Mission and History

The Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities offers opportunities for advanced research and creative teaching initiatives at UC Berkeley. It also sponsors a wide range of programs designed for members of the academic community and for the general public. Building on a history of strong alliances with scholars in the social sciences and in the arts, the Center concentrates on the topics and methods that make the humanities vital and unique in the contemporary world.

The Center was established at the University of California, Berkeley in 1987 to promote research and ongoing conversation among and within academic disciplines. It began with a newsletter, a fellowship for Berkeley graduate students and untenured faculty, and a modest program of support for lectures and conferences. Much more was to come: a vast expansion in grant and fellowship programs for all levels of the campus community; the Avenali and Una endowed lectureships; collaborations with the arts; and programs that address significant public issues in human rights, health, medicine, and social suffering.

Unlike a number of other university humanities centers, which devote a large percentage of their resources to bringing residential scholars from other institutions to campus, the Center is committed above all to coordinating, disseminating, and enriching the existing wealth of intellectual resources at Berkeley. The Center funds interdepartmental seminars, sponsors seminars and colloquia, and reaches out to both the campus and a larger public through its website and a monthly newsletter. The Center also publishes a series of Occasional Papers, which make available the proceedings of outstanding Center programs. Through the Joan and Peter Avenali Chair, as well as through the Una’s Lectureship and Residency and the Forum on the Humanities and the Public World, the Center has hosted a long list of distinguished visiting scholars and artists. Townsend Center visitors—the list includes three Nobel Laureates (John Coetzee, Seamus Heaney, and Kenzaburô Ôe), writer Maurice Sendak, architect Maya Lin, filmmaker Fred Wiseman, photographer Sebastião Salgado, historian Natalie Zemon Davis, and former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky—have been catalysts for broad discussions of important issues on the campus and in the surrounding communities.

The Center supports more than 60 interdisciplinary working groups on topics ranging from the Muslim Identities and Cultures group, to New Media, to the Consortium on the Novel, to Latin American Colonial Studies. It offers fellowships to dissertation students and assistant professors who participate together with a group of tenured faculty in weekly discussions of work in progress. It provides release time to associate professors, who choose a counterpart in another discipline with whom they join in a semester-long seminar on their research. With the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Center supports entering and other pre-dissertation graduate students through its Discovery Fellowship Program; in Mellon Strategic Groups, also Mellon-funded, it facilitates the development of research and curricular innovation. The Geballe Research Opportunities for Undergraduates Program (G.R.O.U.P.) promotes the development of undergraduate courses and provides students with the opportunity to join multi-level research teams. The program of Townsend Departmental Residencies enables two departments per year to host visitors who will contribute significantly to both the department and the campus at large.

The Center’s many activities and programs benefit the Berkeley community in myriad ways. Our endowed lectures bring world-renowned speakers to campus for the general public. Our programs provide research and administrative support to all members of the academic community, from undergraduates to senior faculty. The working groups and conferences that we support allow for the presentation of research to the general body of scholars. Finally, our programs seek to interrogate current disciplinary boundaries, proposing innovative fields of research and teaching for future scholarly endeavor.

An organized unit within the College of Letters and Science, the Center is funded mainly by income from the Townsend Endowment and other endowments, and by funds provided by the Office of the President of the University of California, as part of the President’s Initiative in the Humanities.

The Center is a member of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes.