Past Events

Avenali Chair in the Humanities Wendell Berry in discussion with UC Berkeley faculty panelists Michael Pollan (Graduate School of Journalism), Robert Hass (English), Miguel Altieri (Environmental Science, Policy and Management), and Anne-Lise Francois (English and Comparative Literature).

The Berkeley Human Rights Seminar invites distinguished scholars across disciplines to present their recent research on human rights. This seminar features Benjamin Nathans (University of Pennsylvania), discussing "Civil Rights under Soviet Socialism: Revisiting the 1966 Sinyavsky/Daniel Trial."

After being brutally beaten and hospitalized, Mark Hogencamp turned to art as a therapeutic tool, eventually creating “Marwencol,” a fictional Belgian town stuck in World War II populated by a variety of military figurines and Barbie dolls. Jeff Malmberg delicately brings us inside this world and offers an engaging look at the curious and creative mind behind it.

Una's Lecturer Vikram Seth in conversation with UC Berkeley faculty panelists Lawrence Cohen (Anthropology, South and Southeast Asian Studies), Davitt Moroney (Music), Harsha Ram (Slavic Languages & Literatures, Comparative Literature), Ananya Roy (City and Regional Planning, Global Poverty and Practice), and Mary Ann Smart (Music).

Vikram Seth is a poet, novelist, travel writer, librettist, children’s writer, and memoirist. His acclaimed first novel, The Golden Gate, is written entirely in Onegin stanzas after the style of Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. His 1474-page novel A Suitable Boy, an epic of Indian life set in the 1950s, won both the WH Smith Literary Award and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize.

The Berkeley Human Rights Seminar invites distinguished scholars across disciplines to present their recent research on human rights. This seminar features Joseph Slaughter (Columbia), discussing his book Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law in conversation with UC Berkeley faculty members Kent Puckett (English), Donna V. Jones (English), and Robert Kaufman (Comparative Literature).

Faculty from Stanford and UC Berkeley examine how language affects politics and vice versa. What are the conditions that make political language possible, and what are the conditions that render language political? From a racially-inflected "rhetoric of contempt" to shades of totalitarian references in contemporary political discourse, the participating faculty members of both universities will engage in a wide-ranging and spirited discussion at the Book Club of California.

Bill Cunningham, a pillar of New York Fashion photography for the last three decades, becomes himself the subject of the camera’s gaze in Richard Press’s documentary. The film captures both Cunningham’s clear familiarity with an elite level of celebrity as well as the unassuming humility he brings to his own work and personal life.

The Berkeley Human Rights Seminar invites distinguished scholars across disciplines to present their recent research on human rights. This seminar features Dirk Moses (European University Institute), discussing "How and Why Did Genocide Become a Non-Political Crime?"

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.