Townsend Events

In her study of the inhabited landscape paintings of 19th-century artist Fitz H. Lane, Margaretta Lovell asks how New Englanders conceived of their land, economy, history, and place in the global community.

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

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 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, 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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).

Mario Telò asks what it means to read Greek tragedy in a pandemic, exploring how the genre can address urgent contemporary crises.

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.

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.