Past Events

As part of a new, 3-year UC-wide initiative, The Humanities and Changing Conceptions of Work, The Townsend Center for the Humanities at UC Berkeley will hold a “Workshop on Work,” with the aim of helping scholars develop multi-campus collaborations on the topic as well as concrete proposals for the first year of the program. Scholars from all UC campuses are welcome, and a webcast of the event will be posted for those unable to attend.

Opening on the eve of the annual migration home of some 130 million people for the New Year holiday, Lixin Fan’s Last Train Home offers a glimpse of the challenges faced by a generation of Chinese migrant workers who left their children behind to be raised by grandparents. Fan follows one such couple, Zhang Changhua and Chen Suqin, over the course of three years as they struggle to raise a teenage daughter growing up back home in their remote village with very different values from their own.

Cary Wolfe is Bruce and Elizabeth Dunlevie Professor of English and Chair of the English Department at Rice University. His scholarship focuses on animal studies, posthumanism, systems theory and pragmatism, biopolitics and biophilosophy.

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.

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.