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
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.
Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age
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.
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.
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.
The Week: A History of the Unnatural Rhythms That Made Us Who We Are
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.
An Empire of Touch: Women's Political Labor and the Fabrication of East Bengal
Poulomi Saha offers an innovative account of women’s political labor in East Bengal over more than a century, one that suggests new ways of thinking about textiles and the gendered labors of their making.
Jacob Gaboury argues for the fundamental role of computer graphics as the force that transformed the computer from a calculating machine into an interactive medium.
Working at the intersection of literary theory, philosophy of history, and phenomenology, Karen Feldman explores the representation of connections between events in literary, historical, and philosophical narratives.