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

Cheerfulness: A Literary and Cultural History

Timothy Hampton
Berkeley Book Chats
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| Online

Exploring cheerfulness as a theme and structuring element in the work of major artists, Timothy Hampton (Comparative Literature and French) casts new light on literary history, the intersections of culture and psychology, and the history of emotions.

Behaviorism, Consciousness, and the Literary Mind

Joshua Gang
Berkeley Book Chats
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| Online

What might behaviorism, that debunked school of psychology, tell us about literature? Joshua Gang argues for its enormous critical value for thinking about why language is so good at creating illusions of mental life.

Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age

Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon
Berkeley Book Chats
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| Online

The humanities, underfunded and popularly devalued, seem to be in a perpetual state of crisis. Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon show how the modern humanistic disciplines made crisis a core part of their project.

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| Online

SanSan Kwan explores how dance — based in body-to-body interaction on the stage — serves as a revelatory site, and ultimately carries the potential to model everyday encounters across difference in the world.

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| Online

Edward Tyerman explores the role of China in the 1920s as the key site for Soviet debates over how the political project of socialist internationalism should be expressed through literature, film, and theater.

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| Online

Approaching the seven-day week as an artificial construction of modern society, David Henkin explores its role as a dominant organizational principle that shapes our understanding and experience of time.

Image Objects: An Archaeology of Computer Graphics

Jacob Gaboury
Berkeley Book Chats
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| Online

Jacob Gaboury argues for the fundamental role of computer graphics as the force that transformed the computer from a calculating machine into an interactive medium.

Arts of Connection: Poetry, History, Epochality

Karen Feldman
Berkeley Book Chats
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| Online

Working at the intersection of literary theory, philosophy of history, and phenomenology, Karen Feldman explores the representation of connections between events in literary, historical, and philosophical narratives.