The Berkeley Books blog series, which ran from 2010-2013, featured the recently published work of UC Berkeley faculty in the arts and humanities. The Townsend Center has continued in the tradition of celebrating faculty publications with the Berkeley Book Chats series.
Forced to Care traces the ideological and material foundations of the current care crisis in the United States by weaving together two interconnected strands: unpaid care work within the family, on the one hand, and slavery, indenture, and other forms of coerced labor, on the other.
Professor Karin Sanders' book talks about the often colorful and imaginative afterlives of mummified human artifacts that arrive in the present after spending centuries preserved by chemicals in bog water.
Professor Otter writes about Philadelphia in a manner that underscores the usually ignored literary significance of the city as well as the political life of nineteenth century America.
Chancellor's Professor of English Jeffrey Knapp offers a perspective outside the usual dichotomy of opinions of Shakespeare as a singularity or of a man of obscured ability. His book questions the necessity of these stalwart oppositions and proposes that the academic community should take middle ground, based in a historical context, instead.
Last fall, UC Press released the long-awaited first volume of the Autobiography of Mark Twain to great fanfare, and the book quickly outstripped its initial press run of 7,500 by several orders of magnitude.
Considering texts by Henry James, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ralph Ellison, and others alongside film, painting, music, photography, and popular culture, Beautiful Circuits explores the ways in which American modernism was shaped by its response to technology.
Queer Beauty: Sexuality and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Freud and Beyond by Whitney Davis, George C. and Helen N. Pardee examines the relationships between sexuality and aesthetics from antiquity to intellectual movements that have taken place since the 18th century.
Professor of English Susan Schweik's book, The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public examines the "unsightly beggar," a common character in discourse and knowledge in the late 19th to 20th century, and traces the emergence of the "ugly laws" that enforced behaviors which ranged from bigotry to eugenics.
Professor of History Martin Jay departs from the modern obsession with truth and instead offers a nuanced reading of the enmeshment of lies and politics, examining writing on lies from Plato and St. Augustine to Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss to show that each philosopher's position on lying corresponds to a particular conception of the political.
This month's Berkeley Books selection, Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan by Professor of Comparative Literature and Film & Media Miryam Sas, explores the theoretical and cultural significance of Japanese experimental arts in a range of media.
