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 Many Names of Anonymity: Portraitists of the Canton Trade
Examining how Western art history has misconstrued names and identities in Chinese art, Winnie Wong proposes new ways of studying anonymity, copying, and the emergence of author names in the long 18th century.
Lineages of the Global City: Occult Modernism and the Spiritualization of Democracy
Shiben Banerji explores the forgotten history of the occult foundations of the early 20th-century global city.
Andreja Novakovic offers the first philosophical study of Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman's deeply personal body of work.
Whiskerology: The Culture of Hair in Nineteenth-Century America
In Whiskerology, named a New Yorker Best Book of the Year, Sarah Gold McBride offers a surprising history of human hair in nineteenth-century America — where length, texture, color, and coiffure became powerful indicators of race, gender, and national belonging.
Why do we look away from the suffering of others, cover our faces in shame, and lower our heads in grief? Benjamin Saltzman explores these gestures in art, poetry, and philosophy as an essential language for our uncomfortable engagements with the world.
Past Events
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Mario Telò asks what it means to read Greek tragedy in a pandemic, exploring how the genre can address urgent contemporary crises.
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.
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.
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.
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.