PODCAST · education
Townsend Center for the Humanities
by Townsend Center for the Humanities
The Townsend Center for the Humanities encourages an interdisciplinary approach to scholarship, fosters innovation in research, and promotes intellectual conversation among individuals from the humanities and related fields at UC Berkeley. Berkeley Book Chats is a popular series which showcases a Berkeley faculty member engaged in a public conversation about a recently completed work.
Episodes
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Berkeley Book Chats, Ian Duncan # 25, 05/13/2020
In Human Forms: The Novel in the Age of Evolution (Princeton, 2019), Ian Duncan (English Department, UC Berkeley) shows how the novel became a major experimental instrument for managing a new set of divisions — between nature and history, individual and species, human and biological life. Duncan…
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Berkeley Book Chats, Ellen Oliensis # 24, 04/29/2020
Loving Writing / Ovid’s Amores (Cambridge, 2019) offers a fresh reading of the Amores centered on the aggressive, opportunistic, pleasure-seeking character — the poet-lover of the collection, called Naso. Resisting the scholarly tendency to segregate the poet from the lover, Ellen Oliensis...
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Berkeley Book Chats, Catherine Flynn # 23, 03/04/2020
In James Joyce and the Matter of Paris (Cambridge, 2019), Catherine Flynn (Department of English, UC Berkeley) explores the ways in which Joyce's imaginative consciousness was shaped by the paradigmatic city of European urban modernity. Joyce’s trip to the French metropole at the age of 20…
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Berkeley Book Chats, Beth Piatote # 22, 02/26/20
In her debut short story collection, Beth Piatote (Ethnic Studies Department, UC Berkeley) explores Native American life in the modern world. The stories find unifying themes in the strength of kinship, the pulse of longing, and the language of return: a woman teaches her niece to make a pair of...
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Berkeley Book Chats, Leslie Kurke # 21, 02/12/2020
In Pindar, Song, and Space (Johns Hopkins, 2019), Leslie Kurke (Classics and Comparative Literature Departments, UC Berkeley) and coauthor Richard Neer (University of Chicago) develop a new, integrated approach to classical Greece — a "lyric archaeology" that combines literary and art-historical...
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Berkeley Book Chats, Anne Walsh # 20, 01/29/2020
Anne Walsh (Dept. of Art Practice, UC Berkeley) engaged in an ongoing artistic response to surrealist painter Leonora Carrington’s 1974 feminist novella, The Hearing Trumpet, and spent time with Carrington before her death at age 94. In Hello Leonora, Soy Anne Walsh (No Place Press, 2019), Walsh...
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Berkeley Book Chats # 19, Grace Lavery, 12/04/2019
From the opening of trade with Britain in the 1850s, Japan occupied a unique and contradictory place in the Victorian imagination, regarded as both a rival empire and a cradle of exquisite beauty. In Quaint, Exquisite (Princeton, 2019), Grace Lavery (Dept. of English, UC Berkeley)explores the...
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Berkeley Book Chats # 18, Sugata Ray, 11/20/2019
In Climate Change and the Art of Devotion (Washington, 2019), Sugata Ray (History of Art Department, UC Berkeley) shows how this place-centered theology emerged in the wake of the Little Ice Age (ca. 1550-1850), an epoch marked by climatic catastrophes across the globe. In a major contribution to...
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Berkeley Book Chats # 17, Mark Schapiro, 10/23/2019
The fate of the food supply has slipped into a handful of the world’s largest companies, with more than half of commercial seed varieties owned by three agri-chemical companies. In Seeds of Resistance (Skyhorse, 2018) Mark Schapiro (School of Journalism, UC Berkeley) examines what this corporate...
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Berkeley Book Chats # 16, Stephen Best, 10/16/2019
In None Like Us (Duke, 2018) Stephen Best (English Department, UC Berkeley) reappraises what he calls “melancholy historicism,” in which the imagination is directed toward the recovery of a “we” at the point of “our” violent origin. Through an examination of cultural texts including the…
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Art of Writing, Carlo Rotella, 11/19/2019
A writer of uncommon range, Carlo Rotella has examined writers from pulp to sci-fi, boxers gifted at foiling the advances of both opponents and interviewers, musicians who ring new changes on the blues, and a child psychiatrist with an extraordinary ability to reach the most “difficult” children....
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Thinking about Composition # 2, 10/25/2019
In the second of a series of conversations, we focus on the "how" of composition by bringing together a group of master practitioners working across a wide range of forms and media: acclaimed jazz flutist and composer Nicole Mitchell, who directs Jazz Studies at the University of Pittsburgh;...
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Berkeley Book Chats # 15, Alva Noë, 10/02/2019
In Infinite Baseball (Oxford, 2019), Alva Noë (Philosophy Department, UC Berkeley) explores the many unexpected ways in which baseball is truly a philosophical kind of game — a window on language, culture, and the nature of human action, intertwined with deep and fundamental human truths. In an...
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Berkeley Book Chats # 14, Michael Lucey, 09/25/2019
In Someone (Chicago, 2019) Michael Lucey (Departments of Comparative Literature and French, UC Berkeley) considers characters from 20th-century French literary texts whose sexual forms prove difficult to conceptualize or represent. The characters expressing these “misfit” sexualities gravitate...
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Berkeley Book Chats # 13, Timothy Hampton, 04/17/2019
The 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature recognized Bob Dylan as a major modern artist, elevating his work beyond the world of popular music. In his book Bob Dylan's Poetics (Zone, 2019), Timothy Hampton (Comparative Literature and French Departments, Townsend Center director, UC Berkeley) focuses on…
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Berkeley Book Chats # 12, Mary Ann Smart, 03/20/2019
Mary Ann Smart (Music Department, UC Berkeley) shows how Giuseppe Verdi's operas — along with those by Rossini, Donizetti, and Mercadante —inspired Italians to imagine Italy as an independent and unified nation. Capturing what it was like to attend the opera or to join in the music at an...
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Berkeley Book Chats # 11, Anthony Long, 03/13/2019
Anthony Long (Classics Department, UC Berkeley) presents a new edition of Epictetus’s celebrated guide to the Stoic philosophy of life. Born a slave, the Roman Stoic philosopher Epictetus (c. 55–135 AD) taught that mental freedom is supreme, since it can liberate one anywhere, even in a prison.…
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Berkeley Book Chats # 10, Joyce Carol Oates, 03/06/2019
In her latest novel Hazards of Time Travel (HarperCollins, 2018), Joyce Carol Oates(Department of English, UC Berkeley) recounts the dystopian story of a young woman’s resistance against the constraints of an oppressive society. In the North American States—a bleak future dictatorship founded on...
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Berkeley Book Chats # 9, Diego Pirillo, 02/20/2019
The establishment of permanent embassies in 15th-century Italy has traditionally been regarded as the advent of modern diplomacy. In his book The Refugee-Diplomat (Cornell, 2018), Diego Pirillo (Department of Italian Studies, UC Berkeley) offers a new history of early modern diplomacy, centered…
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Berkeley Book Chats # 8, Michael Nylan, 02/06/2019
In The Chinese Pleasure Book (Zone, 2018), Michael Nylan (Department of History, UC Berkeley) takes up one of the most important themes in Chinese thought: the relation of pleasurable activities to bodily health and the health of the body politic. In notable contrast to Western writings on the...
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Berkeley Book Chats # 7, Allan deSouza , 01/30/2019
What terms do we use to describe and evaluate art? How do we judge if art is good, and if it is for the social good? In his book How Art Can Be Thought (2018), Allan deSouza (Department of Art Practice, UC Berkeley) investigates such questions and the popular terminology through which art is...
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Berkeley Book Chats # 6, Daniel Boyarin, 11/14/2018
In his book Judaism: The Genealogy of a Modern Notion (2018), Daniel Boyarin (Rhetoric and Near Eastern Studies Departments, UC Berkeley) makes the bold claim that the very concept of a religion of “Judaism” is an invention of the Christian church. He argues that although the world treats the…
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Berkeley Book Chats # 5, Anne Nesbet, 11/07/2018
In her book of historical fiction for younger readers (ages 10-14), Anne Nesbet (Slavic Languages & Literatures and Film & Media Departments, UC Berkeley) tells the story of 11-year-old Gusta. It’s 1941, and tensions are rising in the United States as the Second World War rages in Europe. Gusta…
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Berkeley Book Chats # 4, Hertha Sweet Wong, 10/24/2018
In her book Picturing Identity (2018), Hertha Sweet Wong (English Department, UC Berkeley) explores the intersection of writing and visual art in the autobiographical work of American writers and artists who employ a mix of written and visual forms of self-narration. Examining the work of such...
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Berkeley Book Chats # 3, Bryan Wagner, 10/17/2018
In his book The Tar Baby: A Global History (2017), Bryan Wagner (English Department, UC Berkeley) explores how the tar baby tale, thought to have originated in Africa, came to exist in hundreds of forms on five continents. Examining the fable’s variation, reception, and dispersal over time, he...
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Berkeley Book Chats # 2, Catherine Gallagher, 10/03/2018
Inventing counterfactual histories is a common pastime of modern day historians, both amateur and professional. They speculate about an America ruled by Jefferson Davis, a Europe that never threw off Hitler, or a second term for JFK. In her book Telling It Like It Wasn't (2018), Catherine…
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Berkeley Book Chats # 1, Francine Masiello, 09/26/2018
Francine Masiello (Comparative Literature and Spanish & Portuguese Departments, UC Berkeley) examines the representation of the senses during moments of crisis in Latin America from the early 19th century to the present. In her book The Senses of Democracy: Perception, Politics, and Culture in...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
The Townsend Center for the Humanities encourages an interdisciplinary approach to scholarship, fosters innovation in research, and promotes intellectual conversation among individuals from the humanities and related fields at UC Berkeley. Berkeley Book Chats is a popular series which showcases a Berkeley faculty member engaged in a public conversation about a recently completed work.
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Townsend Center for the Humanities
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How many episodes does Townsend Center for the Humanities have?
Townsend Center for the Humanities currently has 27 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Townsend Center for the Humanities about?
The Townsend Center for the Humanities encourages an interdisciplinary approach to scholarship, fosters innovation in research, and promotes intellectual conversation among individuals from the humanities and related fields at UC Berkeley. Berkeley Book Chats is a popular series which showcases a...
How often does Townsend Center for the Humanities release new episodes?
Townsend Center for the Humanities has 27 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
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Townsend Center for the Humanities is created and hosted by Townsend Center for the Humanities.
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