Facebook pixel Jonathan Berliner | Pepperdine University | Seaver College Skip to main content
Pepperdine | Seaver College
Jonathan Berliner

Jonathan Berliner

Visiting Professor of English
Seaver College
CAC 117

Biography

Jonathan Berliner received his PhD in English from the University of Chicago and served as an Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellow at the University of Southern California. He has been recognized for his work in the classroom with the Outstanding Instructor of the Year Award at Mount St. Mary’s University in Los Angeles. He teaches courses in a range of areas, including composition, American literature, and the humanities.

Dr. Berliner’s research involves the relationship between material texts within literature and physical forms of texts as they circulate in the world. His study of the American Indian writer Simon Pokagon’s birch bark booklets was published in PMLA as part of their cluster of essays in the field of Textual Materialism, an area of inquiry that brings together scholars working in manuscript culture, book history, and new forms of media.

In his book William Faulkner and the Materials of Writing (Cambridge University Press, 2023), Dr. Berliner develops an inside-outside approach to literary materiality. On the one hand, the study examines the letters, postcards, telegrams, financial documents, and other textual objects that populate Faulkner’s fiction; on the other hand, it analyzes the changing physical forms of Faulkner’s books themselves in multiple editions and anthologies. Taken together, William Faulkner and the Materials of Writing examines texts not simply as abstractions or vehicles for language but as material things embedded in social and cultural life.

Education

  • PhD, English, University of Chicago
  • MA, English, University of Chicago
  • BA, English and History, University of Washington

 

  • William Faulkner and the Materials of Writing (Cambridge University Press, 2023)
  • “From Ivory to Foolscap: Faulkner’s Romance of Writing Materials,” Mississippi Quarterly, vol. 70/71, no. 2, 2017/2018, pp. 135–146.
  • “Borrowed Books: Bodies and the Materials of Writing in The Sound and the Fury,” Faulkner Journal, vol. 30, no. 2, 2016, pp. 3–17.
  • “The Landscapes of Hamlin Garland and the American Populists,” American Literary Realism, vol. 47, no. 3, 2015, pp. 219–234.
  • “Barack Obama’s Landscapes: The Unfolding Road as Metaphor of American Unity,” Amerikastudien / American Studies, vol. 59, no. 1, 2014, pp. 99–112.
  • “Written in the Birch Bark: The Linguistic-Material Worldmaking of Simon Pokagon,” PMLA, vol. 125, no. 1, 2010, pp. 73–91.
  • “Jack London’s Socialistic Social Darwinism,” American Literary Realism, vol. 41, no. 1, 2008, pp. 52–78. Reprinted in Short Story Criticism, vol. 133, 2010, pp. 281–296.
  • Instructor of Merit, California Extended Opportunity Program, 2018
  • Outstanding Instructor of the Year, Mount St. Mary’s University, 2016
  • Mayers Fellowship, Huntington Library, 2012
  • Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship, University of Southern California, 2008
  • Walter Blair Dissertation Fellowship, University of Chicago, 2005
  • Thomas Hardy and the Material Text, Scripps College, Claremont, CA, 2024.
  • Literary Indulgences and the Materials of Writing, California Lutheran University, Thousand Oaks, CA, 2017.
  • Barack Obama’s Landscapes, University of Haifa, Israel, 2016.
  • The Verbal and Visual Landscapes of Barack Obama, Shevchenko University, Kiev, Ukraine, 2015.
  • Simone de Beauvoir and Biocultures, Modern Language Association Annual Convention, Boston, MA, 2013.
  • Missions and Manumissions: American Indians and African Americans in the West, California African American Museum, Los Angeles, CA, 2011.
  • Native American Textual Worldmaking, Modern Language Association Annual Convention, Los Angeles, CA, 2011.
  • Hamlin Garland and the Landscapes of the American Populists, Modern Language Association Annual Convention, Philadelphia, PA, 2009.
  • The Sweet, Suggestive Landscapes of Hamlin Garland and the American Populists, American Studies Association Annual Meeting, Washington, DC, 2009.
  • Simon Pokagon’s Linguistic-Material Worldmaking, Native American Studies Association Annual Conference, Minneapolis, MN, 2009.
  • The Politics of Nature in American Literature, Oxford University, Oxford, UK, 2009.
  • Socialism and Social Darwinism in Jack London, Futures of American Studies Institute, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, 2007.

Topics

  • American Literature
  • Composition and Rhetoric
  • Material Textuality
  • American Indian Literature
  • World Literature

Courses

  • First-Year Composition 
  • Western Culture III
  • Dracula in Fiction and Beyond
  • The Life of Literature
  • Contemporary American Literature