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
Alan Tansman traces the rich history of Japanese literature, which encompasses a vast range of forms and genres stretching back nearly 1500 years.
Henrike Lange examines one of the most celebrated monuments in the world, offering new readings of the work and asking fundamental questions about its place in Western art history.
Estelle Tarica examines how community leaders, writers, and political activists facing state repression in Latin America have used Holocaust terms to describe human rights atrocities in their own countries.
Nana Adusei-Poku examines the socio-historical and cultural context of the term “post-black” and its use in defining the work of artists who resisted being labeled as “black artists.”
In this collection of essays spanning her career, Shannon Jackson explores a range of disciplinary, institutional, and political puzzles that engage the social and aesthetic practice of performance.
In his study of the ordinary — and oftentimes unseen — lives of memorials, Andrew Shanken explores the relationship of commemorative monuments to the pulses of daily life.
The Haydn Economy: Music, Aesthetics, and Commerce in the Late Eighteenth Century
Analyzing the final three decades of Haydn’s career, Nicholas Mathew uses the composer as a prism through which to examine urgent questions across the humanities.
In his innovative study of Goya's body of work, Anthony Cascardi argues that the artist is engaged in a thoroughgoing critique of the modern social and historical worlds.
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.