Avenali Chair in the Humanities Eelco H. Runia is a historian, theorist, psychologist, and novelist. He is the author of the 2014 book Moved by the Past: Discontinuity and Historical Mutation. Runia is currently in the Department of History at the University of Groningen and chair of the Centre for Metahistory.
Fictions of Dignity: Embodying Human Rights in World Literature
Elizabeth Anker (Cornell University) examines how liberal human rights discourses and norms depend on the construct of bodily integrity.
Professor of Rhetoric Marianne Constable’s book proposes understanding law as language, rather than as primarily rules, policy, or force.
Author Marilynne Robinson is joined in discussion by UC Berkeley faculty panelists Dorothy Hale (English), Jonathan Sheehan (History), and Robert Hass (English) on the topic of Religion and the Art of the Novel.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Marilynne Robinson is a professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her Avenali lecture considers the question of audience in the work of Shakespeare.
Quirk Historicism
This symposium explores the aestheticized status that marginal objects have acquired in our writing of history.
Tears in the Fabric of the Past: New Theories of Narrative and History
Avenali Chair in the Humanities Eelco Runia in discussion with Hayden White (UC Santa Cruz, emeritus), Martin Jay (UC Berkeley), Carol Gluck (Columbia), Harry Harootunian (Columbia), and Ethan Kleinberg (Wesleyan).
The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magón
Claudio Lomnitz is the Campbell Family Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University. In his new biography, Lomnitz delves into the lives and ideology of Magón’s inner circle, examining their role in the Mexican Revolution.
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.