Past Events

Alberto Manguel is known both for his scholarly works, such as The Library at Night, and for his works of fiction, including the novel News for a Foreign Country Came. His lecture explores questions about the use of memory and the transmission of meaning raised by the work of Raimondo di Sangro on a curious system of communication employed by the Incas.

The Course Threads Symposium is a capstone forum for students who have completed all requirements of the Course Threads Program. Students will present on the topics they studied within their thread, discussing the ways in which interdisciplinary course work informed their knowledge of the topic.

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.

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.

This symposium explores the aestheticized status that marginal objects have acquired in our writing of 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).

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.