Past Events

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.

The Course Threads Symposium is a capstone forum for students who have completed all requirements of the Course Threads Program. Students will present on the topics they studied within their thread, discussing the ways in which interdisciplinary course work informed their knowledge of the topic.

Chancellor Nicholas B. Dirks’ book recounts his early study of kingship in India, the rise of the caste system, the emergence of English imperial interest in controlling markets and India's political regimes, and the development of a crisis in sovereignty that led to an extraordinary nationalist struggle.

The culminating event in this semester's campus-wide dialogue on legacies of reconciliation, accountability, and impunity in South Africa and elsewhere in the world.

This conference brings together scholars and medical professionals from areas of neurosciences, behavioral sciences, and humanities to answer questions about what it is to be a person.