Our Team

Director

Catherine Flynn is an Associate Professor of English,  director of the Irish Studies Program at UC Berkeley, and a former director of Berkeley Connect in English, as well as the summer programs Transfer Connect and First-Year Connect. Her research focuses on British and Irish modernist literature in a European avant-garde context.

Her book, James Joyce and the Matter of Paris, appeared with Cambridge University Press (2019). For the hundred-year anniversary of Ulysses, she has put together The Cambridge Centenary Ulysses: The 1922 Text with Essays and Notes, a facsimile edition of the historic 1922 Shakespeare and Company text, featuring Joyce’s own errata as well as references to later amendments, along with maps, photographs, and footnotes, and an essay by a leading Joyce scholar on each of the eighteen episodes (Cambridge University Press, 2022). Her edited volume, entitled The New Joyce Studies: Twenty-First Century Critical Revisions is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press in September 2022. She co-hosts the related podcast “U22 The Centenary Ulysses” (available on iTunes and Spotify) with former students Rafael Aguilar, Max Ambrose, Emily Moell, and Louie Poore. She is currently working on a monograph on Flann O’Brien/Myles na gCopaleen/Brian O’Nolan and the young Irish State.

Prior to joining the UC Berkeley faculty in 2012, Professor Flynn was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University’s Introduction to the Humanities Program. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Yale University and her B.A. in English and Philosophy from University College Cork. Previously, she practiced as an architect in Ireland and in Vienna, Austria; she has a B.Arch from University College Dublin.

Staff support

Berkeley Connect benefits from the support of a team of staff, all of whom can be reached at berkeleyconnect@berkeley.edu. 

Leslie Harlson serves as Executive Director of Berkeley Connect and is joined by Shana Love, Amy Louise Casey and Mia Rauer. Fun fact: Mia took Berkeley Connect when she was an undergraduate!

Founding Director

Maura Nolan, Associate Professor of English, was the founding Director of Berkeley Connect (2010-2018).  In 2011, she received the Berkeley Faculty Award for Outstanding Mentorship of Graduate Students for her leadership of the Chernin Program, the pilot project in the Department of English that launched the campus-wide Berkeley Connect program.

For more information on Berkeley Connect faculty directors and graduate fellows, please see Participating Departments

Student Assistants