Berkeley Book Chats

The Townsend Center presents a lunchtime series celebrating the intellectual and artistic endeavors of the UC Berkeley faculty. Each Berkeley Book Chat features a faculty member engaged in conversation about a recently completed publication, performance, or recording. The series highlights the extraordinary breadth and depth of Berkeley’s academic community.

Reading Greek Tragedy with Judith Butler

Mario Telò in Conversation with Judith Butler
Berkeley Book Chats
-
| Maude Fife Room, 315 Wheeler Hall

Considering Judith Butler's “tragic trilogy” — a set of interventions on Sophocles's Antigone, Euripides's Bacchae, and Aeschylus's EumenidesMario Telò seeks to understand how Butler uses and interprets Greek tragedy and, ultimately, how tragedy shapes Butler's thinking.

-
| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

Through bold new analyses of legendary works of German silent cinema, Nicholas Baer reassesses Weimar cinema in light of the "crisis of historicism" widely diagnosed by German philosophers in the early twentieth century.

Past Events

-
| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

Professor of Philosophy John MacFarlane’s book gives a clear account of what it is to be a relativist about truth and uses this view to provide a fresh perspective of parts of our thought and speech that have resisted traditional methods of analysis.

A Play, An Opera, The Tango

Philip Kan Gotanda
Berkeley Book Chats
-
| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

Professor of Theater, Dance, & Performance Studies Philip Kan Gotanda will read and discuss excerpts from three current projects Remember the I-Hotel (play), Both Eyes Open (opera), and Chelsea & Rodney’s Tango (video).

On The Wire

Linda Williams
Berkeley Book Chats
-
| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

Professor Emerita of Film & Media and Rhetoric Linda Williams’ book examines the HBO television series The Wire (2002-2008). She argues that the series transforms close observation into an unparalleled melodrama by juxtaposing the good and evil of individuals and institutions. Introduction by Professor Alan Tansman.

-
| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures Luba Golburt's book examines the complex place of the eighteenth century in the subsequent Russian literary tradition, tracing how later Russian writers paradoxically view the epoch as both formative and obsolete. Introduction by Professor Harsha Ram.

Enduring Truths: Sojourner's Shadows and Substance

Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby
Berkeley Book Chats
-
| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

Professor of Art History Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby’s book illustrates how a runaway slave, Sojourner Truth, gained fame in the nineteenth century as an abolitionist, feminist, and orator and earned a living partly by selling photographic images of herself at lectures and by mail.

Romantic Anatomies of Performance

James Davies
Berkeley Book Chats
-
| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

Professor of Music James Davies’ book explores the very matter of musical experience; the hands and voices of virtuosic musicians and singers who plied their trade between London and Paris in the nineteenth century.

The Complete Stories, by Clarice Lispector

Katrina Dodson
Berkeley Book Chats
-
| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

Katrina Dodson’s recent translation of Clarice Lispector’s Complete Stories (New Directions, 2015) collects for the first time all 85 short stories by one of Brazil’s most important writers.

-
| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures Irina Paperno gives an account of Tolstoy's lifelong attempt to find adequate ways to represent the self, to probe its limits, and to arrive at an identity not based on the bodily self and its accumulated life experience.

Autobiography of an Archive: A Scholar's Passage to India

Nicholas B. Dirks
Berkeley Book Chats
-
| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

Chancellor Nicholas B. Dirks’ book recounts his early study of kingship in India, the rise of the caste system, the emergence of English imperial interest in controlling markets and India's political regimes, and the development of a crisis in sovereignty that led to an extraordinary nationalist struggle.

Van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade

Winnie Wong
Berkeley Book Chats
-
| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

Professor of Rhetoric Winnie Wong’s book explores contemporary art in the world's largest production center for oil-on-canvas painting and shows how its painters force us to reexamine preconceptions about creativity and the role of Chinese workers in redefining global art.