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.

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| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

Shannon Steen explores how discourses of creativity can seduce us into joining a worldview that justifies structural inequalities, environmental degradation, and other aspects of contemporary capitalism that we might otherwise find troubling.

Past Events

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| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

Professor of English Steven Lee’s book makes a unique contribution to interwar literary, political, and art history, drawing extensively on Russian archives, travel narratives, and artistic exchanges to establish the parameters of an undervalued "ethnic avant-garde."

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| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

Graduate School of Journalism lecturer Adam Hochschild explores the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) through the lives of idealistic international young volunteers as well as American journalists, scholars, citizens, and a right-wing oil company executive who supplied Franco’s army.

Reason after Its Eclipse: On Late Critical Theory

Martin Jay
Berkeley Book Chats
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| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

Professor of History Martin Jay’s book tackles a question as old as Plato and still pressing today: what is reason, and what roles does and should it have in human endeavor?

The Work of the Dead

Thomas Laqueur
Berkeley Book Chats
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| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

Professor of History Thomas Laqueur's book, The Work of the Dead, offers a richly detailed account of how and why the living have cared for the dead, from antiquity to the twentieth century.

Greek Models of Mind and Self

Anthony Long
Berkeley Book Chats
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| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

Professor Emeritus of Classics Anthony Long’s book offers a wide-ranging study of Greek notions of mind and human selfhood from Homer through Plotinus.

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| 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
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| 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
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| 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.

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| 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.