Past Berkeley Book Chats

Catherine Flynn explores the ways in which James Joyce's imaginative consciousness was shaped by the paradigmatic city of European urban modernity.

Beth Piatote’s debut short story collection is a reflection on modern Native American life.

In their study of the poet Pindar of Thebes, coauthors Leslie Kurke and Richard Neer develop a new methodological approach to classical Greece.

This collected volume offers a critical interdisciplinary view on how and why social media is at the heart of contemporary political discourse.

In her response to surrealist painter Leonora Carrington’s feminist novella, The Hearing Trumpet, Anne Walsh uses a variety of media to cast herself as an “apprentice crone” who studies and rehearses the trauma of old age.

Grace Lavery examines the contradictory role — as both rival empire and cradle of exquisite beauty — played by Japan in the Victorian imagination.

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.