Berkeley Book Chats

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.

The Tomb of the Divers

Francine Masiello
Berkeley Book Chats
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| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

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.

On the Colors of Vowels: Thinking Through Synesthesia

Liesl Yamaguchi
Berkeley Book Chats
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| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

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.”

Orphan Bachelors: A Memoir

Fae Myenne Ng
Berkeley Book Chats
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| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

Winner of the American Book Award and other major prizes, Fae Myenne Ng's memoir tells the story of the author's family in San Francisco’s Chinatown and her father’s struggles to secure citizenship.

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| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

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

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| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

Through her study of portraiture, Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby examines the indeterminacy of the term “Creole” — a label applied to white, black, and mixed-race persons born in French colonies during the nineteenth century.

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| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

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.

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| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

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.

Aleksandr Rodchenko: Photography in the Time of Stalin

Aglaya Glebova
Berkeley Book Chats
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| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

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.

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| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

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.

Untimely Sacrifices: Work and Death in Finland

Daena Funahashi
Berkeley Book Chats
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| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

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.

Japanese Literature: A Very Short Introduction

Alan Tansman
Berkeley Book Chats
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| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

Alan Tansman traces the rich history of Japanese literature, which encompasses a vast range of forms and genres stretching back nearly 1500 years.

Giotto's Arena Chapel and the Triumph of Humility

Henrike Lange
Berkeley Book Chats
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| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

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.