Past Events

Alva Noë explores the many unexpected ways in which baseball is truly a philosophical kind of game — a window on language, culture, and the nature of human action, intertwined with deep and fundamental human truths.

Seth Lerer, Distinguished Professor of Literature at UC San Diego, examines how cross-hatching — the controlled marking of parallel lines — became the great technique through which visual artists of the early modern era discovered the representation of physical and emotional reality.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Author Eric Karpeles speaks with Rober Hass about Polish writer, painter, and soldier Józef Czapski (1896-1993), whose biography Karpeles has written.

Three master practitioners — award-winning composer Sivan Eldar, noted jazz musician and composer Myra Melford, and celebrated poet Geoffrey O'Brien — explore the practice and problem of composition across different artistic media, scholarship, and thought.

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.