Townsend Events

A generation of contemporary Anglo-American novelists has championed the ethical value of literature. Dorothy Hale explores the modernist roots of this “new” emphasis on the novel’s ethical significance.

Hannah Ginsborg, Ken Goldberg, and David Marno explore how the technological and social shifts of the COVID era have changed the ways in which we pay attention.

In their introduction to the English translation of Jean Daive’s memoir, Robert Kaufman and Philip Gerard provide critical, historical, and cultural context for Daive's account of his friendship with the German-language poet Paul Celan.

Joy Harjo is the 23rd US Poet Laureate, and the first Native American to hold the position. She is joined in conversation by poet Craig Santos Perez to discuss her literary antecedents and pathbreaking editorial work.

Joy Harjo, the 2020-21 Avenali Chair in the Humanities, discusses her signature project as US Poet Laureate, which maps and documents the work of contemporary Native poets.

Placing Remembrance of Things Past within a complex philosophical and aesthetic context, Suzanne Guerlac approaches Proust’s novel as a text whose true subject is the adventure of living in time.

The pandemic has underscored the need for attention to the life of the spirit. Berkeley faculty members explore the shifting role of spirituality and its relationship to art.

Anneka Lenssen explores how artists developed new kinds of painting as a means to agitate against the imposed identities and intersubjective relations that accompanied the making of modern Syria.

In a study based on the systematic sampling of nearly 2,000 French and English novels written between 1601 and 1830, Nicholas Paige offers a new conception of the novel as a technology of patterned systems in constant flux.

Antonella Bonfanti, Abigail De Kosnik, and Jeffrey Skoller examine how the practices and study of visual culture are shaped by the current political and public health crises.