Past Events

Professor of Art History Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby’s book illustrates how a runaway slave, Sojourner Truth, gained fame in the nineteenth century as an abolitionist, feminist, and orator and earned a living partly by selling photographic images of herself at lectures and by mail.

This film recounts the personal story of Moris Albahari, a Sephardic Jew from Sarajevo, who spoke Ladino (Judeo-Spanish), his native tongue, to survive the Holocaust. The screening will be followed by a short 1929 documentary film, rediscovered in 1992, portrays Sephardic community life in Macedonia, Turkey, Yugoslavia, and Romania, including rare footage of Jewish schools, residential quarters, synagogues, and cemeteries.

The first event in The [in]Justice System series, The Life Cycle of the Problem, examines the school-to-prison pipeline, race and poverty, mental health, health care, solitary confinement, and more.

Professor of Music James Davies’ book explores the very matter of musical experience; the hands and voices of virtuosic musicians and singers who plied their trade between London and Paris in the nineteenth century.

World-renowned composer Kaija Saariaho is in residence in the Department of Music during the Fall 2015 semester. In addition to master classes and private lessons with student composers, she participates in a number of appearances, including five public Bloch Lectures featuring conversations with several of her distinguished collaborators.

Katrina Dodson’s recent translation of Clarice Lispector’s Complete Stories (New Directions, 2015) collects for the first time all 85 short stories by one of Brazil’s most important writers.

Toledo was a city in which three major cultures met, intertwined, and enriched one another. This film tells the stories of Toledo’s “Marranos,” converted Jews who continued to practice Judaism in secret, as recalled by three of their descendants.

Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures Irina Paperno gives an account of Tolstoy's lifelong attempt to find adequate ways to represent the self, to probe its limits, and to arrive at an identity not based on the bodily self and its accumulated life experience.

On his 70th birthday and in his 43rd year as a faculty member at Berkeley, Tom Laqueur’s students, friends, and colleagues gather to celebrate him and his contributions to the University and his fields of study.

Argentine artist Andrés Waissman will be interviewed by curator and gallerist Gachi Prieto, about the complex set of circumstances that contributed to shaping his art as well as the role of art in contemporary Argentina. Waissman will discuss his experience as a Jewish Argentine artist as well as the various series within his oeuvre that address topics related to the exoduses, migrations, and multitudes of souls in search of the Promised Land.