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

Christopher Geary is a PhD candidate in English.

Where did you grow up?

Dublin, Ireland

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

Trinity College Dublin; University of Toronto,  English

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

My research explores how neglected, sub-canonical aesthetics from the eighteenth century can tell us a lot about how people understood, navigated, and resisted capitalism prior to widespread industrialisation. I'm currently writing about whimsy, agricultural modernisation, and the gentry.

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Gabrielle Elias is a PhD candidate in English.

Where did you grow up?

I grew up in Southern California.

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

UC Berkeley, English

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

I am interested in the relationship between description and typicality in the novel; two writers I work on are Nella Larsen and Jessie Redmon Fauset.

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Leo Dunsker is a PhD candidate in English.

Where did you grow up?

Albany, New York.

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

Trinity College Dublin, English

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

Why would anyone want to write an epic poem? How might such a poem be written? I study poets from all around the world — but especially the Caribbean — who turn to epic in order to narrate supposedly unnarratable histories, redefining epic in the process.

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Lindsay Choi is a PhD candidate in English.

Where did you grow up?

Chino Hills, CA

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

UC Berkeley, English and Philosophy

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

I study how lyric poetry captures history in periods of geopolitical crisis, especially when "history," as a term, appears to be a problem. I look specifically at work across the Pacific Rim from the Russo-Japanese War through the end of the Cold War.

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Miles Drawdy is a PhD candidate in English.

Where did you grow up?

Northern Virginia

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

The College of William and Mary; English

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

I research the relationship between disability and performance in seventeenth-century England.

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Semester Activities