Avgi Saketopoulou in Conversation
Avgi Saketopoulou, the 2025-26 Avenali Chair in the Humanities, engages in conversation with UC Berkeley faculty members Paola Bacchetta, Eric Stanley, and Damon Young.
Psychoanalyst and scholar Avgi Saketopoulou, the 2025-26 Avenali Chair in the Humanities, is the author of Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia.
Jamaica Kincaid, one of the most celebrated writers of her generation, is the 2024-25 Avenali Chair in the Humanities. She talks with Townsend Center director Stephen Best.
Ocean Vuong, the 2023-24 Avenali Chair in the Humanities, reads from his latest poetry collection, Time is a Mother, written in the aftershocks of his mother's death.
Ocean Vuong, author of the celebrated novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, is the 2023-24 Avenali Chair in the Humanities. He talks with poet Cathy Park Hong.
Cultural theorist and literary critic Sianne Ngai is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English at the University of Chicago.
Joy Harjo is the 23rd US Poet Laureate, and the first Native American to hold the position. She is joined in conversation by poet Craig Santos Perez to discuss her literary antecedents and pathbreaking editorial work.
Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and a staff writer at the New Yorker.
In his exploration of a watershed political year, Todd Gitlin unearths a "thrust toward retrogression" that stands in stark contrast to the popular image of 1968 as a politically progressive moment.
Joseph Koerner examines Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Delights — approaching the painting as a representation of a world without history and without law.