Department of Film & Media UC Berkeley

The Department of Film & Media is pleased to announce the appointment of Jeffrey Knapp as its new Department Chair effective July 1, 2020. Jeffrey Knapp is the Eggers Professor of English at Berkeley and a Faculty Affiliate of Berkeley’s Department of Film & Media.  After undergraduate and then graduate study at Berkeley, Knapp taught at Harvard for three years before returning to Berkeley in 1990. He has received the campus’s Distinguished Teaching Award and its Faculty Service Award; he is also the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and an NEH Fellowship. Knapp has written four books: An Empire Nowhere: England and America from Utopia to The Tempest (1992); Shakespeare’s Tribe: Church, Nation, and Theater in Renaissance England (2002); Shakespeare Only (2009); and Pleasing Everyone: Mass Entertainment in Renaissance London and Golden-Age Hollywood (2017)—Knapp’s first book on film as well as literature and theater. Knapp has chaired the Berkeley English department, the campus committees on Privilege and Tenure and on the Budget and Interdepartmental Relations, and the UC system-wide Committee on Academic Personnel, so he brings a wealth of administrative experience that will put the department in good hands for the next three years.