Past Events

Jennifer Arnold’s A Small Act follows Chris Mburu, a Harvard educated Human Rights attorney for the United Nations working to establish a charitable education fund for children in his native Kenya. Mburu hopes to name the fund after the unknown benefactor who paid for his own education, and his search eventually leads to Hilde Back, a retired schoolteacher from Sweden who turns out to have a remarkable story of her own. Even as he struggles with bureaucratic hurdles and unexpected political developments in Kenya, Mburu’s connection with Back provides him the impetus to realize the project at any cost.

Novelist Francine Prose is former President of the PEN American Center and author of over 16 books of fiction, a book on Anne Frank, and the New York Times bestseller Reading Like a Writer.

Peter Sellars, Toni Morrison [via Skype], and Rokia Traoré in conversation with UC Berkeley faculty Abdul JanMohamed (English), Tamara Roberts (Music) and Darieck Scott (African American Studies).

This panel discussion is free and open to the public but tickets are required. Free tickets will be available at the Zellerbach Playhouse one hour before the event.  

Presented in collaboration with Cal Performances.

In conjunction with the U.S. premiere of Desdemona at Cal Performances (October 26-29), the Townsend Center presents Director Peter Sellars in a public lecture delivered in the performance space.

Author and curator (most notably of the exhibition “Sigmund Freud: Conflict and Culture,” which opened at the Library of Congress in 1998), Roth describes his scholarly interests as centered on “how people make sense of the past.” His fifth book, Memory, Trauma and History: Essays on Living with the Past will be published this year by Columbia University Press, and he is currently preparing his next book, Why Liberal Education Matters, for Yale University Press.

Co-sponsored by the Program in Critical Theory and the Townsend Center for the Humanities.

Currently President of Wesleyan University, Michael S. Roth has served as President of the California College of the Arts, Associate Director of the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, and Director of European Studies at Claremont Graduate University. He was also H.B. Professor of Humanities at Scripps College, where he founded and directed the Scripps College Humanities Institute.

The Sciences and Society Thread is the newest addition to the Townsend Center's Course Threads Program. This event will include a series of short reflections by students and professors mixed with food, drink, and a chance to meet the Berkeley sciences and society community. We will address such questions as: What do the sciences and society mean to you? What images and objects inspire your thinking about the place of science in our changing world? All interested undergraduates and faculty are encouraged to attend.

While media coverage of the immigration debate will often highlight the treacherous nature of the desert along the U.S./Mexico border, for many illegal immigrants the danger begins many miles earlier. Filmed across five countries and two continents, Rebecca Cammisa’s Which Way Home documents the peril posed by the extended journey north for its most vulnerable travelers: children. Riding the tops of railway cars, thousands of children make the journey each year, hoping to find work or reconnect with lost parents who have gone before them.

Novels have captured readers' imaginations for hundreds of years. But what is it about this literary form that keeps people coming back for more? Scholars from UC Berkeley and Stanford come together to discuss the evolution of the novel—and to uncover some novelistic gems that have been overlooked by the reading public.

As part of a new, 3-year UC-wide initiative, The Humanities and Changing Conceptions of Work, The Townsend Center for the Humanities at UC Berkeley will hold a “Workshop on Work,” with the aim of helping scholars develop multi-campus collaborations on the topic as well as concrete proposals for the first year of the program. Scholars from all UC campuses are welcome, and a webcast of the event will be posted for those unable to attend.