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.
Lucrecia Martel: Un destino común
UC Berkeley hosts the residency of Argentine director Lucrecia Martel, whose atmospheric films explore the moral, psychological, and social decay of characters willfully blind to the historical violence and continuing social cost they pay for their privilege.
Literary critic and theorist Hortense Spillers is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor Emerita of English at Vanderbilt University. Lecture postponed to Fall 2026.
Hortense Spillers, the 2025-26 Una's Lecturer, is joined in conversation by UC Berkeley faculty members. Conversation postponed to Fall 2026.
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.