Townsend Events

Approaching the seven-day week as an artificial construction of modern society, David Henkin explores its role as a dominant organizational principle that shapes our understanding and experience of time.

Edward Tyerman explores the role of China in the 1920s as the key site for Soviet debates over how the political project of socialist internationalism should be expressed through literature, film, and theater.

Margaret Guerrero and David Siegfried, directors of foundation relations and corporate philanthropy at UC Berkeley, discuss how to approach private foundations for research support in the arts and humanities.

SanSan Kwan explores how dance — based in body-to-body interaction on the stage — serves as a revelatory site, and ultimately carries the potential to model everyday encounters across difference in the world.

Asking how essential democratic values can be adapted and deployed within a Chinese context, panelists respond to the groundbreaking work of Ci Jiwei, author of the 2019 book Democracy in China: The Coming Crisis.

How do new and emerging forms of media shape perceptions of China’s complex contemporary reality? Panelists explore how various media platforms affect public opinion about China, both within and outside the Sinosphere.

Li Wai-yee and Siep Stuurman explore the Eastern and Western roots of the notion that all the world’s inhabitants — regardless of ethnic origin, native place, or status — constitute a single human community.

The identity of Homer is shrouded in mystery, including doubts that he was an actual person. James Porter explores Homer’s mystique, approaching the poet not as a man, but as a cultural invention.

What might behaviorism, that debunked school of psychology, tell us about literature? Joshua Gang argues for its enormous critical value for thinking about why language is so good at creating illusions of mental life.

Exploring cheerfulness as a theme and structuring element in the work of major artists, Timothy Hampton (Comparative Literature and French) casts new light on literary history, the intersections of culture and psychology, and the history of emotions.

Saidiya Hartman, a scholar of African American literature and cultural history whose works explore the afterlife of slavery in modern American society, is the 2021-22 Avenali Chair in the Humanities.

Saidiya Hartman, the 2021-22 Avenali Chair in the Humanities, is joined in conversation by UC Berkeley faculty members.