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.
In his wry meditation on aging, Thomas Farber memorializes lost friends and takes the measure of our current moment.
Sharad Chari explores how people handle the remains of segregation and apartheid in South Africa, as witnessed through portals in an industrial-residential landscape in the city of Durban.
Reading Greek Tragedy with Judith Butler
Considering Judith Butler's “tragic trilogy” — a set of interventions on Sophocles's Antigone, Euripides's Bacchae, and Aeschylus's Eumenides — Mario Telò seeks to understand how Butler uses and interprets Greek tragedy and, ultimately, how tragedy shapes Butler's thinking.
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
In her examination of Finland — where public health officials named occupational burnout a "new hazard" of the new economy — Daena Funahashi asks what moves people to work to the point of pathological stress.
Painting the Inhabited Landscape: Fitz H. Lane and the Global Reach of Antebellum America
In her study of the inhabited landscape paintings of 19th-century artist Fitz H. Lane, Margaretta Lovell asks how New Englanders conceived of their land, economy, history, and place in the global community.
Alan Tansman traces the rich history of Japanese literature, which encompasses a vast range of forms and genres stretching back nearly 1500 years.
Henrike Lange examines one of the most celebrated monuments in the world, offering new readings of the work and asking fundamental questions about its place in Western art history.
Estelle Tarica examines how community leaders, writers, and political activists facing state repression in Latin America have used Holocaust terms to describe human rights atrocities in their own countries.
Nana Adusei-Poku examines the socio-historical and cultural context of the term “post-black” and its use in defining the work of artists who resisted being labeled as “black artists.”
In this collection of essays spanning her career, Shannon Jackson explores a range of disciplinary, institutional, and political puzzles that engage the social and aesthetic practice of performance.
In his study of the ordinary — and oftentimes unseen — lives of memorials, Andrew Shanken explores the relationship of commemorative monuments to the pulses of daily life.
The Haydn Economy: Music, Aesthetics, and Commerce in the Late Eighteenth Century
Analyzing the final three decades of Haydn’s career, Nicholas Mathew uses the composer as a prism through which to examine urgent questions across the humanities.
In his innovative study of Goya's body of work, Anthony Cascardi argues that the artist is engaged in a thoroughgoing critique of the modern social and historical worlds.