Past Events

The Novel and the New Ethics

Dorothy Hale
Berkeley Book Chats
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| Online

A generation of contemporary Anglo-American novelists has championed the ethical value of literature. Dorothy Hale explores the modernist roots of this “new” emphasis on the novel’s ethical significance.

Archive Feelings: A Theory of Greek Tragedy

Mario Telò
Berkeley Book Chats
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| Online

Bringing an innovative synthesis of postmodern theories to bear on his reading of ancient Greek tragedy, Mario Telò offers a new way of understanding tragic aesthetics.

Changing the Narrative: What Stories Can We Tell Now?

(Re)making Sense: The Humanities and Pandemic Culture
(Re)Making Sense
Tuesday, Dec 8, 2020 4:00 pm
| Online

Anthony Cascardi and Catherine Gallagher ask how narrative gives sense to events, and whether narrative forms that have served in times of past crisis (the novel, the epic, history writing) might provide meaning in the pandemic era.

Memory and Memorials in a Contested Age

(Re)making Sense: The Humanities and Pandemic Culture
(Re)Making Sense
Wednesday, Dec 2, 2020 5:00 pm
| Online

At a time when public monuments are the objects of political contestation, Stephen Best, Debarati Sanyal, and Andrew Shanken discuss the complexities of memory and memorialization.

Midnight la Frontera

Ken Light
Berkeley Book Chats
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| Online

Documentary photographer Ken Light and author José Ángel Navejas discuss their book, which features photographs of US border patrol agents on their nighttime shifts on the Mexican border in the 1980s.

The Trouble with Literature

Victoria Kahn
Berkeley Book Chats
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| Online

Victoria Kahn argues that the literature of the English Reformation (written during the fraught years of the late 16th and 17th centuries) marks a turning point in Western thinking about literature and literariness.

Jeannie Suk Gersen

Una's Lecture
Wednesday, Oct 14, 2020 4:00 pm
| Online

Jeannie Suk Gersen is a feminist legal scholar and contributing writer at the New Yorker. She is joined in conversation by political theorist Wendy Brown.

Joyce Carol Oates

In Conversation with John Shoptaw
Thursday, Oct 1, 2020 4:00 pm
| Online

Joyce Carol Oates, author of over 70 works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, talks with poet John Shoptaw.

In the Matter of Nat Turner: A Speculative History

Christopher Tomlins
Berkeley Book Chats
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| Online

Christopher Tomlins offers a new interpretation of Nat Turner and the slave rebellion that stunned the American South.