Kathleen Donegan (Ph.D. American Studies, Yale University) writes and teaches about literature and culture in early America, from New World encounters through the first decades of the republic.  She is the author of Seasons of Misery: Catastrophe and Colonial Settlement in Early America (Penn, 2014), a book about the deeply unsettling history of early English colonial settlement in Native America.

Imogen Forbes-Macphail is a graduate student in the English Faculty and a coordinator of the Literature and Digital Humanities Townsend Working Group. She works primarily on the relationship between literature and mathematics in the nineteenth-century, with a particular interest in the writings of Ada Lovelace, Charles Babbage, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 

R.D. Perry works primarily in the literature of late-medieval England, from Chaucer, Gower, and Langland, through to Hoccleve and Lydgate, up to the transitional figures of Dunbar and Skelton.  He also has interests in the influence of medieval philosophy on 20th-Century Critical Theory and philosophy and on the religious culture of medieval England after the Fourth Lateran Council.

Professor Nolan works on late medieval English literature, with a special focus on the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and the vexed relationship between the “medieval” and the “Renaissance.”  She is especially interested in defining and articulating the role of the aesthetic in late medieval vernacular literature, particularly in relation to variable cultural understandings of sensation and cognition.

Scott Saul is a historian and critic who has written for The New York Times, Harper's Magazine, The Nation, and other publications. The author of Becoming Richard Pryor and Freedom Is, Freedom Ain't: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties, he is also the creator of Richard Pryor's Peoria, an extensive digital companion to his biography of the comedian. He teaches courses in American literature and history at Berkeley.

Bryan Wagner is Associate Professor in the English Department at UC Berkeley. He received a PhD from the University of Virginia before coming to Berkeley in 2002. His research focuses on African American expression in the context of slavery and its aftermath, and he has secondary interests in legal history and critical theory.