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.

-
| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

Shannon Steen explores how discourses of creativity can seduce us into joining a worldview that justifies structural inequalities, environmental degradation, and other aspects of contemporary capitalism that we might otherwise find troubling.

Past Events

Judaism: The Genealogy of a Modern Notion

Daniel Boyarin
Berkeley Book Chats
-
| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

Boyarin argues that the very concept of a religion of “Judaism” is an invention of the Christian church that was adopted by Jews only with the coming of modernity and the spread of Christian languages.

The Orphan Band of Springdale

Anne Nesbet
Berkeley Book Chats
-
| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

Nesbet’s historical novel for younger readers takes place during World War II in Springdale, Maine. It tells the story of 11-year-old Gusta, who is sent to live in an orphanage run by her grandmother after her labor-organizer father is forced to flee the country.

-
| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

Wong explores the intersection of writing and visual art in the autobiographical work of Art Spiegelman, Faith Ringgold, Leslie Marmon Silko, and other American writers-artists who experiment with hybrid forms of self-narration.

The Tar Baby: A Global History

Bryan Wagner
Berkeley Book Chats
-
| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

Wagner offers a fresh analysis of this deceptively simple story of a fox, a rabbit, and a doll made of tar and turpentine, tracing its history and connections to slavery, colonialism, and global trade.

-
| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

Inventing counterfactual histories — such as a Europe that never threw off Hitler, or a second term for JFK — is a common pastime of modern day historians. Gallagher probes how counterfactual history works and to what ends.

-
| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

Exploring the idea of "intimations" - social interactions that approach outright communication but do not quite reach it - G. R. F. (John) Ferrari offers a new framework for understanding different ways in which we communicate with each other.

-
| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

In his study of the coevolution of radio and the novel in Argentina, Cuba, and the United States, McEnaney explores how novelists in the radio age transformed realism as they struggled to channel and shape popular power.

Sweet Science: Romantic Materialism and the New Logics of Life

Amanda Jo Goldstein
Berkeley Book Chats
-
| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

Today we do not expect poems to carry scientifically valid information — but this was not always the case. Sweet Science explores how Romantic poetry served as an important tool for scientific inquiry.

Jan Brueghel and the Senses of Scale

Elizabeth Honig
Berkeley Book Chats
-
| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

In the first book-length study of Jan Brueghel, Pieter’s son, Professor of History of Art Elizabeth Honig reveals how the artist’s tiny detail-filled paintings questioned conceptions of distance, dimension, and style.