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.
Hannah Zeavin tells the complicated story of American techno-parenting, for an object lesson in how using technology in our most intimate relationships became a moral flash point.
Fiona McFarlane's gripping collection of short stories explores the reverberations of a serial killer’s crimes in the lives of everyday people.
Mark Goble explores how slow motion in film and literature reveals a deep cultural fascination with the uneven speeds of modern life and our ability to comprehend them.
Concrete Encoded: Poetry, Design, and the Cybernetic Imaginary in Brazil
Nathaniel Wolfson shows how the concrete movement in art and poetry — which burst onto Brazil’s cultural stage in the 1950s, during a dizzying period of modernization — presciently grappled with an emerging information age.
In his exploration of plays named after objects, Mario Telò offers a new approach to the politics of familial and social relations in Roman comedy.
Past Events
Palimpsests of Themselves: Logic and Commentary in Postclassical Muslim South Asia
Asad Ahmed offers an intervention in current discussions about the fate of philosophy in postclassical Islamic intellectual history.
In her history of the idea of "relevance" since the 19th century, Elisa Tamarkin explores the term as a means to grasp how something once disregarded, unvalued, or lost becomes interesting and important.
Sophie Volpp considers fictional objects of the late Ming and Qing that defy being read as illustrative of historical things, and are instead often signs of fictionality itself.
The identity of Homer is shrouded in mystery, including doubts that he was an actual person. James Porter explores Homer’s mystique, approaching the poet not as a man, but as a cultural invention.
Kate Heslop approaches Viking Age poetry through an innovative interpretive framework that considers the texts as pieces in a premodern multimedia landscape.
The Atlantic Realists: Empire and International Political Thought between Germany and the United States
Matthew Specter offers a revisionist interpretation of the "realist" worldview, which shaped US foreign policy, public discourse, and international relations theory after World War II and throughout the Cold War.
Figures of Possibility: Aesthetic Experience, Mysticism, and the Play of the Senses
Niklaus Largier explores the ways in which devotional practices have informed experimental engagements in literature and art from the 17th to the 20th centuries.
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.
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.
What happens when we talk? Michael Lucey offers a linguistic anthropological analysis of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.