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.

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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.

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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

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

Intervening in debates on historical memory, testimony, and the representation of violence, Michael Iarocci shows how Goya's masterpiece extends far beyond conventional understandings of visual testimony.

Past Events

Risk and Rationality

Lara Buchak
Berkeley Book Chats
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| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

Professor of Philosophy Lara Buchak's book analyzes the principles governing rational decision-making in the face of risk.

Language of Dreams

Myra Melford
Berkeley Book Chats
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| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

Professor of Music Myra Melford’s interdisciplinary project, inspired by Eduardo Galeano's Memory of Fire trilogy, incorporates music, movement, video, and spoken text.

Our Word Is Our Bond: How Legal Speech Acts

Marianne Constable
Berkeley Book Chats
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| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

Professor of Rhetoric Marianne Constable’s book proposes understanding law as language, rather than as primarily rules, policy, or force.

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| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

Professor of Ethnic Studies Raúl Coronado’s book focuses on how eighteenth-century Texas Mexicans used writing to remake the social fabric in the midst of war and how a Latino literary and intellectual life was born in the New World.

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| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

Professor of Scandinavian Linda Rugg’s new book explores how non-documentary narrative art films create new forms of collaborative self-representation and selfhood.

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| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

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.

A General Theory of Visual Culture

Whitney Davis
Berkeley Book Chats
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| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

Professor of History of Art Whitney Davis’ book presents a new and original framework for understanding visual culture.

Polartide

Greg Niemeyer, Chris Chafe, Perrin Meyer and Rama Gottfried
Berkeley Book Chats
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| Sather Tower and Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

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.