Seeing Differently: Kelly Chuang on Vision, Speculation, and Unreliable Narrators Seeing Differently: Kelly Chuang on Vision, Speculation, and Unreliable Narrators December 1, 2025 Lucille Lorenz, Arts & Humanities writer-in-residence Kelly Chuang is a third-year English and Rhetoric double major and a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow. She has a strong interest in speculative fiction, the uncanny, and narratology, and she jokes that she can connect almost anything she reads back to cyborgs, Carl Sagan’s Contact, or sci-fi. Kelly chose English because of her long-standing love of literature and the teachers who encouraged it. She added Rhetoric after discovering how much she enjoyed the department’s interdisciplinary approach and the energy of its faculty. Firstly, I would love to hear you introduce yourself! What is your major, and why were you drawn to this field of interest? My name is Kelly Chuang; I’m a third year English and Rhetoric major. I have a deep love for speculative fiction, the uncanny, and narratology. I’ve developed a hammer and nails dynamic where everything I read can be linked to cyborgs, Carl Sagan’s Contact, sci-fi, or speculative fiction. Blessing and a curse. In terms of why I picked English and Rhetoric, I knew it was going to be English because I always really enjoyed my literature classes in high school and middle school. My English teachers have a very special place in my heart. As I was applying to college, a lot of people were telling me that my major wouldn’t necessarily be my career path or tell me something substantive about where I’d end up, so I should go and do what I want for four years. I knew that Berkeley has a fantastic English program, and that it would be a missed opportunity if I didn’t go for English. I knew that for at least four years of my life, and hopefully more, I wanted to do a lot of reading, learn from the professors here, and put myself in a thoughtful and literary space. In terms of Rhetoric, my high school prepared me very well for my English degree. I think they were trying to get us to go to UCs, so I had a lot of requirements already completed by the time my high school transcript was processed. The choice, then, was either to graduate early or double-major. With an English bachelor’s, there wasn’t a point to me graduating early, especially because I want to pursue graduate study, so I decided to choose another major. It was originally going to be English and Philosophy. I sat in on a couple of guest lectures and a couple classes, but philosophy wasn’t exactly the right shoe for me. Then I took Rhetoric 116 in my freshman spring with Nathan Atkinson. That was my first Rhetoric class. Atkinson is such a fantastic lecturer – he knows how to read a room really well and get people engaged. He is so amazing at what he does; I’m not sure if he knows, but he brought me into the Rhetoric major. In both Rhetoric and English, you can find deep care and passion lying about rather easily. No one really knows what Rhetoric is — the professors don’t, the students don’t — which I think is quite fun. There is no definition of Rhetoric in our department at Berkeley and everyone will give you a different answer. It’s amazing to learn from professors who are trained in so many different fields. There are a lot of converging and overlapping ideas in Rhetoric, and I deeply appreciate and love it. Read more at the Division of Arts & Humanities >> Source: https://ls.berkeley.edu/news/seeing-differently-kelly-chuang-vision-speculation-and-unreliable-narrators