Townsend Center for the Humanities

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 is joined by Kevin Padian (Department of Integrative Biology).

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 (Departments of Classics and Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley) teases out the affiliations between Naso's most “poetic” performances and his seamy erotic adventures, showing that his need to write the script of his own subjection corresponds with other features of his generally masochistic profile. Oliensis is joined by Timothy Hampton (Comparative Literature and French Departments; Townsend Center director).

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 sparked a question that motivated his work for the rest of his life: what, given the force of modern capitalism, is art?  Flynn is joined by Michael Lucey (Comparative Literature and French Departments).

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 beaded earrings while ruminating on a fractured relationship; in 1890, two young men at college — one French and the other Lakota — each contemplates a death in the family; a Nez Perce-Cayuse family is torn apart as they debate the fate of ancestral remains in a reimagining of the Greek tragedy Antigone. The Beadworkers (Counterpoint, 2019) draws on indigenous aesthetics and forms to offer a powerful and sustaining vision of Native life. Piatote is joined by Kathleen Donegan (English Department).

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 analysis with archaeological and epigraphic materials. The focus of their study is the poet Pindar of Thebes, best known for his odes in honor of victors at the Olympic Games and other competitions. While recent classical scholarship has tended to isolate poetry, art, and archaeology, Kurke and Neer argue that poems, statues, bronzes, tombs, boundary stones, roadways, beacons, and buildings worked together as a suite of technologies for organizing and inhabiting space that was essentially political in nature. Kurke and Neer are joined by Mario Telò (Classics Department, UC Berkeley).

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 casts herself as an “apprentice crone” who stalks old people and takes selfies with them, becomes a mother, passes through menopause, and attends “elder theater” classes. Walsh is joined by Julia Bryan-Wilson (History of Art Dept.), whose work is included in the book.

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 enduring impact of this dramatic encounter, showing how the rise of Japan led to a major transformation of Western aesthetics at the dawn of globalization. Lavery is joined by Judith Butler (Dept. of Comparative Literature).

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 the emerging field of eco-art history, Ray compares early modern conceptions of the environment and current assumptions about nature and culture. Ray is joined by Whitney Davis (History of Art Department).

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 stranglehold is doing to our daily diet, from the explosion of genetically modified foods to the rapid disappearance of plant varieties to the elimination of independent farmers who have long been the bedrock of our food supply. Schapiro is joined by Deirdre English (Journalism).

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 literature of Toni Morrison and Gwendolyn Brooks and the visual art of El Anatsui and Mark Bradford, Best argues that there can be no “we” following from such a time and place, that black identity is constituted in and through negation. Best is joined by Damon Young (Film & Media and French Departments).

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. In this conversation, Rotella delves into how he approaches the craft of writing about the craft of others. Carlo Rotella has been a regular contributor to the New York Times Magazine since 2007, and he has also been an op-ed columnist for the Boston Globe and commentator for WGBH FM. He is professor of American Studies, English, and journalism at Boston College. He talks with Scott Saul (English Department, UC Berkeley), author of Becoming Richard Pryor (2014). This event is sponsored by Art of Writing at UC Berkeley.

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; cultural historian Josh Kun, who holds a PhD in Ethnic Studies from UC Berkeley and is director of USC’s Annenberg School of Communication; and poet and scholar Chiyuma Elliott, a faculty member in UC Berkeley’s African American Studies Department and a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. In a conversation moderated by UC Berkeley professor and jazz pianist Myra Melford, panelists share their ideas about what it means to compose.

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 exploration that ranges across the act of umpiring, the role of instant replay, the concept of the strike zone, the rampant use of surgery, and the controversy surrounding performance-enhancing drugs, Noë, a lifelong Mets fan, joins the distinguished line of American philosophers who have embraced the national pastime. Noë is joined by Anthony Cascardi (Dean, College of Letters & Science).

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 towards same-sex encounters, yet they differ in subtle but crucial ways from mainstream gay or lesbian identities. Investigating works by Simone de Beauvoir, Colette, Jean Genet, and others, Lucey probes the range of same-sex sexual forms in 20th-century France and the innovative literary language used to explore them. Lucey is joined by Catherine Flynn (English Department).

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 the details and nuances of Dylan's songs, showing how they work as artistic statements designed to create meaning and elicit emotion. Locating Dylan in the long history of artistic modernism, Hampton offers both a nuanced engagement with the work of a major artist and a meditation on the contribution of song at times of political and social change. Hampton is joined by Robert Kaufman (Comparative Literature).

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 aristocratic salon, her book Waiting for Verdi (UC Press, 2018) shows how opera set new horizons for what Italians could think, feel, say, and write. Smart is joined by Hannah Ginsborg (Philosophy).

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. How to Be Free (Princeton, 2018) features new translations alongside the original Greek, an introduction that sets Epictetus in context and describes the importance of Stoic freedom today, and a glossary of key words and concepts. Long is joined by Timothy Hampton (Comparative Literature and French; Townsend Center director).

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 sexism, racism, and violence — Adriane Strohl is punished for her provocative high-school valedictorian speech by being sent back in time. She is transported to the idyllic yet repressive midwestern town of Wainscotia, Wisconsin, as it existed in 1959. Oates is joined by Robert Hass (English).

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 not on states and their official representatives, but on “refugee-diplomats”—Italian religious dissidents who left Italy in order to forge ties with English and northern European Protestants in the hope of inspiring an Italian Reformation. Pirillo is joined by Kinch Hoekstra (Political Science).

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 subject, early Chinese writings oppose pleasure not with pain but with insecurity. Nylan is joined by Hans Sluga (Philosophy).

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 discussed, valued, and taught. Adapting art viewing to contemporary demands within a rapidly changing world, deSouza outlines how art functions as politicized culture within a global industry. He provides an extensive analytical glossary of terms, while focusing on their current and changing usage. DeSouza is joined by Anne Walsh (Art Practice).

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 word “Judaism” as appropriate for naming an alleged religion of the Jews, it is in fact a Christian theological concept adopted by Jews only with the coming of modernity and the spread of Christian languages. Boyarin is joined by Niklaus Largier (German and Comparative Literature).

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 has been sent to live in an orphanage run by her grandmother in Springdale, Maine, after her father, a foreign-born labor organizer, has had to flee the country. As Gusta gets to know the rambunctious orphans at the home, she feels like an outsider at her new school, and she finds herself facing patriotism turned to prejudice, alien registration drives, and a burning family secret. Nesbet’s previous novel for children, Cloud and Wallfish, won the 2016 California Book Award gold medal in juvenile fiction. A scholar of Russian and Soviet film, she is the author of Savage Junctures: Sergei Eisenstein and the Shape of Thinking. Nesbet is joined by Kristen Whissel (Film & Media) and Whissel's daughter, Isla Hager.

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 writers-artists as Art Spiegelman, Faith Ringgold, and Leslie Marmon Silko, Wong argues that, in grappling with the breakdown of stable definitions of identity and unmediated representation, her subjects experiment with hybrid autobiography in an effort to break free of inherited visual-verbal regimes and revise painful histories. She shows how their works envision new possibilities of selfhood and fresh modes of self-narration in word and image. Wong is joined by Linda Rugg (Scandinavian).

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 argues that this story of a fox, a rabbit, and a doll made of tar and turpentine is best understood not merely as a folktale but as a collective work in political philosophy. Circulating at the same time and in the same places as new ideas about property and politics developed in colonial law and political economy, the tar baby comes to embody an understanding of the interlocking systems of slavery, colonialism, and global trade. Wagner is joined by Christopher Tomlins (Berkeley Law).

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 Gallagher (English Department, UC Berkeley) examines how counterfactual history works and to what ends. Beginning in eighteenth-century Europe, where the idea first took hold in philosophical disputes about Providence, and moving through alternate histories of the Civil War and World War II, she shows how the counterfactual habit of replaying the recent past can shape popular understandings of the actual events themselves. Gallagher is joined by Thomas Laqueur (History).

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 Latin America (2018), she traces the evolution of “sense work” in literary texts, the visual arts, periodical culture, and history. She argues that when the discourse on democracy is altered or threatened, the representation of our sensing bodies helps shape democratic practice and rebellion, cultural crisis, and social change. Masiello is joined by Tom McEnaney (Comparative Literature and Spanish & Portuguese).