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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Mario Telò asks what it means to read Greek tragedy in a pandemic, exploring how the genre can address urgent contemporary crises.
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.
Past Events
Professor of Scandinavian Linda Rugg’s new book explores how non-documentary narrative art films create new forms of collaborative self-representation and selfhood.
Dangerous Intersections: Complicity, Trauma, and Holocaust Memory
Professor of French Debarati Sanyal’s forthcoming book examines the ways in which literature and film from the French-speaking world have repeatedly sought not to singularize the Holocaust as the paradigm of historical trauma, but rather to connect its memory with other memories of atrocity.
Professor of History of Art Whitney Davis’ book presents a new and original framework for understanding visual culture.
Aesopic Conversations: Popular Tradition, Cultural Dialogue, and the Invention of Greek Prose
Delving into Aesop, his adventures, and his crafting of fables, Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature Leslie Kurke’s Aesopic Conversations shows how this noncanonical figure was unexpectedly central to the construction of ancient Greek literature.
Created for the Maldives Pavilion at the 2013 Venice Biennale, “Polartide” turns the fluctuating data sets of sea levels and oil company stock valuations into digitized tones, inviting participants to reflect on the growing threat of global climate change in a new way. Join us for an interactive performance of “Polartide” at the Sather Tower carillon, followed by discussion in the Geballe Room.
Professor of Music Nicholas Mathew’s recent book explores Beethoven's music as an active participant in political life from the Napoleonic Wars to the present day.
Kith, Kin, & Neighbors: Communities and Confessions in Seventeenth-Century Wilno
Professor of Slavic Language and Literatures David Frick’s recent book details how Poles, Lithuanians, Germans, Ruthenians, Jews, and Tatars navigated and negotiated cultural and religious differences in mid-seventeenth century Wilno.