Townsend Events

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| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

Intervening in debates on historical memory, testimony, and the representation of violence, Michael Iarocci shows how Goya's masterpiece extends far beyond conventional understandings of visual testimony.

AI is Weird

AI and the Humanities
Monday, Apr 1, 2024 5:00 pm
| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

Erik Davis explores how the concept of the weird helps illuminate the speculative, reality-bending, and dreamlike properties of AI discourse and practice.

Ocean Vuong, Writer

In Conversation with Cathy Park Hong
Avenali Lecture
Thursday, Apr 4, 2024 5:00 pm
| BAMPFA, 2155 Center Street

Ocean Vuong, author of the celebrated novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, is the 2023-24 Avenali Chair in the Humanities. He talks with poet Cathy Park Hong.

Ocean Vuong

Poetry Reading
Avenali Lecture
Friday, Apr 5, 2024 5:00 pm
| BAMPFA, 2155 Center Street

Ocean Vuong, the 2023-24 Avenali Chair in the Humanities, reads from his latest poetry collection, Time is a Mother, written in the aftershocks of his mother's death.

Sonali Deraniyagala

In Conversation
Art of Writing
Wednesday, Apr 10, 2024 5:00 pm
| David Brower Center

Sonali Deraniyagala lost her entire family, including two sons, in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. She discusses Wave, her bestselling memoir on the experience, which won the PEN Ackerley Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

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| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

Shannon Steen explores how discourses of creativity can seduce us into joining a worldview that justifies structural inequalities, environmental degradation, and other aspects of contemporary capitalism that we might otherwise find troubling.

Adam Gopnik

The National Emergency: On Liberal Institutions, Protecting Pluralism, and Free Debate
Wednesday, Apr 24, 2024 12:00 pm
| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

Bestselling author and New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik examines the increasing threats to the institutions of liberal democracy that guarantee free political debate.