Townsend Events

Agnes Callard and Judith Butler discuss Callard's new book, Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life, which explores how the work of Socrates can be used to ask and answer life’s most important questions.

In residence at BAMPFA, filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa is considered one of the most insightful commentators on a range of political and socioeconomic issues related to Ukraine, Russia, and the former Soviet bloc countries.

In this deeply poetic book, Fumi Okiji gathers a chorus of thinkers and artists to examine sites of intemperance and equivocation in black thought and music.

Chamber opera Both Eyes Open, with libretto by Philip Kan Gotanda, recasts the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II.

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.

Todd Olson sheds new light on the complexity of Jusepe de Ribera’s artwork and artistic methods and their connections to the Spanish imperial project.

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.”

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.

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.”

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.