Townsend Events

AI and the Humanities

Generative Creativity and Interpretation
Wednesday, Oct 11, 2023 5:00 pm
| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall and Online

Leading researchers, authors, and industry members discuss the impact of generative AI on creativity and the humanities.

Untimely Sacrifices: Work and Death in Finland

Daena Funahashi
Berkeley Book Chats
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| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

In her examination of Finland — where public health officials named occupational burnout a "new hazard" of the new economy — Daena Funahashi asks what moves people to work to the point of pathological stress.

Daphne Brooks

Rhapsody & Ruin: Porgy and Bess and the Story of America
The Life of Sound
Wednesday, Oct 18, 2023 5:00 pm
| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

Daphne Brooks is William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of African American Studies, American Studies, Music, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University.

Kevin McLaughlin

Gehalt Theory: Benjamin on Goethe
Tuesday, Oct 24, 2023 5:00 pm
| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

Kevin McLaughlin, author of The Philology of Life: Walter Benjamin's Critical Program, traces the development of a theory of literature and a method of criticism in Benjamin's early interpretations of a nexus formed by Hölderlin, the German romantics, and Goethe.  McLaughlin's lecture will focus on Benjamin's thesis of what he calls Goethe's "new approach" to aesthetic matters as it gathers around the enigmatic term Gehalt.

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| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

Kevis Goodman approaches late 18-century medicine, aesthetics, and poetics as overlapping forms of knowledge that probe the relationship between the geographical movements of persons displaced from home and the physiological “motions” within their bodies and minds.

Tanya Lukin Linklater

Open Rehearsals of Ewako ôma askiy. This then is the earth.
The Life of Sound
Wednesday, Nov 1, 2023 1:30 pm -
| BAMPFA, 2155 Center Street

Artist and choreographer Tanya Lukin Linklater, whose work engages with Indigenous art and culture, presents a series of open rehearsals with dance artists Ivanie Aubin-Malo and Ceinwen Gobert that respond to the works on view in BAMPFA's exhibit Duane Linklater: mymothersside.

Aleksandr Rodchenko: Photography in the Time of Stalin

Aglaya Glebova
Berkeley Book Chats
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| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

Through the lens of Aleksandr Rodchenko’s photography, Aglaya Glebova charts a new understanding of the troubled relationship between technology, modernism, and state power in Stalin’s Soviet Union.

Wednesday, Nov 8, 2023 6:00 pm
| Maude Fife Room, 315 Wheeler Hall

Acclaimed writers Claudia Rankine and Pamela Sneed discuss commemoration and its relationship to memory and storytelling.

Bonnie Honig, Political Theorist

Fatal Forgiveness: Euripides, Austin, Arendt, Cavell
Una's Lecture
Monday, Nov 13, 2023 5:00 pm
| Maude Fife Room, 315 Wheeler Hall

Political theorist Bonnie Honig is Nancy Duke Lewis Professor of Modern Culture & Media and Political Science at Brown University.

Bonnie Honig in Conversation

with Marianne Constable, Mario Teló, and Dora Zhang
Tuesday, Nov 14, 2023 5:00 pm
| Maude Fife Room, 315 Wheeler Hall

Bonnie Honig, the 2023-24 Una's Lecturer, talks with UC Berkeley faculty members Marianne Constable (Rhetoric), Mario Teló (Rhetoric, Ancient Greek & Roman Studies, and Comparative Literature), and Dora Zhang (English).

Echoes from the Borderlands

Sonic Essay by Valeria Luiselli
The Life of Sound
Friday, Dec 1, 2023 11:59 pm
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Writer Valeria Luiselli presents "Echoes from the Borderlands," an experimental sound piece documenting the histories of violence against land and bodies in the US-Mexico borderlands.

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| Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

In her exploration of media art and theory in Japan, Miryam Sas opens up media studies and affect theory to a deeper engagement with works and theorists outside Euro-America.