Townsend Events

Thirteen Ways of Looking at an Image

Lecture by Eduardo Cadava
Thursday, Feb 20, 2025 5:30 pm
| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

Eduardo Cadava (Princeton University) delivers the keynote lecture for a symposium held in conjunction with the BAMPFA exhibit Abounaddara: The Ruins We Carry, whose works explore life during the Syrian Revolution.

Todd Haynes

Film Retrospective
Saturday, Mar 8, 2025 2:30 pm -
| BAMPFA, 2155 Center Street

Beginning with four films chosen and presented by the director himself, this extensive retrospective at BAMPFA includes all of Todd Haynes’s feature films and a selection of early works.

Jamaica Kincaid

In Conversation with Stephen Best
Avenali Lecture
Wednesday, Mar 12, 2025 5:00 pm
| Zellerbach Playhouse

Jamaica Kincaid, one of the most celebrated writers of her generation, is the 2024-25 Avenali Chair in the Humanities. She talks with Townsend Center director Stephen Best.

Thursday, Mar 20, 2025 9:00 am
| Maude Fife Room, 315 Wheeler Hall

What might the study of psychoanalysis in and for the 21st century look like? Forty scholars, artists, and clinicians gather to explore the idea of a “Return to Freud.”

The Tomb of the Divers

Francine Masiello
Berkeley Book Chats
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| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

Francine Masiello's debut novel, written with pleasure and wit, weaves a multigenerational tale of small-time artists and crooks who, over the course of a century, wend their way from southern Italy to Paterson, New Jersey.

On the Colors of Vowels: Thinking Through Synesthesia

Liesl Yamaguchi
Berkeley Book Chats
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| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

Exploring the ways in which visual conceptions of vowels have inflected the arts and sciences of modernity, Liesl Yamaguchi asks how discourses of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries crafted the enigma we now readily recognize as “synesthesia.”

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| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

In The Entanglement, Alva Noë explores the inseparability of life, art, and philosophy, arguing that we have greatly underestimated what this entangled reality means for understanding human nature.