Past Events

Lorraine Daston is Executive Director of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and Professor at the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. She has published on a wide range of topics in the history of science, including probability and statistics, evidence, wonder and curiosity, the moral authority of nature, anthropomorphism, and scientific images.

Charting a trajectory of ideas about space, Bromberg discusses influences on her work as a dance and media artist, including the serendipitous viewing of an Eva Hesse retrospective at the UC Berkeley Museum of Art in the late ‘70’s, the restaging of her choreographic work for KQED TV in the ‘80’s, and the exploration of dance telematics and virtual realities in the ‘90’s and beyond.

Ellen Bromberg and TDPS dance program director Lisa Wymore explored the process of making dance with technology, creating a new performance piece for the Berkeley Dance Project that allows emergent ideas about media use to float to the surface and become themes for the work. The piece was created with UC Berkeley students interested in engaging in a democratically led, and socially networked, process of discovery and creation.

Samera Esmeir’s research focuses on the contemporary Middle East, specifically on questions of violence, war, and the security state. Saba Mahmood’s research interests lie in exploring historically specific articulations of secular modernity in postcolonial societies, with particular attention to issues of subject formation, religiosity, embodiment, and gender.

In this lecture, Bernard Stiegler will consider how critical intelligence can be renewed in an era when attention and cognitive focus are being radically dissipated by new media technology.

Pauline Yu has been President of the American Council of Learned Societies since July 2003. Professor Yu’s scholarship focuses on classical Chinese poetry, comparative literature, and issues in the humanities.

Southern Mardi Gras celebrations have long made an art of turning everyday reality on its head, but what seems most upside down about the 300-year-old celebration in Mobile, Alabama is the fact that it is still willingly segregated between the city’s black and white citizens. Capturing the bizarre ritual celebrations and complex meditations on race by local residents, Margaret Brown’s film presents a unique portrait of a place where the line between past and present is continually and intentionally blurred.

Literary reading featuring Adam Zagajewski, Mark Danner, Jessica Fisher, Linda Gregg, Robert Hass, Brenda Hillman, Charles Legere, Tony Lin, Jane Hirshfield, C.S. Giscombe, John Shoptaw, Alexis Ramos, and Luba Golburt.

In this talk, Critchley reflects on the hugely difficult question of the nature and plausibility of a politics of nonviolence. In particular, he focuses on how such a politics has to negotiate the limits of nonviolence and in what circumstances it might become necessary to transgress those limits.

In an incident in Auschwitz, Jean Amery describes how, at a particular moment, he was forced to give "concrete form to my dignity by punching a human face." Bernstein's paper will interrogate the thesis, common to Amery and Frantz Fanon, that, as a consequence of the particular character of human embodiment, violent reprisal belongs to the grammar of human dignity.