Generate a tailored SOP for Dr. Amanda Goldstein. Improve your application with a focused, well-structured draft.
Amanda Jo Goldstein specializes in 18th-Century and 19th-Century British poetry, focusing on Enlightenment and Romantic literature. Her scholarship examines the intersections of rhetoric, poetics, and pre-Darwinian biology within the materialist theories of history, nature, and poetry. Her book, 'Sweet Science: Romantic Materialism New Logics Life', published by the University of Chicago Press in 2017, explores how writers like William Blake, Goethe, and Percy Shelley engage with ancient atomist science to depict poetry as a privileged methodology for empirical inquiry. Goldstein's work has been recognized with prestigious awards, including the Kenshur Prize and the MLA Prize for Outstanding Monograph of 2018. Currently, she is investigating ecological utopia through early socialist projects, which she refers to as 'Romantic' and 'Utopian'. Her current research delves into the scientific roots of concepts such as biosemiosis and plasticity, influenced by epigenetic neuroscience. Prior to joining the faculty at Berkeley, Goldstein served as an assistant professor at Cornell University and as a postdoctoral fellow in Biopolitics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from U.C. Berkeley in 2011. Her teaching includes undergraduate courses on Romanticism, cultural experiments, and the impact of the Age of Revolution on modern literature.
University of California, Berkeley • Berkeley, CA
Teaching and researching in the areas of Romantic and Enlightenment literature.
Cornell University • Ithaca, NY
Engaged in teaching and research within the English Department.
University of Wisconsin-Madison • Madison, WI
Conducted research in Biopolitics.
The Mathematics Subject GRE is required for the Fall 2026 admissions cycle. General GRE is optional.