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.

The Tomb of the Divers

Francine Masiello
Berkeley Book Chats
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| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

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.

On the Colors of Vowels: Thinking Through Synesthesia

Liesl Yamaguchi
Berkeley Book Chats
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| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

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.”

Orphan Bachelors: A Memoir

Fae Myenne Ng
Berkeley Book Chats
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| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

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.

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| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

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

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| Online

Kate Heslop approaches Viking Age poetry through an innovative interpretive framework that considers the texts as pieces in a premodern multimedia landscape. 

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.