Past Events

On the day before the 300th anniversary of Samuel Johnson’s birth, Jeffrey Meyers will deliver a lecture focusing on the author’s friendships with Sir Joshua Reynolds, Edmund Burke and Oliver Goldsmith.

From his earliest publications on literary theory in the mid 1960s to his moral inquiries into identity, responsibility, and ethics in his more recent historical studies, Tzvetan Todorov continues to be one of the foremost contemporary European literary and cultural theorists.

Rebecca Solnit is the best-selling author of numerous books, including A Field Guide to Getting Lost; Wanderlust: A History of Walking; Hope in the Dark; and Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics.

Rivers and Tides follows sculptor Andy Goldsworthy as he creates ephemeral, site-specific earthworks out of found materials in natural settings. As an artist, Goldsworthy seeks to mimic the patterns and rhythms of the natural world, and director Thomas Riedelsheimer’s film patiently and engagingly captures both the work and worldview of his subject.

Panel Discussants: Wang Hui, Martin Jay (History), Pheng Cheah (Rhetoric) and Colleen Lye (English)

Panel Discussants: Kaja Silverman (Rhetoric and Film Studies), Larry Rinder (Berkeley Art Museum) and Mark Rosenthal (Norton Museum of Art). Moderated by Anthony J. Cascardi (Townsend Center Director)

With an innovative use of charcoal drawing, prints, collages, stop-animation, film and theater, South African artist William Kentridge’s work continues to attract international recognition. Especially distinctive are his hand-drawn films, which are created using a technique he calls "stone-age filmmaking.”

In conjunction with Townsend’s 2008-2009 Avenali Lecture by South African artist William Kentridge, Depth of Field will feature two short documentaries on the artist and his work. Included in the screening will be Alex Gabassi’s 2007 biography of the artist, Certain Doubts of William Kentridge, and Kentridge’s interview with Dan Cameron, which focuses specifically on Kentridge’s animated short film, Automatic Writing.

Formerly the principal child psychotherapist at Charing Cross Hospital in London, Adam Phillips writes regularly for the New York Times, The Observer, and The London Review of Books.

Michael Taussig is Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. His extensive fieldwork has spanned topics of slavery; hunger; commodity fetishism; the impact of colonialism on folk healing; the relevance of modernism and post-modernist aesthetics for the understanding of ritual; and the making, talking, and writing of terror.