Townsend Events

In his innovative study of Goya's body of work, Anthony Cascardi argues that the artist is engaged in a thoroughgoing critique of the modern social and historical worlds.

Dylan Riley responded to Covid lockdown with the tools of his trade, producing an extraordinary volume of over a hundred short essays inviting us to think about how critical sociology can speak to this troubled decade.

Analyzing the final three decades of Haydn’s career, Nicholas Mathew uses the composer as a prism through which to examine urgent questions across the humanities.

In his study of the ordinary — and oftentimes unseen — lives of memorials, Andrew Shanken explores the relationship of commemorative monuments to the pulses of daily life.

Senegalese writer and musician Felwine Sarr has shifted conversations on the central role of Africa in the design of a planetary future. He converses with Natalia Brizuela and performs songs from his career.

Cultural theorist and literary critic Sianne Ngai is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English at the University of Chicago.

Sianne Ngai, the 2022-23 Avenali Chair in the Humanities, talks with UC Berkeley faculty members Colleen Lye (English) and Damon Young (Film & Media and French).

South African artist William Kentridge, the 2022-23 UC Berkeley artist-in-residence, performs a multimedia piece that reveals his talents as an actor as well as a director.

In this collection of essays spanning her career, Shannon Jackson explores a range of disciplinary, institutional, and political puzzles that engage the social and aesthetic practice of performance.

In the US premiere of the opera SIBYL, William Kentridge wrestles with the human desire to know our future, and our helplessness in the face of technologies that obscure that knowledge.

Nana Adusei-Poku examines the socio-historical and cultural context of the term “post-black” and its use in defining the work of artists who resisted being labeled as “black artists.”

Estelle Tarica examines how community leaders, writers, and political activists facing state repression in Latin America have used Holocaust terms to describe human rights atrocities in their own countries.

Filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, the 2022-23 Una’s Lecturer, is joined in conversation by writer and UC Berkeley teaching professor Hilton Als.

Henrike Lange examines one of the most celebrated monuments in the world, offering new readings of the work and asking fundamental questions about its place in Western art history.

Hilton Als presents a tale of his brief encounter and long obsession with the late musical icon Prince.