Past Events

Gopal Balakrishnan is Associate Professor of the History of Consciousness at the University of California Santa Cruz. He was a Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute (2000) and a Harper Schmidt Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago (2001-2005).

Geoffrey Harpham, President and Director of the National Humanities Center, is a historian of and an advocate for the humanities. His scholarship also focuses on the role of ethics in literary study, the work of Joseph Conrad, and the place of language in intellectual history.

Ray Ryan is Senior Commissioning Editor of English and American Literature at Cambridge University Press. He is author of Ireland and Scotland: Literature and Culture, State and Nation, editor of Writing in the Irish Republic: Literature, Culture, Politics, 1949-1999, and co-editor of Ireland and Scotland: Culture and Society, 1700-2000 and The Good of the Novel.

Abigail De Kosnik is Assistant Professor in the Berkeley Center for New Media (BCNM) and the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies. Greg Niemeyer is Associate Professor of Art Practice, Film, and the Center for New Media at Berkeley.

“If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes. If you opened me up, you’d find beaches.” So begins Agnes Varda’s engaging self portrait of a life lived in and around the cinema. Less an autobiography than a meditation on time, memory, and place, Varda’s film offers us a glimpse of the complex flow between life and images, forces that shift back and forth with the ceaseless energy of the sea itself.

Amy Huber is Assistant Professor of Literature at the Gallatin School at New York University. She is also UC Berkeley Post-Doctoral Scholar and Lecturer in Comparative Literature and Critical Theory for Fall 2010. Professor Huber received her doctorate in Rhetoric from the University of California at Berkeley in 2009.

Join the Townsend Center in an informal discussion moderated by Professor Peter Sahlins (History) on open review and online publishing.

Known for his essays on moral and political philosophy, Norbert Bilbeny is Professor of Ethics and Director of the M.A. program in Citizenship and Human Rights at the University of Barcelona. His scholarship focuses on ethics, politics, and globalization—most specifically on the topics of intercultural ethics, moral cosmopolitan identity, and global civil society.

This lecture traces the history of "anti-commodity" video art (from the 1970s to the 1990s) and links this to the flowering of poststructural philosophy and the rise of open source discourse and computing movements, bringing them altogether with reflections on 'tactical media.'

While the popularity of web sites like Facebook and YouTube allows us to broadcast our lives for the world to see, few people have carried the idea as far as Josh Harris. An internet pioneer, Harris founded Quiet, a project in which 150 people lived together and broadcast their every movement. Shot over a fifteen year period, We Live in Public follows Harris’ rise and fall, from his status as poster child for the dot-com mania of the late 1990s to his eventual retreat from technology altogether.