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.
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.
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.
Creole: Portraits of France’s Foreign Relations During the Long Nineteenth Century
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.
Deep Care: The Radical Activists Who Provided Abortions, Defied the Law, and Fought to Keep Clinics Open
Angela Hume offers lessons from generations of underground activists and clinicians who worked to protect abortion access.
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
Professor of Philosophy Lara Buchak's book analyzes the principles governing rational decision-making in the face of risk.
Professor of Music Myra Melford’s interdisciplinary project, inspired by Eduardo Galeano's Memory of Fire trilogy, incorporates music, movement, video, and spoken text.
Professor of Rhetoric Marianne Constable’s book proposes understanding law as language, rather than as primarily rules, policy, or force.
A World Not to Come: A History of Latino Writing and Print Culture
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.
Inside the Zhivago Storm: The Editorial Adventures of Pasternak’s Masterpiece
Professor of Philosophy Paolo Mancosu’s book offers a riveting account of the story of the first publication of Doctor Zhivago and of the subsequent Russian editions in the West.
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.