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.
Drawing upon recent narratives and media representations of the refugee “crisis” at Europe’s edges, Debarati Sanyal tells a new story about those on the move, the technologies unleashed on them, and the artistry with which migrants and allies bear witness to displacement.
Reckoning with aging and mortality, democracy in crisis, the role of the writer, and the fate of books, Thomas Farber presents the latest in his series of creative memoirs that grapple with life and its limits.
The Atlantic Republic of Letters: Knowledge and Colonialism in the Age of Franklin
Offering an alternative intellectual history of early America through the lens of Benjamin Franklin's Philadelphia, Diego Pirillo explores the entanglement among books, knowledge, and colonialism.
Concrete Colonialism: Architecture, Urbanism, and the US Imperial Project in the Philippines
During US colonial rule in the Philippines, reinforced concrete was used to the near exclusion of all other building materials. Diana Martinez shows how the material's stability, plasticity, and strength served the shifting imperatives of colonialism.
The Profligate Colonial: How the US Exported Austerity to the Philippines
Lisandro Claudio explores how the ideology of austerity served as a tool of US empire in the Philippines, casting Filipinos as reckless spenders and presenting monetary discipline as a civilizing force.
David Henkin shows how baseball offers a capacious space for thinking about such things as spectatorship, success, community, order, and contingency in the modern world.
Non-Aligned: Art, Decolonization, and the Third World Project in India
Atreyee Gupta takes a revelatory look at modernism in India, exploring art’s role in decolonization and aesthetic discourse across the Global South.
Sneaking into Print: Mouvance and Narrative Culture in Spain c. 1500
Ignacio Navarrete explores the impact of early printing on narrative literature in Spain, charting the rise of a distinct, new narrative culture.
Past Events
Mark Goble explores how slow motion in film and literature reveals a deep cultural fascination with the uneven speeds of modern life and our ability to comprehend them.
Fiona McFarlane's gripping collection of short stories explores the reverberations of a serial killer’s crimes in the lives of everyday people.
Hannah Zeavin tells the complicated story of American techno-parenting, for an object lesson in how using technology in our most intimate relationships became a moral flash point.
Magical Nominalism: The Historical Event, Aesthetic Reenchantment, and the Photograph
In this bold, wide-ranging study, Martin Jay examines the conflict between “conventional” and “magical” nominalism in philosophy, history, aesthetics, and photography.
Claire Kahane recounts her nine-decade journey of self-transformation, moving from free-spirited rebel in the 1950s to feminist scholar, and confronting personal and historical traumas along the way.
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.
Exploring the ways in which visual conceptions of vowels have inflected the arts and sciences of modernity, Liesl Yamaguchi asks how discourses of the 19th and 20th centuries crafted the enigma we now readily recognize as “synesthesia.”
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.
Billie’s Bent Elbow: Exorbitance, Intimacy, and a Nonsensuous Standard
In this deeply poetic book, Fumi Okiji gathers a chorus of thinkers and artists to examine sites of intemperance and equivocation in black thought and music.
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.