Past Events

Intervening in debates on historical memory, testimony, and the representation of violence, Michael Iarocci shows how Goya's masterpiece extends far beyond conventional understandings of visual testimony.

Academy Award winner Barry Jenkins introduces and discusses his 2021 miniseries, The Underground Railroad, which shows at BAMPFA over three days. The series won a Peabody Award and was nominated for an Emmy.

Behrooz Ghorbani, Cathy Park Hong, and Hoyt Long discuss how artificial intelligence has impacted literary translation. How might AI increase the creative potential of translation? How do writers feel about machine translations of their works?

Angela Hume offers lessons from generations of underground activists and clinicians who worked to protect abortion access.

Doreen St. Félix is a staff writer at the New Yorker and the magazine’s TV critic. She talks with author and New Yorker critic Hilton Als.

Through her study of portraiture, Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby examines the indeterminacy of the term “Creole” — a label applied to white, black, and mixed-race persons born in French colonies during the nineteenth century.

Honoring the Frankfurt School's practice of immanent critique, Martin Jay puts critical pressure on a number of its own ideas by probing their contradictory impulses.

In her exploration of media art and theory in Japan, Miryam Sas opens up media studies and affect theory to a deeper engagement with works and theorists outside Euro-America.

Kim Stanley Robinson is one of the foremost living writers of science fiction. He discusses his 2020 novel Ministry for the Future in the context of the climate crisis.

Writer Valeria Luiselli presents "Echoes from the Borderlands," an experimental sound piece documenting the histories of violence against land and bodies in the US-Mexico borderlands.