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
A World Not to Come: A History of Latino Writing and Print Culture
Professor of Ethnic Studies Raúl Coronado’s book focuses on how eighteenth-century Texas Mexicans used writing to remake the social fabric in the midst of war and how a Latino literary and intellectual life was born in the New World.
Inside the Zhivago Storm: The Editorial Adventures of Pasternak’s Masterpiece
Professor of Philosophy Paolo Mancosu’s book offers a riveting account of the story of the first publication of Doctor Zhivago and of the subsequent Russian editions in the West.
Professor of Scandinavian Linda Rugg’s new book explores how non-documentary narrative art films create new forms of collaborative self-representation and selfhood.
Dangerous Intersections: Complicity, Trauma, and Holocaust Memory
Professor of French Debarati Sanyal’s forthcoming book examines the ways in which literature and film from the French-speaking world have repeatedly sought not to singularize the Holocaust as the paradigm of historical trauma, but rather to connect its memory with other memories of atrocity.
Professor of History of Art Whitney Davis’ book presents a new and original framework for understanding visual culture.
Aesopic Conversations: Popular Tradition, Cultural Dialogue, and the Invention of Greek Prose
Delving into Aesop, his adventures, and his crafting of fables, Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature Leslie Kurke’s Aesopic Conversations shows how this noncanonical figure was unexpectedly central to the construction of ancient Greek literature.
Created for the Maldives Pavilion at the 2013 Venice Biennale, “Polartide” turns the fluctuating data sets of sea levels and oil company stock valuations into digitized tones, inviting participants to reflect on the growing threat of global climate change in a new way. Join us for an interactive performance of “Polartide” at the Sather Tower carillon, followed by discussion in the Geballe Room.
Professor of Music Nicholas Mathew’s recent book explores Beethoven's music as an active participant in political life from the Napoleonic Wars to the present day.
Kith, Kin, & Neighbors: Communities and Confessions in Seventeenth-Century Wilno
Professor of Slavic Language and Literatures David Frick’s recent book details how Poles, Lithuanians, Germans, Ruthenians, Jews, and Tatars navigated and negotiated cultural and religious differences in mid-seventeenth century Wilno.