer Tseng, Dorian Bell, Ronaldo V. Wilson, Micah Perks
Philosophical Approaches to Literature
Many faculty teach theoretical schools of thought as objects of analysis, in addition to using them in their approaches to various texts and cultural objects. These include philosophical approaches to literature, critical theory, posthumanism, digital theory, environmental humanities theory, poststructuralism, semiotics, narratology, among others.
Faculty: Vilashini Cooppan, Carla Freccero, Dorian Bell, Ronaldo V. Wilson
