English

Every semester, Berkeley Connect sponsors a wide range of activities and events for participating studentsThey include:

• small-group meetings led by your mentor;
• one-on-one meetings with your mentor;
• special events, including informal lectures by professors and guest speakers, and panels on career options, graduate school admissions, and other topics;
• and visits to Berkeley resources.

At the heart of Berkeley Connect is the relationship between you and your mentor. The Berkeley Connect mentors are advanced graduate students or recent PhDs in English, who are chosen both for their demonstrated commitment to undergraduates and for their scholarly achievement. They are dedicated to providing the kind of close-knit community and one-on-one attention that can be hard to find at a large university.

When you sign up for Berkeley Connect, you will join one of several small groups of participants in English. Your small group will be led by your mentor, and will meet every other week during the semester for an hour-long discussion session. Discussions will focus on key intellectual issues within English as well as key skills you need to succeed in the major. Above all, the small groups will focus on building connections among students, so that each group becomes a supportive community for all participants.

You will meet with your mentor one-on-one at least twice during the semester, to talk about anything you choose related to your academic life—questions you have, challenges you are facing, resources you are seeking, goals you are seeking to achieve. Your mentor will also hold open mentoring hours throughout the semester, during which you are free to show up and continue these conversations, or just check in.

Faculty

Katherine Snyder (Director) is an Associate Professor in the English Department, specializing in contemporary novels and short stories. In her research and teaching, she focuses on cheerful narrative subgenres such as post-9/11 fiction, post-apocalyptic fiction, pandemic fiction, and climate fiction. She has taught at UC Berkeley since 1993, after getting her PhD in English at Yale and her BA in English at Cornell, a university that, like Cal, is large and hard-to-navigate. She loves the way that Berkeley Connect is designed to make the English major and the whole Cal experience a bit more intimate and a bit easier to navigate.

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Elizabeth Abel (Assistant Director) is a Professor in the English Department, specializing in twentieth-century British literature, with a focus on issues of gender, race, and sexuality.After receiving her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton, she began her academic career as a Romanticist working on the intersections between literary and visual arts, but the emergence of feminist literary criticism induced her to shift directions. She teaches courses on twentieth-century literature; Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury; gender, sexuality, and modernism; literature and photography; and literary theory. In addition to numerous essays and co-edited volumes, she has published three books:Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis(1989);Signs of the Times: The Visual Politics of Jim Crow (2010); andOdd Affinities: Virginia Woolf’s Shadow Genealogies (forthcoming 2024). She looks forward to fostering stronger connections within the English major.

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Berkeley Connect Mentors

Eliot D'Silva is a PhD candidate in English.

Where did you grow up?

England, United Kingdom

Where did you go to college and what was your major?

Cambridge University. English major

How would you describe your research in a sentence or two?

My research is about writers and artists who make art out of their everyday lives. I’m interested in how recording daily experiences opens a space for self-reflection and contemplation, as well as the forms of communication these artists use to document whatever is going on at a given time, from letter writing to digital photography.

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Jessica Laser is a PhD candidate in English.

Where did you grow up?

Chicago

Where did you go to college and what was your major?

Brown; Literary Arts

How would you describe your research in a sentence or two?

I'm writing on Robert Frost and American poetry.

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Jared Robinson is a PhD candidate in English.

Where did you grow up?

Indianapolis, Indiana

Where did you go to college and what was your major?

Indiana University, Bloomington // English Literature and Creative Writing

How would you describe your research in a sentence or two?

I think about how the writings of the enslaved in America participate in the critique of the Enlightenment; the very ideas on which America was founded. I do this in a way that thinks deeply about deception, figuration, and imagined presence.

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Abigail Struhl is a PhD candidate in English.

Where did you grow up?

New York City

Where did you go to college and what was your major?

Columbia, where I double-majored in English and Creative Writing

How would you describe your research in a sentence or two?

I study eighteenth-century British fiction and visual culture, with particular interest in how writers and artists in the period questioned what it meant to make a “just” representation—at once moral and accurate to the particulars of everyday life. I also edit creative nonfiction about urban experience and experiment with writing for nonacademic audiences.

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Rudi Yniguez is a PhD candidate in English.

Where did you grow up?

Redding, California

Where did you go to college and what was your major?

I was an English major at Williams College.

How would you describe your research in a sentence or two?

I work mostly with 18th and 19th Century British novels, and I'm especially interested in the formal influence of revolutionary political texts upon novels written in the first-person.

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Semester Activities