Past Events

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.

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.

Mark Greif is author of Against Everything and associate professor of literary studies at the New School for Social Research. Linda Williams is author of Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the Frenzy of the Visible and professor emeritus of Rhetoric and Film & Media at UC Berkeley.

Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor of Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley. Maggie Nelson is author of The Argonauts and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism.

Joseph Harris, leader of the Art of Writing Summer Institute, returns to UC Berkeley to deliver a lecture on the representation of writing teachers and instruction in popular culture.

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

Natasha Boas is an independent international curator and a regular contributor to Dwell, the Believer, and the Huffington Post. Sarah Thornton, author of Seven Days in the Art World, is former chief art correspondent for the Economist.

Christopher Bollas is the most influential psychoanalyst writing in English today. In his Avenali Lecture, he argues that mental pain should not be ignored, minimized, or suppressed through medication, but understood and embraced as a constitutive element of human psychic development.

Professor of Art and Art History at Stanford, Alexander Nemerov is a scholar of American art and author of Silent Dialogues: Diane Arbus and Howard Nemerov and Wartime Kiss: Visions of the Moment in the 1940s.

Professor of Music at Wesleyan University, Roger Mathew Grant is a scholar of 18th century music theory and author of Beating Time and Measuring Music in the Early Modern Era. He is currently a fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center.