Townsend Events

Christopher Tomlins offers a new interpretation of Nat Turner and the slave rebellion that stunned the American South.

Joyce Carol Oates, author of over 70 works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, talks with poet John Shoptaw.

Jeannie Suk Gersen is a feminist legal scholar and contributing writer at the New Yorker. She is joined in conversation by political theorist Wendy Brown.

Jeannie Suk Gersen, the 2020-21 Una's Lecturer, is joined in conversation by UC Berkeley faculty members Joshua Cohen and Marianne Constable.

Victoria Kahn argues that the literature of the English Reformation (written during the fraught years of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) marks a turning point in Western thinking about literature and literariness.

Documentary photographer Ken Light and author José Ángel Navejas discuss their book, which features photographs of U.S. border patrol agents on their nighttime shifts on the Mexican border in the 1980s.

Anthony Cascardi and Catherine Gallagher ask how narrative gives sense to events, and whether narrative forms that have served in times of past crisis (the novel, the epic, history writing) might provide meaning in the pandemic era.

Bringing an innovative synthesis of postmodern theories to bear on his reading of ancient Greek tragedy, Mario Telò offers a new way of understanding tragic aesthetics.