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.
#identity: Hashtagging Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Nation
This collected volume offers a critical interdisciplinary view on how and why social media is at the heart of contemporary political discourse.
Pindar, Song, and Space: Towards a Lyric Archaeology
In their study of the poet Pindar of Thebes, coauthors Leslie Kurke and Richard Neer develop a new methodological approach to classical Greece.
Beth Piatote’s debut short story collection is a reflection on modern Native American life.
Catherine Flynn explores the ways in which James Joyce's imaginative consciousness was shaped by the paradigmatic city of European urban modernity.
Ian Duncan offers a major rethinking of the European novel and its relationship to early evolutionary science.
Ellen Oliensis offers a fresh approach to the Amores emphasizing the masochistic pleasures of the elegiac writing project.
Documentary photographer Ken Light and author José Ángel Navejas discuss their book, which features photographs of U.S. border patrol agents on their nighttime shifts on the Mexican border in the 1980s.
Past Events
Grace Lavery examines the contradictory role — as both rival empire and cradle of exquisite beauty — played by Japan in the Victorian imagination.
Climate Change and the Art of Devotion: Geoaesthetics in the Land of Krishna, 1550-1850
In the north Indian pilgrimage region of Braj, the landscape is considered sacred. Sugata Ray shows how this place-centered theology and its art emerged in the wake of the climatic catastrophe of the Little Ice Age (ca. 1550–1850).
Three-quarters of the seed varieties on earth in 1900 are now extinct, and more than half of the remaining commercial seeds are owned by three large companies. Mark Schapiro examines the fate of our food supply under the pressures of corporate consolidation.
Questioning the assumption that the slave past provides an explanatory prism for understanding the black political present, Stephen Best offers a new way of understanding the constitution of black subjectivity.
Alva Noë explores the many unexpected ways in which baseball is truly a philosophical kind of game — a window on language, culture, and the nature of human action, intertwined with deep and fundamental human truths.
Someone: The Pragmatics of Misfit Sexualities, from Colette to Hervé Guibert
Imagine trying to tell someone something about yourself and your desires for which there are no words. Michael Lucey examines characters from 20th-century French literary texts whose sexual forms prove difficult to conceptualize or represent.
Timothy Hampton’s close examination of Bob Dylan's songs locates the artist’s transgressive style within a long history of modern (and modernist) art.
Looking for Law in All the Wrong Places: Justice Beyond and Between
For many, the right place to look for law is in constitutions, statutes, and judicial opinions. This book looks for law in the “wrong places” — in the realms of language, text, image, culture, and other sites in which no formal law appears.
Waiting for Verdi: Opera and Political Opinion in Nineteenth-Century Italy, 1815-1848
Mary Ann Smart explores how nineteenth-century Italian opera sparked political change by turning the newly engaged spectator in the opera house into an actor on the political stage.
How to Be Free: An Ancient Guide to the Stoic Life
Born a slave, the ancient Roman Stoic philosopher Epictetus taught that mental freedom is supreme, since it can liberate one anywhere, even in a prison. Anthony Long presents a new edition of Epictetus’s famed handbook on Stoicism.