Artificial Humanities: A Fictional Perspective on Language in AI
Nina Beguš explores how literature, history, and art can deepen our understanding of artificial intelligence and guide us toward a more thoughtful future for AI.
Robert Beavers
In conjunction with a retrospective of his work, avant-garde filmmaker Robert Beavers engages in a week of post-screening conversations with Berkeley faculty members and other film scholars.
The Future of Revolution: Communist Prospects from the Paris Commune to the George Floyd Uprising
How might a twenty-first-century revolution against class society succeed? Jasper Bernes synthesizes from a history of failure the key criteria for success.
Movable Londons: Performance and the Modern City
Julia Fawcett looks to the Restoration theater to understand the emergence of London as a modern city after the Great Fire of 1666.
How do (and should) we read today? This two-day symposium considers how emerging technologies, habits of attention, and cross-cultural legacies shape contemporary reading practices.
How do (and should) we read today? This two-day symposium considers how emerging technologies, habits of attention, and cross-cultural legacies shape contemporary reading practices.
The Many Names of Anonymity: Portraitists of the Canton Trade
Examining how Western art history has misconstrued names and identities in Chinese art, Winnie Wong proposes new ways of studying anonymity, copying, and the emergence of author names in the long eighteenth century.
Lineages of the Global City: Occult Modernism and the Spiritualization of Democracy
Shiben Banerji explores the forgotten history of the occult foundations of the early twentieth-century global city.
Andreja Novakovic offers the first philosophical study of Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman's deeply personal body of work.
Zahid Chaudhary
Zahid Chaudhary (Princeton University) discusses his recent book, which analyzes the psychosocial dynamics of conspiracy cultures, anti-democratic movements, and new media.
Whiskerology: The Culture of Hair in Nineteenth-Century America
In Whiskerology, named a New Yorker Best Book of the Year, Sarah Gold McBride offers a surprising history of human hair in nineteenth-century America — where length, texture, color, and coiffure became powerful indicators of race, gender, and national belonging.
Literary critic and theorist Hortense Spillers is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor Emerita of English at Vanderbilt University.
Hortense Spillers, the 2025-26 Una's Lecturer, is joined in conversation by UC Berkeley faculty members.
Why do we look away from the suffering of others, cover our faces in shame, and lower our heads in grief? Benjamin Saltzman explores these gestures in art, poetry, and philosophy as an essential language for our uncomfortable engagements with the world.