Past Berkeley Book Chats

Examining the role of handmaking amid the rise of global manufacturing, Fray explores how textiles inhabit the broad space between high and low, untrained and highly skilled, conformist and disobedient, craft and art.

In his exploration of the long history of mass entertainment before film, Jeffrey Knapp opens our eyes to the uncanny resemblance between Renaissance drama and Golden-Age Hollywood cinema.

Rogue Archives examines the rise of self-designated archivists—fans, pirates, hackers—who have become practitioners of cultural preservation on the Internet, building freely accessible online collections of content.

Invisible Hands traces the rise in eighteenth-century Europe of a belief in self-organization—such that large systems, whether natural or human-made, are seen as capable of creating their own order, without any need for external direction.

Sacred Founders argues that from the time of Augustus through early Byzantium, a discourse of "sacred founders” helped legitimate the authority of the emperor and his family.

Territories of the Soul draws upon queer and affect theory to explore structures of belonging experienced by the black diasporic subject.

In Hidden Hitchcock, D.A. Miller does what seems impossible: he discovers what has remained unseen in the movies of this best-known of filmmakers.

Namwali Serpell’s book Seven Modes of Uncertainty contends that literary uncertainty is crucial to ethics because it pushes us beyond the limits of our experience.

Shannon Jackson discusses her recent co-authored book on the Builders Association, a New York-based multimedia theater company that creates original productions based on stories drawn from contemporary life.

Hannah Ginsborg presents fourteen essays which establish Kant's Critique of Judgment as a central contribution to the understanding of human cognition.