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.
The Many Names of Anonymity: Portraitists of the Canton Trade
Examining how Western art history has misconstrued names and identities in Chinese art, Winnie Wong proposes new ways of studying anonymity, copying, and the emergence of author names in the long 18th century.
Lineages of the Global City: Occult Modernism and the Spiritualization of Democracy
Shiben Banerji explores the forgotten history of the occult foundations of the early 20th-century global city.
Andreja Novakovic offers the first philosophical study of Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman's deeply personal body of work.
Whiskerology: The Culture of Hair in Nineteenth-Century America
In Whiskerology, named a New Yorker Best Book of the Year, Sarah Gold McBride offers a surprising history of human hair in nineteenth-century America — where length, texture, color, and coiffure became powerful indicators of race, gender, and national belonging.
Why do we look away from the suffering of others, cover our faces in shame, and lower our heads in grief? Benjamin Saltzman explores these gestures in art, poetry, and philosophy as an essential language for our uncomfortable engagements with the world.
Past Events
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.
Timothy Hampton’s close examination of Bob Dylan's songs locates the artist’s transgressive style within a long history of modern (and modernist) art.
Looking for Law in All the Wrong Places: Justice Beyond and Between
For many, the right place to look for law is in constitutions, statutes, and judicial opinions. This book looks for law in the “wrong places” — in the realms of language, text, image, culture, and other sites in which no formal law appears.
Waiting for Verdi: Opera and Political Opinion in Nineteenth-Century Italy, 1815-1848
Mary Ann Smart explores how nineteenth-century Italian opera sparked political change by turning the newly engaged spectator in the opera house into an actor on the political stage.
How to Be Free: An Ancient Guide to the Stoic Life
Born a slave, the ancient Roman Stoic philosopher Epictetus taught that mental freedom is supreme, since it can liberate one anywhere, even in a prison. Anthony Long presents a new edition of Epictetus’s famed handbook on Stoicism.
Joyce Carol Oates’s latest novel is the dystopian story of a young woman living in a bleak future dictatorship, who is punished for her transgressions by being sent back in time.
Diego Pirillo offers a new history of early modern diplomacy, centered on Italian religious refugees who left Italy in order to forge ties with English and northern European Protestants in the hope of inspiring an Italian Reformation.
Michael Nylan explores the concept of “pleasure”—including both short-term delight and longer-term satisfaction—as understood by major thinkers of ancient China.
What terms do we use to describe and evaluate art? How do we judge if art is good, and if it is for the social good? DeSouza investigates the terminology through which art is discussed, valued, and taught.
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.