Past Events

Author Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Book Award and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys and Blonde (a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize), and the New York Times bestsellers The Falls and The Gravedigger's Daughter. Oates is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.

From the ashes of the L.A. riots in 1992 rose a community garden on a fourteen-acre plot of land in the neighborhood of South Central. After thriving for nearly a decade, the garden was jeopardized when the owner made plans to develop warehouse storage on the site. The Garden follows the group “South Central Farmers” as they work through the red tape and empty political promises of Los Angeles City Hall in an attempt to save the center of their community.

Gopal Balakrishnan is Associate Professor of the History of Consciousness at the University of California Santa Cruz. He was a Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute (2000) and a Harper Schmidt Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago (2001-2005).

Geoffrey Harpham, President and Director of the National Humanities Center, is a historian of and an advocate for the humanities. His scholarship also focuses on the role of ethics in literary study, the work of Joseph Conrad, and the place of language in intellectual history.

Ray Ryan is Senior Commissioning Editor of English and American Literature at Cambridge University Press. He is author of Ireland and Scotland: Literature and Culture, State and Nation, editor of Writing in the Irish Republic: Literature, Culture, Politics, 1949-1999, and co-editor of Ireland and Scotland: Culture and Society, 1700-2000 and The Good of the Novel.

Abigail De Kosnik is Assistant Professor in the Berkeley Center for New Media (BCNM) and the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies. Greg Niemeyer is Associate Professor of Art Practice, Film, and the Center for New Media at Berkeley.

“If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes. If you opened me up, you’d find beaches.” So begins Agnes Varda’s engaging self portrait of a life lived in and around the cinema. Less an autobiography than a meditation on time, memory, and place, Varda’s film offers us a glimpse of the complex flow between life and images, forces that shift back and forth with the ceaseless energy of the sea itself.

Amy Huber is Assistant Professor of Literature at the Gallatin School at New York University. She is also UC Berkeley Post-Doctoral Scholar and Lecturer in Comparative Literature and Critical Theory for Fall 2010. Professor Huber received her doctorate in Rhetoric from the University of California at Berkeley in 2009.

Join the Townsend Center in an informal discussion moderated by Professor Peter Sahlins (History) on open review and online publishing.

Known for his essays on moral and political philosophy, Norbert Bilbeny is Professor of Ethics and Director of the M.A. program in Citizenship and Human Rights at the University of Barcelona. His scholarship focuses on ethics, politics, and globalization—most specifically on the topics of intercultural ethics, moral cosmopolitan identity, and global civil society.