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.
In her exploration of media art and theory in Japan, Miryam Sas opens up media studies and affect theory to a deeper engagement with works and theorists outside Euro-America.
Honoring the Frankfurt School's practice of immanent critique, Martin Jay puts critical pressure on a number of its own ideas by probing their contradictory impulses.
Creole: Portraits of France’s Foreign Relations During the Long Nineteenth Century
Through her study of portraiture, Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby examines the indeterminacy of the term “Creole” — a label applied to white, black, and mixed-race persons born in French colonies during the nineteenth century.
Deep Care: The Radical Activists Who Provided Abortions, Defied the Law, and Fought to Keep Clinics Open
Angela Hume offers lessons from generations of underground activists and clinicians who worked to protect abortion access.
Intervening in debates on historical memory, testimony, and the representation of violence, Michael Iarocci shows how Goya's masterpiece extends far beyond conventional understandings of visual testimony.
Past Events
The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children
Alison Gopnik argues that the familiar 21st century picture of parents and children is profoundly wrong — it's not just based on bad science, it's bad for kids and parents, too.
This volume brings together fourteen essays that explore the role of hiddenness—as both an object and a mode of representation—in the history of cultural production in China.
Julia Fawcett examines the stages, pages, and streets of eighteenth-century London as England's first modern celebrities performed their own strange and spectacular self-representations.
Examining the role of handmaking amid the rise of global manufacturing, Fray explores how textiles inhabit the broad space between high and low, untrained and highly skilled, conformist and disobedient, craft and art.
Pleasing Everyone: Mass Entertainment in Renaissance London and Golden-Age Hollywood
In his exploration of the long history of mass entertainment before film, Jeffrey Knapp opens our eyes to the uncanny resemblance between Renaissance drama and Golden-Age Hollywood cinema.
Rogue Archives examines the rise of self-designated archivists—fans, pirates, hackers—who have become practitioners of cultural preservation on the Internet, building freely accessible online collections of content.
Invisible Hands traces the rise in eighteenth-century Europe of a belief in self-organization—such that large systems, whether natural or human-made, are seen as capable of creating their own order, without any need for external direction.
Sacred Founders: Women, Men, and Gods in the Discourse of Imperial Founding, Rome through Early Byzantium
Sacred Founders argues that from the time of Augustus through early Byzantium, a discourse of "sacred founders” helped legitimate the authority of the emperor and his family.
Territories of the Soul draws upon queer and affect theory to explore structures of belonging experienced by the black diasporic subject.
In Hidden Hitchcock, D.A. Miller does what seems impossible: he discovers what has remained unseen in the movies of this best-known of filmmakers.