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.
Estelle Tarica examines how community leaders, writers, and political activists facing state repression in Latin America have used Holocaust terms to describe human rights atrocities in their own countries.
Henrike Lange examines one of the most celebrated monuments in the world, offering new readings of the work and asking fundamental questions about its place in Western art history.
Hilton Als presents a tale of his brief encounter and long obsession with the late musical icon Prince.
Past Events
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.
Namwali Serpell’s book Seven Modes of Uncertainty contends that literary uncertainty is crucial to ethics because it pushes us beyond the limits of our experience.
The Builders Association: Performance and Media in Contemporary Theater
Shannon Jackson discusses her recent co-authored book on the Builders Association, a New York-based multimedia theater company that creates original productions based on stories drawn from contemporary life.
The Normativity of Nature: Essays on Kant's Critique of Judgement
Hannah Ginsborg presents fourteen essays which establish Kant's Critique of Judgment as a central contribution to the understanding of human cognition.
Hiding in Plain Sight: The Pursuit of War Criminals from Nuremberg to the War on Terror
Authors Stover, Peskin, and Koenig tell the story of the global effort to apprehend the world's most wanted war criminals, and attempt to understand why so many states ignore their legal obligations to arrest and try war crimes suspects.
Fiery Cinema: The Emergence of an Affective Medium in China, 1915-1945
Weihong Bao’s book traces the permutations of cinema as an affective medium in China, exploring its role in aesthetics, politics, and social institutions.
Professor of English Steven Lee’s book makes a unique contribution to interwar literary, political, and art history, drawing extensively on Russian archives, travel narratives, and artistic exchanges to establish the parameters of an undervalued "ethnic avant-garde."
Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939
Graduate School of Journalism lecturer Adam Hochschild explores the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) through the lives of idealistic international young volunteers as well as American journalists, scholars, citizens, and a right-wing oil company executive who supplied Franco’s army.
Professor of History Martin Jay’s book tackles a question as old as Plato and still pressing today: what is reason, and what roles does and should it have in human endeavor?