Townsend Events

Alice Diop is one of the most significant filmmakers working in France today. Her intimate, observational films explore the lives of people on the margins of contemporary French society.

Drawing upon recent narratives and media representations of the refugee “crisis” at Europe’s edges, Debarati Sanyal tells a new story about those on the move, the technologies unleashed on them, and the artistry with which migrants and allies bear witness to displacement.

Because so little of her work survives intact, Sappho has long been particularly available for reinterpretation. Engaging with this rich field of possibility, panelists reflect on the ways in which the Sapphic tradition has contributed to counterintuitive modes of thinking — and thus to the radical work of critical theory.

Reckoning with aging and mortality, democracy in crisis, the role of the writer, and the fate of books, Thomas Farber presents the latest in his series of creative memoirs that grapple with life and its limits.

Offering an alternative intellectual history of early America through the lens of Benjamin Franklin's Philadelphia, Diego Pirillo explores the entanglement among books, knowledge, and colonialism.

During US colonial rule in the Philippines, reinforced concrete was used to the near exclusion of all other building materials. Diana Martinez shows how the material's stability, plasticity, and strength served the shifting imperatives of colonialism.

Lisandro Claudio explores how the ideology of austerity served as a tool of US empire in the Philippines, casting Filipinos as reckless spenders and presenting monetary discipline as a civilizing force.

David Henkin shows how baseball offers a capacious space for thinking about such things as spectatorship, success, community, order, and contingency in the modern world.

Atreyee Gupta takes a revelatory look at modernism in India, exploring art’s role in decolonization and aesthetic discourse across the Global South.

Ignacio Navarrete explores the impact of early printing on narrative literature in Spain, charting the rise of a distinct, new narrative culture.