Berkeley Book Chats

The Townsend Center presents a lunchtime series celebrating the intellectual and artistic endeavors of the UC Berkeley faculty. Each Berkeley Book Chat features a faculty member engaged in conversation about a recently completed publication, performance, or recording. The series highlights the extraordinary breadth and depth of Berkeley’s academic community.

Reading Greek Tragedy with Judith Butler

Mario Telò in Conversation with Judith Butler
Berkeley Book Chats
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| Maude Fife Room, 315 Wheeler Hall

Considering Judith Butler's “tragic trilogy” — a set of interventions on Sophocles's Antigone, Euripides's Bacchae, and Aeschylus's EumenidesMario Telò seeks to understand how Butler uses and interprets Greek tragedy and, ultimately, how tragedy shapes Butler's thinking.

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| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

Through bold new analyses of legendary works of German silent cinema, Nicholas Baer reassesses Weimar cinema in light of the "crisis of historicism" widely diagnosed by German philosophers in the early twentieth century.

Past Events

Apartheid Remains

Sharad Chari
Berkeley Book Chats
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| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

Sharad Chari explores how people handle the remains of segregation and apartheid in South Africa, as witnessed through portals in an industrial-residential landscape in the city of Durban.

Penultimates: The Now and the Not-Yet

Thomas Farber
Berkeley Book Chats
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| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

In his wry meditation on aging, Thomas Farber memorializes lost friends and takes the measure of our current moment.

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| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

Shannon Steen explores how discourses of creativity can seduce us into joining a worldview that justifies structural inequalities, environmental degradation, and other aspects of contemporary capitalism that we might otherwise find troubling.

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| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

Intervening in debates on historical memory, testimony, and the representation of violence, Michael Iarocci shows how Goya's masterpiece extends far beyond conventional understandings of visual testimony.

| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

In The Entanglement, Alva Noë explores the inseparability of life, art, and philosophy, arguing that we have greatly underestimated what this entangled reality means for understanding human nature.

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| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

Through her study of portraiture, Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby examines the indeterminacy of the term “Creole” — a label applied to white, black, and mixed-race persons born in French colonies during the nineteenth century.

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| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

Honoring the Frankfurt School's practice of immanent critique, Martin Jay puts critical pressure on a number of its own ideas by probing their contradictory impulses.

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| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

In her exploration of media art and theory in Japan, Miryam Sas opens up media studies and affect theory to a deeper engagement with works and theorists outside Euro-America.