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.
Ribera’s Repetitions: Paper and Canvas in Seventeenth-Century Spanish Naples
Todd Olson sheds new light on the complexity of Jusepe de Ribera’s artwork and artistic methods and their connections to the Spanish imperial project.
Francine Masiello's debut novel, written with pleasure and wit, weaves a multigenerational tale of small-time artists and crooks who, over the course of a century, wend their way from southern Italy to Paterson, New Jersey.
Exploring the ways in which visual conceptions of vowels have inflected the arts and sciences of modernity, Liesl Yamaguchi asks how discourses of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries crafted the enigma we now readily recognize as “synesthesia.”
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.
Past Events
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.
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.
Mario Telò asks what it means to read Greek tragedy in a pandemic, exploring how the genre can address urgent contemporary crises.
Through the lens of Aleksandr Rodchenko’s photography, Aglaya Glebova charts a new understanding of the troubled relationship between technology, modernism, and state power in Stalin’s Soviet Union.
Pathologies of Motion: Historical Thinking in Medicine, Aesthetics, and Poetics
Kevis Goodman approaches late 18-century medicine, aesthetics, and poetics as overlapping forms of knowledge that probe the relationship between the geographical movements of persons displaced from home and the physiological “motions” within their bodies and minds.
In her examination of Finland — where public health officials named occupational burnout a "new hazard" of the new economy — Daena Funahashi asks what moves people to work to the point of pathological stress.
Painting the Inhabited Landscape: Fitz H. Lane and the Global Reach of Antebellum America
In her study of the inhabited landscape paintings of 19th-century artist Fitz H. Lane, Margaretta Lovell asks how New Englanders conceived of their land, economy, history, and place in the global community.
Alan Tansman traces the rich history of Japanese literature, which encompasses a vast range of forms and genres stretching back nearly 1500 years.
Henrike Lange examines one of the most celebrated monuments in the world, offering new readings of the work and asking fundamental questions about its place in Western art history.
Estelle Tarica examines how community leaders, writers, and political activists facing state repression in Latin America have used Holocaust terms to describe human rights atrocities in their own countries.