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.
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.
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.”
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.
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
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.