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.
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.”
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.
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
Beth Piatote’s debut short story collection is a reflection on modern Native American life.
Pindar, Song, and Space: Towards a Lyric Archaeology
In their study of the poet Pindar of Thebes, coauthors Leslie Kurke and Richard Neer develop a new methodological approach to classical Greece.
#identity: Hashtagging Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Nation
This collected volume offers a critical interdisciplinary view on how and why social media is at the heart of contemporary political discourse.
Grace Lavery examines the contradictory role — as both rival empire and cradle of exquisite beauty — played by Japan in the Victorian imagination.
Climate Change and the Art of Devotion: Geoaesthetics in the Land of Krishna, 1550-1850
In the north Indian pilgrimage region of Braj, the landscape is considered sacred. Sugata Ray shows how this place-centered theology and its art emerged in the wake of the climatic catastrophe of the Little Ice Age (ca. 1550–1850).
Three-quarters of the seed varieties on earth in 1900 are now extinct, and more than half of the remaining commercial seeds are owned by three large companies. Mark Schapiro examines the fate of our food supply under the pressures of corporate consolidation.
Questioning the assumption that the slave past provides an explanatory prism for understanding the black political present, Stephen Best offers a new way of understanding the constitution of black subjectivity.
Alva Noë explores the many unexpected ways in which baseball is truly a philosophical kind of game — a window on language, culture, and the nature of human action, intertwined with deep and fundamental human truths.
Someone: The Pragmatics of Misfit Sexualities, from Colette to Hervé Guibert
Imagine trying to tell someone something about yourself and your desires for which there are no words. Michael Lucey examines characters from 20th-century French literary texts whose sexual forms prove difficult to conceptualize or represent.