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
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.
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.