Forum on the Humanities and the Public World

The Townsend Center’s Forum on the Humanities and the Public World presents eminent artists, political leaders, writers, and scholars, each representing a unique discipline, viewpoint, and medium. The series brings the humanities into dialogue with the critical issues at play in the public sphere. The Townsend Center at UC Berkeley has a long and distinguished tradition of humanistic scholarship, open dialogue, and pioneering innovation in the humanities. It is in this spirit that the Forum on the Humanities and the Public World presents leading figures from the academic and public worlds in settings designed for scholars and for the public at large.

2011-2012 Forum 

Cary Wolfe, Professor of English, Rice University
“‘Life’: Neovitalism and Biopolitical Thought”

Wednesday, August 31, 2011
4 p.m. | Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

Cary Wolfe is Bruce and Elizabeth Dunlevie Professor of English at Rice University, where he is also Chair of the English Department. A scholar of animal studies and posthumanism, systems theory and pragmatism, biopolitics and biophilosophy, his books and edited collections include Animal Rites: American Culture, The Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory; the edited collection Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal; and, most recently, What Is Posthumanism?

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Michael Roth, President, Wesleyan University
“Why Liberal Education Matters”

Monday, October 24, 2011
5 p.m. | Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

Currently President of Wesleyan University, Michael S. Roth has served as President of the California College of the Arts, Associate Director of the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, and Director of European Studies at Claremont Graduate University. He was also H.B. Professor of Humanities at Scripps College, where he founded and directed the Scripps College Humanities Institute.

Co-sponsored by the Arts Research Center and the Program in Critical Theory.

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Francine Prose, Writer
“How I Became an Art Critic”

Monday, November 7, 2011
5 p.m. | Maude Fife Room, 315 Wheeler Hall

Novelist Francine Prose is former President of the PEN American Center and author of over 16 books of fiction, a book on Anne Frank, and the New York Times bestseller Reading Like a Writer. Currently a visiting professor of Literature at Bard College, Prose has written for the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, Atlantic Monthly, ARTNews, the New York Times, among others, and she is a contributing editor for Harper’s Magazine.

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Svetlana Boym, Professor of Slavic & Comparative Literature, Harvard University
“Freedom and the Arts of Dissent”

Thursday, March 15, 2012
5 p.m. | Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

Svetlana Boym is a Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literatures at Harvard University and the Associate of Harvard School of Design and Architecture. Writer, theorist and media artist, she is the author of many books including The Future of Nostalgia (2001), Architecture of the Off-Modern (2008), Territories of Terror: Memory and Mythology of Gulag (exhibit and catalogue 2006), and the novel Ninochka (2003). Her newest book, Another Freedom: The Alternative History of an Idea (Chicago University Press, 2010), spans from Greek tragedy to contemporary art scandals, and explores cross-cultural conceptions of freedom and the relationship between aesthetics and politics.

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Mark Lilla, Professor of Humanities, Columbia University
“Innocence”

Tuesday, March 20, 2012
5 p.m. | Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

Mark Lilla’s research in the humanities focuses on intellectual history, with a particular focus on Western political and religious thought. A frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, the New Republic, and the New York Times, Professor Lilla is best known for his books The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics and The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West.

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