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

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.

Hidden Hitchcock

D.A. Miller
Berkeley Book Chats
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| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

In Hidden Hitchcock, D.A. Miller does what seems impossible: he discovers what has remained unseen in the movies of this best-known of filmmakers.

Seven Modes of Uncertainty

Namwali Serpell
Berkeley Book Chats
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| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

Namwali Serpell’s book Seven Modes of Uncertainty contends that literary uncertainty is crucial to ethics because it pushes us beyond the limits of our experience.

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| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

Shannon Jackson discusses her recent co-authored book on the Builders Association, a New York-based multimedia theater company that creates original productions based on stories drawn from contemporary life.

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| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

Hannah Ginsborg presents fourteen essays which establish Kant's Critique of Judgment as a central contribution to the understanding of human cognition.

Hiding in Plain Sight: The Pursuit of War Criminals from Nuremberg to the War on Terror

Eric Stover, Victor Peskin, and Alexa Koenig
Berkeley Book Chats
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| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

Authors Stover, Peskin, and Koenig tell the story of the global effort to apprehend the world's most wanted war criminals, and attempt to understand why so many states ignore their legal obligations to arrest and try war crimes suspects.