The Department of Rhetoric selected Marianne Constable as the inaugural recipient of the Distinguished Rhetoric Faculty Fellowship. Constable is a UC Berkeley professor, a leading authority in law and language, and a co-founder of the Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities.
“Marianne Constable has amassed a glittering record in scholarship, teaching, and service over the course of her 34-year career at Berkeley,” said James I. Porter, the Department of Rhetoric chair. “She is fully deserving of this honor.”
Two UC Berkeley rhetoric alums — Bettina Duval and Dana Slatkin — established the Distinguished Rhetoric Faculty Fellowship in 2024 to provide two years of funding for awardees to pursue research projects. Constable is currently completing Chicago Husband-Killing and the New Unwritten Law, an ambitious history of the exoneration and acquittal of women who killed their husbands in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Her first book, The Law of the Other, won the James Willard Hurst Prize in Legal History. She continues to supervise Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship Program participants and teach courses connecting language to philosophy and law.
Constable is well known for her mentorship of students and new faculty colleagues. She previously held the Zaffaroni Family Chair in Undergraduate Teaching and won the Sarlo Distinguished Graduate Student Mentoring Award in 2009. In May, a leading professional association, the Law & Society Association, recognized Constable’s “right combination of frankness and encouragement” with its Stan Wheeler Mentorship Award
“Where most of us hold office hours, Constable seems to hold office days,” said Porter, whose office is next to Constable’s. “Her office is constantly packed with a steady flow of undergraduate and graduate students who queue up in the hallway late into the evening.”
Tim Wyman-McCarthy and Linda Kinstler coordinated Constable’s nomination for the Stan Wheeler Mentorship Award. Constable advised both Ph.D. graduates on their dissertations. Wyman-McCarthy was glad to learn that Constable received further recognition by Berkeley’s rhetoric department.
“I was struck by Marianne’s investment in my success from day one, when she was assigned to be my first-year faculty mentor when I started my Ph.D. in rhetoric,” said Wyman-McCarthy.
“What stands out to me most, however, is Marianne’s remarkable attentiveness to my thinking and writing. My experience is just one example of the long-term, multifaceted, deep commitment Marianne has for her students’ intellectual and professional growth.”
Kinstler echoed Wyman-McCarthy’s sentiment and praised Constable for cultivating a robust network of former students and colleagues interested in the relation between jurisprudence, philosophy, literature, history, and politics.
“Marianne has been my professional and intellectual mentor for the better part of a decade, and it is to her that I owe the majority of my own development as a writer, thinker, and scholar,” said Kinstler. “Her guidance is always practical, generous, expansive, and imaginative. She showed me the scholarly pathways that were possible but left it to me to determine which one I would ultimately travel down.”
Faculty are at the heart of UC Berkeley’s reputation and global impact through their elaboration of critical dialogues and cultivation of the next generation of leaders. However, they need adequate funding for independent study and scholarly exchange.
“Our spectacular rhetoric professors have always pushed the envelope through deep, unconventional inquiry,” said Duval, the fellowship’s co-founder. “Marianne Constable is a widely respected scholar on the topic of law and language. She is a terrific choice for this fellowship.”
Duval is the president of telecommunications hardware manufacturer BRDBND and the chair of the UC Berkeley Foundation’s board of directors. She co-founded two political action committees: Friends of the University of California, which advocates for the UC system in Sacramento, and California Women’s List, which works to elect women to public office.
Duval has created other fellowships at UC Berkeley: a graduate student fellowship at the Goldman School of Public Policy and a scholarship in memory of Jill Costello, a Berkeley women’s crew coxswain who died at a young age of cancer.
Slatkin, the fellowship’s other donor, originally intended to use her rhetoric degree to prepare for law school, but she ultimately decided on a pivot towards a career in restaurants and culinary education, with the mission of bringing communities together. She is now the chef and owner of two restaurants in Los Angeles, as well as a published cookbook author and activist for sustainable food systems. Slatkin also serves on the Berkeley Food Institute’s advisory council.
“I was proud to give back to the Department of Rhetoric and support their outstanding endeavors,” said Slatkin. “Professor Constable has demonstrated a passionate commitment to both exploring our cultural narratives and cultivating new talent.”
“The department is extremely grateful to Bettina Duval and Dana Slatkin for their generous support of our faculty and students and, above all, for believing in the value of academic excellence,” said Porter.
Constable felt honored to receive the award. She plans on using the funds to advance her Spanish, enhance her “Language and Movement” course, and provide stipends to undergraduate student researchers.
“I am deeply honored by the trust placed in me by the department and our generous donors,” said Constable. “The Department of Rhetoric’s tight-knit alumni community has a profound impact on our research and mentorship through their gifts to the Distinguished Rhetoric Faculty Fellowship and the Felipe Rochon Gutterriez Graduate Endowment Fund. We are moved by this continued support.”
