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.
Hannah Zeavin tells the complicated story of American techno-parenting, for an object lesson in how using technology in our most intimate relationships became a moral flash point.
Fiona McFarlane's gripping collection of short stories explores the reverberations of a serial killer’s crimes in the lives of everyday people.
Mark Goble explores how slow motion in film and literature reveals a deep cultural fascination with the uneven speeds of modern life and our ability to comprehend them.
Concrete Encoded: Poetry, Design, and the Cybernetic Imaginary in Brazil
Nathaniel Wolfson shows how the concrete movement in art and poetry — which burst onto Brazil’s cultural stage in the 1950s, during a dizzying period of modernization — presciently grappled with an emerging information age.
In his exploration of plays named after objects, Mario Telò offers a new approach to the politics of familial and social relations in Roman comedy.
Past Events
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.
A Little Book on Form: An Exploration into the Formal Imagination of Poetry
Robert Hass reveals the role of instinct and imagination within poetic form, demonstrating his formidable gifts as both a poet and a critic.
George W. Bush's War on Terror has led to seventeen years of armed conflict, making it the longest war in US history. Professor Mark Danner examines this state of perpetual struggle and its widespread acceptance in the name of American security.
Professor of History Peter Sahlins explores the “animal moment” in and around 1668, in which French authors, anatomists, painters, sculptors, and especially the young Louis XIV turned their attention to nonhuman beings.
In his study of High Renaissance art, Professor of English James Turner demonstrates the surprisingly close connection between explicitly pornographic art and the canonical works of masters such as Leonardo, Raphael, and Michelangelo.
Death Be Not Proud: The Art of Holy Attention traces the role of attentiveness in philosophy, prayer, and devotional poetry, exploring a tradition of striving for a mental state devoid of distraction.
Improvised Continent: Pan-Americanism and Cultural Exchange
Illuminating the story of how cultural exchange programs brought many of the most important Latin American artists and writers to the United States, Richard Cándida Smith explores Pan-American cultural exchange in the twentieth century.
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.