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.
Drawing upon recent narratives and media representations of the refugee “crisis” at Europe’s edges, Debarati Sanyal tells a new story about those on the move, the technologies unleashed on them, and the artistry with which migrants and allies bear witness to displacement.
Reckoning with aging and mortality, democracy in crisis, the role of the writer, and the fate of books, Thomas Farber presents the latest in his series of creative memoirs that grapple with life and its limits.
The Atlantic Republic of Letters: Knowledge and Colonialism in the Age of Franklin
Offering an alternative intellectual history of early America through the lens of Benjamin Franklin's Philadelphia, Diego Pirillo explores the entanglement among books, knowledge, and colonialism.
Concrete Colonialism: Architecture, Urbanism, and the US Imperial Project in the Philippines
During US colonial rule in the Philippines, reinforced concrete was used to the near exclusion of all other building materials. Diana Martinez shows how the material's stability, plasticity, and strength served the shifting imperatives of colonialism.
The Profligate Colonial: How the US Exported Austerity to the Philippines
Lisandro Claudio explores how the ideology of austerity served as a tool of US empire in the Philippines, casting Filipinos as reckless spenders and presenting monetary discipline as a civilizing force.
David Henkin shows how baseball offers a capacious space for thinking about such things as spectatorship, success, community, order, and contingency in the modern world.
Non-Aligned: Art, Decolonization, and the Third World Project in India
Atreyee Gupta takes a revelatory look at modernism in India, exploring art’s role in decolonization and aesthetic discourse across the Global South.
Sneaking into Print: Mouvance and Narrative Culture in Spain c. 1500
Ignacio Navarrete explores the impact of early printing on narrative literature in Spain, charting the rise of a distinct, new narrative culture.
Past Events
Reading Greek Tragedy with Judith Butler
Considering Judith Butler's “tragic trilogy” — a set of interventions on Sophocles's Antigone, Euripides's Bacchae, and Aeschylus's Eumenides — Mario Telò seeks to understand how Butler uses and interprets Greek tragedy and, ultimately, how tragedy shapes Butler's thinking.
Sharad Chari explores how people handle the remains of segregation and apartheid in South Africa, as witnessed through portals in an industrial-residential landscape in the city of Durban.
An Artificial History of Natural Intelligence: Thinking with Machines from Descartes to the Digital Age
David Bates offers a new history of human intelligence, arguing that humans know themselves by knowing their machines.
In his wry meditation on aging, Thomas Farber memorializes lost friends and takes the measure of our current moment.
Shannon Steen explores how discourses of creativity can seduce us into joining a worldview that justifies structural inequalities, environmental degradation, and other aspects of contemporary capitalism that we might otherwise find troubling.
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.