Past Berkeley Book Chats

Past Events

Death Be Not Proud: The Art of Holy Attention

David Marno
Berkeley Book Chats
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| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

Death Be Not Proud: The Art of Holy Attention traces the role of attentiveness in philosophy, prayer, and devotional poetry, exploring a tradition of striving for a mental state devoid of distraction.

Improvised Continent: Pan-Americanism and Cultural Exchange

Richard Cándida Smith
Berkeley Book Chats
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| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

Illuminating the story of how cultural exchange programs brought many of the most important Latin American artists and writers to the United States, Richard Cándida Smith explores Pan-American cultural exchange in the twentieth century.

The Rhetoric of Hiddenness in Traditional Chinese Culture

Paula Varsano, editor
Berkeley Book Chats
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| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

This volume brings together fourteen essays that explore the role of hiddenness—as both an object and a mode of representation—in the history of cultural production in China.

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| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

Julia Fawcett examines the stages, pages, and streets of eighteenth-century London as England's first modern celebrities performed their own strange and spectacular self-representations.

Fray: Art and Textile Politics

Julia Bryan-Wilson
Berkeley Book Chats
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| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

Examining the role of handmaking amid the rise of global manufacturing, Fray explores how textiles inhabit the broad space between high and low, untrained and highly skilled, conformist and disobedient, craft and art.

Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom

Abigail De Kosnik
Berkeley Book Chats
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| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

Rogue Archives examines the rise of self-designated archivists—fans, pirates, hackers—who have become practitioners of cultural preservation on the Internet, building freely accessible online collections of content.

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| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

Invisible Hands traces the rise in eighteenth-century Europe of a belief in self-organization—such that large systems, whether natural or human-made, are seen as capable of creating their own order, without any need for external direction.