Past Events

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.

A lecture and forum with Mark Lilla (Columbia University), one of America’s leading intellectual historians and writers on current events. Moderated by Professor Emerita Arlie Hochschild.

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.

Music critic and author Ben Ratliff was for 20 years a jazz and pop critic at the New York Times. He is the author of four books, including Coltrane: The Story of a Sound.

Kimberly Drew (a.k.a. @museummammy) is a writer, curator, and social media manager for The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The Townsend Center brings together eminent figures in the field of music to explore the topic of virtuosity, including music writer Ben Ratliff, violist Kim Kashkashian, Afro-Latin jazz musician John Santos, and Associate Professor of Music and composer Ken Ueno.

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.

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.

Dave Pell is the founder and editor of NextDraft, a curated compilation of daily news and analysis.

John Horn is host of KPCC’s The Frame, a daily arts and entertainment program. Glynn Washington is host and executive producer of Snap Judgment on National Public Radio. Moderator Chloe Veltman is senior arts editor at KQED.