RSS FeedUpcoming EventsApplying to Graduate School: Discussing LGBTQ + & Women*’s Experiences*, March 19https://events.berkeley.edu/townsend/event/243605-applying-to-graduate-school-discussing-lgbtq-amp

Ask questions and demystify the process at our “Applying to Graduate School” panels featuring current graduate students. The 1st panel will speak to LGBTQ+ experiences and the 2nd will focus on women*s experiences. Panelists will cover their experiences applying, application components, the difference in graduate degrees, and other essential things to consider.

If you require an accommodation for effective communication or information about campus mobility access features in order to fully participate in this event, please contact Joanna Villegas at (510) 230-3254 or joannavillegas@berkeley.edu with as much advance notice as possible and at least 7-10 days in advance of the event.
Questions? Contact Patricia at pdgomes@berkeley.edu or Julie at jgrassian@berkeley.edu

https://events.berkeley.edu/townsend/event/243605-applying-to-graduate-school-discussing-lgbtq-amp
Christian Voller | Messages in a Bottle: Recent Studies on the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, March 19https://events.berkeley.edu/townsend/event/243606-christian-voller-messages-in-a-bottle-recent

“Messages in a Bottle: Recent Studies on the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory” is a three-part virtual book talk series. The second book talk is presented by Christian Voller (Leuphana University Lüneburg) on his book In the Twilight: Studies in the Prehistory and Early History of Critical Theory (2022).

About the Series

“Messages in a Bottle: Recent Studies on the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory” is a three-part lecture series. Each lecture requires advance registration.

- February 27, 2024; 12 -1 pm PST; Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy (Brill/Haymarket) with Dirk Braunstein, Institue for Social Research Frankfurt am Main. Registration required.

- March 19, 2024; 12 - 1 pm PST; In the Twilight: Studies in the Prehistory and Early History of Critical Theory (Matthes & Seitz 2022) with Christian Voller, Leuphana University of Lüneburg. Register in advance at this link.

- April 16, 2024; 12 - 1 pm PST; The Archives of Critical Theory (Springer) with Isabelle Aubert, University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. Register in advance at this link.

Sponsors

Cosponsored by the Program in Critical Theory at UC Berkeley, the Department of History, and the Department of German.

Speakers

https://events.berkeley.edu/townsend/event/243606-christian-voller-messages-in-a-bottle-recent
Colloquium: How Do Alien Kinds Become Family? The Literary Lives of the Yakshas in Classical Chinese Tales, March 19https://events.berkeley.edu/live/events/238049-colloquium-how-do-alien-kinds-become-family-the

“The Yaksha Kingdom” (Yecha guo) in Liaozhai zhiyi聊齋誌異 (Liaozhai’s Records of the Strange) by Pu Songling 蒲松齡 (1640-1715) tells the story of a Chinese merchant who suffers a shipwreck, drifts to an island, and with no better options, establishes a family with a female islander whom he identifies as a yakshini (mu yecha母夜叉). This tale, intertwining fear, despair, reconciliation and humor, is a rewriting of earlier Chinese yaksha narratives, which emerged with the spread of Buddhism into China during the medieval period. Placing the tale within the context of cross-cultural encounters, this talk will examine the yakshas’ transition from Indian to Chinese culture and their various depictions in the Tang dynasty tales. It will also consider the recurring theme of the perils faced by shipwrecked merchant as portrayed in Yijian zhi 夷堅志 (Records of Yijian) from the Southern Song period. These two veins of investigation will enable us to further analyze how Pu Songling transforms the traditional horrific yaksha encounters into a nuanced story of separation and reunion, and to gain insight into the literary and cultural significance of this fantastic tale, which blends irony, ambivalence and shades of hope.

Chiung-yun Evelyn Liu is Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. She specializes in premodern Chinese literature, circa 1500-1800, with particular interests in literature of the fantastic, historical memory, book culture and knowledge production. She is completing a book manuscript tentatively titled Remembering the 1402 Usurpation: Media, Historical Sentiment and the Ethics of Memory. Her other research projects include “Form and Meaning: Rethinking the Interpretations of The Journey to the Westthrough Early Modern Chinese Book Culture”, and “Negotiating Boundaries: Records of Encounters with the Alien Kind in Early Modern China.”





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Linda Tabar | The Indigenous Anticolonial: Palestine, Memory, and Imaginaries of Liberation, March 19https://events.berkeley.edu/townsend/event/243607-linda-tabar-the-indigenous-anticolonial-palestine

The International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs presents “Thinking from Palestine: Dispossession, Liberation, and Return: Conversations on Three Recent and Forthcoming Books.”

The question that this book aims to answer might seem simple: how can a violent project of dispossession and discrimination be imagined, felt, and profoundly believed in as though it were the exact opposite––an embodiment of sustainability, multicultural tolerance, and democratic idealism? Despite well-documented evidence of racism and human rights abuse, Israel has long been embraced by the most liberal sectors of European and American society as a manifestation of the progressive values of tolerance, plurality, inclusivity, and democracy, and hence a project that can be passionately defended for its lofty ideals.

The Indigenous Anticolonial moves beyond the critique of Eurocentrism to analyze the overlooked role of anticolonial traditions in international politics and their contributions to political world-making. In conversation with Indigenous studies and drawing on Black study and the Black radical tradition, this work locates Palestine in the structural formations of modernity and the violent processes of settler conquest that have been an inextricable part of making the international order. By setting out to retrieve Palestinian anticolonial intellectual and political traditions, The Indigenous Anticolonial turns to a different set of archives and uses the transmission of memory to uncover a submerged tradition against the overlapping erasures of Zionist settler colonialism, the destruction of Palestinian archives, and the marginalization of non-western perspectives in international knowledges. To persist in a world that requires their continued absence, Palestinians live out radical anticolonial lives that defy matter and form, move through the impenetrable, and reassemble the seemingly irretrievable in ways that elude Zionist settler colonialism. Along the way, the dispossessed, resistance communities, artists, and intellectuals cultivate an enduring sense of presence that exceeds settler colonialism and create imaginaries of liberation that aspire to neither inclusion nor recognition, but liberation from Zionist settler colonialism and a world otherwise.

Linda Tabar is senior lecturer in the Department of International Relations in the School of Global Studies at the University of Sussex. Situated in the fields of Middle East politics, international studies, and transnational feminist studies, her published work focuses on settler colonialism, violence, dispossession, feminist and decolonizing struggles, and transnational solidarity. She is currently completing a book entitled The Indigenous Anticolonial: Palestine, Memory, and Imaginaries of Liberation. The book deepens conversations between Palestine and Indigenous studies. Building on this work, her latest research examines the settler colonial and racial formations of the modern order and anti-colonial conceptions of the international order, focusing on the overlooked connections between Palestine and the Americas.

Sponsors

Presented by the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs, with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Vice Chancellor for Research at the University of California, Berkeley. Co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of Rhetoric and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies.

Speakers

https://events.berkeley.edu/townsend/event/243607-linda-tabar-the-indigenous-anticolonial-palestine
Mitsuko Uchida in Conversation with Jeremy Geffen, March 19https://events.berkeley.edu/townsend/event/243608-mitsuko-uchida-in-conversation-with-jeremy-geffen

As part of her residency at Cal Performances Mitsuko Uchida joins Cal Performances Executive and Artistic Director Jeremy Geffen for a conversation about her history with classical music, her unparalleled artistry, and the motivation and inspiration for her residency within the context of the UC Berkeley campus and broader Bay Area. Attendees will have an opportunity to submit questions for consideration in advance.

https://events.berkeley.edu/townsend/event/243608-mitsuko-uchida-in-conversation-with-jeremy-geffen
Berkeley Book Chat: Michael Iarocci, March 20https://events.berkeley.edu/townsend/event/229982-berkeley-book-chat-michael-iarocci

The Art of Witnessing: Francisco de Goya’s ‘Disasters of War’

Widely acknowledged as a major turning point in the history of visual depictions of war, Francisco de Goya’s renowned print series The Disasters of War remains a touchstone for serious engagement with the violence of war and the questions raised by its artistic representation.

The Art of Witnessing (Toronto, 2022) provides a new account of Goya’s print series by taking readers through the forty-seven prints he dedicated to the violence of war. Drawing on facets of Goya’s artistry rarely considered together before, the book challenges the notion that documentary realism and historical testimony were the artist’s primary aims. Michael Iarocci (Spanish & Portuguese) argues that while the depiction of war’s atrocities was central to Goya’s project, the lasting power of the print series stems from the artist’s complex moral and aesthetic meditations on the subject.

Making novel contributions to longstanding debates about historical memory, testimony, and the representation of violence, The Art of Witnessing tells a new story, print by print, to highlight the ways in which Goya’s masterpiece extends far beyond conventional understandings of visual testimony.

Iarocci is joined by Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby (History of Art). After a brief discussion, they respond to questions from the audience.

https://events.berkeley.edu/townsend/event/229982-berkeley-book-chat-michael-iarocci
Disability Justice and Community Archaeology at a 20th Century Eugenic Institution in Western Massachusetts (Laura Heath-Stout, Stanford University), March 20https://events.berkeley.edu/live/events/237236-disability-justice-and-community-archaeology-at-a-20t

This talk will take place in person at the ARF and on Zoom (you must have a Zoom account to attend). Register for online attendance here.

Abstract: “Nothing about us without us” has been a key rallying cry of the disability rights movement for decades, yet archaeologists regularly interpret past disabled people’s lives while excluding modern disabled people from archaeology careers. In my upcoming project, I seek to address both the epistemic limitations of an archaeology of disability done by nondisabled people and the injustices of systemic ableism in archaeology as a discipline. In collaboration with disabled activists in Massachusetts, I will be investigating the history of the Belchertown State School, where people with intellectual disabilities and others were institutionalized from 1922–1992, and contributing to the Belchertown community’s and Massachusetts’s state-wide reckonings with the histories of eugenics and abuse. In this talk, I will present the foundations of this new project and invite discussion of how to create a truly disability-justice-oriented archaeology project that contributes to both disability activism and archaeological knowledge production in meaningful ways.

/live/events/237236-disability-justice-and-community-archaeology-at-a-20t
Berkeley Geographers’ multifaceted perspectives on California’s environmental change, March 20https://events.berkeley.edu/townsend/event/243609-berkeley-geographers-multifaceted-perspectives-on
Berkeley Geographers have a long and proud history of research on the hydroclimate and geomorphology of California. In this talk by Geography faculty, we will feature work by Berkeley Geographers on this topic, including changes in the distant past, rainfall and other hydrological trends in modern times and future, and impacts on water resources and policy.
https://events.berkeley.edu/townsend/event/243609-berkeley-geographers-multifaceted-perspectives-on
Remembering and Forgetting in Ancient Mesopotamia: Ziggurats, Royal Sculpture, and the Shaping of the Akkadian Empire during the Ur III Period (c. 2100-2000 BCE), March 20https://events.berkeley.edu/townsend/event/243610-remembering-and-forgetting-in-ancient-mesopotamia

The AIA San Francisco Society is pleased to welcome Dr. Marian Feldman to give the Ellen & Charles S. La Follette Lecture. This event will be held over Zoom. To register, please visit the following link: https://berkeley.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJAkcO6tqj4pG9ebjGjMx2sNvh6_EsGVN-i2#/registration

Abstract: 

This talk investigates the destruction and reconstruction of sacred space by the rulers of the so-called Third Dynasty of Ur (c. 2100-2000 BCE), as well as their contrasting preservation and curation of royal monuments from the Akkadian dynasty that preceded them (c. 2350-2150 BCE). It proposes the imbricated nature of the Akkadian and Ur III periods, especially as we have come to understand each of them today, while also making an argument for the way architectural spaces generate bodily experiences that are central to collective identity and memory in contrast to representational monuments of a discursive nature. In doing so, I explore how people engage variously with spatial and representational experiences and the effects on shared memory thus generated in order to analyze how the two modes of memory making intertwined with one another in the sacred precincts of the Ur III rulers, and especially that of the temple complex of the god Enlil, known as the Ekur, at Nippur.

https://events.berkeley.edu/townsend/event/243610-remembering-and-forgetting-in-ancient-mesopotamia
The City Without Jews: A Centenary Film Soirée, March 20https://events.berkeley.edu/townsend/event/243611-the-city-without-jews-a-centenary-film-soiree

Based on the controversial and best-selling novel by Austrian-Jewish writer Hugo Bettauer, H.K. Breslauer’s 1924 film adaptation of The City Without Jews (Die Stadt ohne Juden) was produced two years after the publication of the book, and, tragically, only a brief time before the satirical events depicted in the fictional story transformed into an all-too-horrific reality.

Set in the Austrian city of Utopia (a thinly-disguised stand-in for Vienna), the story follows the political and personal consequences of an antisemitic law passed by the National Assembly forcing all Jews to leave the country. At first, the decision is met with celebration, yet when the citizens of Utopia eventually come to terms with the loss of the Jewish population—and the resulting economic and cultural decline—the National Assembly must decide whether or not to invite the Jews back.

Though darkly comedic in tone, and stylistically influenced by German Expressionism, the film nonetheless contains ominous and eerily realistic sequences, such as the shots of freight trains transporting Jews out of the city. The stinging critique of Nazism in the film is part of the reason it no longer screened in public after 1933 (all complete prints were thought to be destroyed). Now, thanks to the discovery of a nitrate print in a Parisian flea market in 2015, as well as to the brilliant restoration efforts of the Filmarchiv Austria, this previously “lost” film can once again be appreciated in its unfortunately ever-relevant entirety.

The program will include a welcome by Austrian Consul Isabella Tomás, live original music composed and performed by world-renowned klezmer violinist Alicia Svigals and celebrated silent film pianist Donald Sosin, and a conversation with Professor Emerita Cynthia Walk and UC Berkeley’s DAAD Visiting Associate Professor of History and German Philipp Lenhard.

https://events.berkeley.edu/townsend/event/243611-the-city-without-jews-a-centenary-film-soiree
The Loft Hour: Iggy Cortez + Juan David Rubio Restrepo, March 21https://events.berkeley.edu/live/events/218700-the-loft-hour-iggy-cortez-juan-david-rubio

The Loft Hour:
Iggy Cortez + Juan David Rubio Restrepo

in conversation with Salar Mameni


Thursday, Mar 21, 2024
12 – 1pm
ARC, Hearst Field Annex D23

Elevate your lunch break with The Loft Hour, a new year-long series that invites new arts faculty to riff on their work over lunch, in an informal conversation moderated by an ARC-affiliated faculty member. The March program features Iggy Cortez (Film & Media) and Juan David Rubio Restrepo (Music) in conversation with Salar Mameni (Ethnic Studies).

 

Iggy Cortez is a scholar of world cinema and contemporary art whose research and teaching are broadly concerned with diasporic thought and visual culture; racialization in relation to labour and technology; and questions of sexuality, cinematic performance, and embodiment. He is currently at work on a book project entitled Wondrous Nights: Global Cinema and the Nocturnal Sensorium that explores nighttime as a conceptual and sensory threshold across recent world cinema. His writing has appeared in The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, camera obscura, Film Quarterly, ASAP/J, caa: reviews, and several edited volumes. With Ian Fleishman, he is also the co-editor of Performative Opacity in the Work of Isabelle Huppert (Edinburgh University, 2023). He has also curated exhibitions and film series at  The Slought Foundation, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Penn Humanities Forum and The Lightbox Center. https://filmmedia.berkeley.edu/people/iggy-cortez/.

Juan David Rubio Restrepo’s research interests include theories of the human; decolonial theory; media studies; cultural and ethnic studies; critical theory; ethnomusicology; and Latin American, Chicanx, Caribbean and African-American thought. He is currently using multi-sited archival research and auto/ethnography in his current book project, which focuses on placing the music and figure of Ecuadorian singer Julio Jaramillo in a dialogue with popular music in its literal translation. In his own creative pursuits, he has performed at Angel City Jazz Festival; Festival Internacional de la Imagen; Festival Altavoz; and the Rock al Parque and Jazz al Parque festivals. Rubio Restrepo earned his BMus in jazz studies and drumkit performance from Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, Colombia, before studying in California, where he received his MFA in integrated composition, improvisation, and technology from UC Irvine and Ph.D. in music with a focus on integrative studies from UC San Diego. https://artshumanities.berkeley.edu/news/juan-david-rubio-restrepo-joins-department-music-assistant-professor

Salar Mameni, Assistant Professor (Ethnic Studies), is an art historian specializing in contemporary transnational art and visual culture in the Arab/Muslim world with an interdisciplinary research on racial discourse, transnational gender politics, militarism, oil cultures and extractive economies in West Asia. Mameni’s first book Terracene: A Crude Aesthetics (Duke University Press, 2023), considers the emergence of the Anthropocene as a new geological era in relation to the concurrent declaration of the War on Terror in the early 2000s. Terracene engages contemporary art and aesthetic productions, paying particular attention to artists navigating the geopolitics of petrocultures and climate change. Research for Mameni’s second book project engages histories of medicine, in particular that of Transmedicine and the endocrine system. Mameni is currently conducting archival research to understand visual representations of fluid bodies within Islamic manuscripts prior to the rise of the scientific discipline of endocrinology in the early 20th century. https://ethnicstudies.berkeley.edu/people/sara-mameni/.

/live/events/218700-the-loft-hour-iggy-cortez-juan-david-rubio
Modernity and the Rediscovery of Buddhist Women in Korea, March 21https://events.berkeley.edu/live/events/242516-modernity-and-the-rediscovery-of-buddhist-women-in

Hybrid Event | RSVP / Registration Required

RSVP for In Person Attendance at Bottom of Page

Register for Virtual Attendance Here: https://berkeley.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_nRiCvznFTRO7zB7gzqzBmQ

 

Talk Summary:

When we study modern Buddhist history, we often use “modernity” as a frame of reference. But in the case of women, how well-balanced is the picture of the period that the term “modernity” provides? There is a certain level of contradiction in evaluating modern women’s lives, especially those of Buddhist women, through the lens of modernity that urges us to revisit the very concept of modernity and its criteria. My argument is that assessing modernity through the creation of institutions and reforms does not tell the whole story of women’s history and their lives. To illustrate, I will briefly introduce a collection of oral interviews on the history of Korean Buddhist women. The interviews reveal that while these women lived on the margins of history, there is still a sense of direction to their lives, and with the changes of the modern period they too contributed to the exponential growth of Korean Buddhism in the 1970s.

Speaker Bio:

Eunsu Cho (Ph.D., Buddhist Studies, UC Berkeley) is professor emeritus of Buddhist philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at Seoul National University, South Korea.

/live/events/242516-modernity-and-the-rediscovery-of-buddhist-women-in
Polyglot Networks: Overseas Chinese Returnees and the Establishment of Indonesian Language Programs in China, 1945-1965, March 21https://events.berkeley.edu/townsend/event/243612-polyglot-networks-overseas-chinese-returnees-and

About the talk: Language and language education are two central topics in the studies of Chinese diasporic culture. However, existing scholarship has overwhelmingly focused on how overseas Chinese populations deal with language politics in their hosting societies. This research adopts a different perspective by examining how overseas Chinese played central roles in establishing Indonesian language programs in mainland China between the mid-1940s and mid-1960s. Specifically, overseas Chinese “returnees” were indispensable in establishing the National College of Oriental Studies (NCOS) during World War II under the nationalist Guomindang government and several Indonesian language programs in the early years of the People’s Republic (PRC). While such programs served drastically different political purposes across time, they also reflect crucial yet often ignored aspects of, and surprising continuities in, China-Indonesia cultural exchange during the tumultuous period of decolonization, domestic conflicts, and the Cold War. On the one hand, such continuities reflect the persistent demands of top decision-makers in handling geopolitical issues concerning the neighboring region; on the other hand, they are also closely associated with the changing contexts of diaspora politics in the mid-20th century. Moreover, although such language programs’ primary objective was to fulfill the operational needs of various government agencies, they also actively promoted Indonesian cultures and stimulated Chinese people’s sustained interest in understanding the country in the long run.

About the Speaker: Kankan XIE (Ph.D., UC-Berkeley, 2018) is an assistant professor of Southeast Asian studies at Peking University, China. His research and teaching deal with various historical and contemporary issues of the broadly defined “Nusantara” (Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore), particularly the region’s leftwing movements, the intersection of colonialism, nationalism & decolonization, as well as China’s knowledge production about Southeast Asia throughout the 20th century. His current research, funded by China’s National Social Science Foundation and the Institute of Overseas Chinese History Studies, focuses on the history of Indonesian leftism and the Chinese diaspora. Kankan’s work has appeared in the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia (BKI), Journal of Indonesian Social Sciences and Humanities, Dongnanya Yanjiu, and Nanyang Wenti Yanjiu.



If you require an accommodation for effective communication (ASL interpreting/CART captioning, alternative media formats, etc.) or information about campus mobility access features in order to fully participate in this event, please contact Alexandra Dalferro at adalferro@berkeley.edu with as much advance notice as possible and at least 7-10 days before the event

https://events.berkeley.edu/townsend/event/243612-polyglot-networks-overseas-chinese-returnees-and
Modernity and the Rediscovery of Buddhist Women in Korea, March 21https://events.berkeley.edu/townsend/event/243613-modernity-and-the-rediscovery-of-buddhist-women-in

Hybrid Event | RSVP / Registration Required

RSVP for In Person Attendance at Bottom of Page

Register for Virtual Attendance Here: https://berkeley.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_nRiCvznFTRO7zB7gzqzBmQ

 

Talk Summary:

When we study modern Buddhist history, we often use “modernity” as a frame of reference. But in the case of women, how well-balanced is the picture of the period that the term “modernity” provides? There is a certain level of contradiction in evaluating modern women’s lives, especially those of Buddhist women, through the lens of modernity that urges us to revisit the very concept of modernity and its criteria. My argument is that assessing modernity through the creation of institutions and reforms does not tell the whole story of women’s history and their lives. To illustrate, I will briefly introduce a collection of oral interviews on the history of Korean Buddhist women. The interviews reveal that while these women lived on the margins of history, there is still a sense of direction to their lives, and with the changes of the modern period they too contributed to the exponential growth of Korean Buddhism in the 1970s.

Speaker Bio:

Eunsu Cho (Ph.D., Buddhist Studies, UC Berkeley) is professor emeritus of Buddhist philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at Seoul National University, South Korea.

https://events.berkeley.edu/townsend/event/243613-modernity-and-the-rediscovery-of-buddhist-women-in
Haunting Loyalties: The Making and Unmaking of an Early Qing Family, March 21https://events.berkeley.edu/townsend/event/243614-haunting-loyalties-the-making-and-unmaking-of-an

This talk will examine writings by and about the men and women of one Huzhou literati family to explore its fraught process of reinvention in the wake of personal and political disarray during the Qing conquest. The complex interplay of familial and political meanings of loyalty and disloyalty is a central theme of this story. Two brothers of the Fei family fought with Ming loyalist forces to defend their hometown against the Qing invaders, one dying valiantly, while a second went on to write a secret account of the region’s notorious literary inquisition in the 1660s that implicated thousands of people in a seditious history of the fallen Ming Dynasty. Their younger brother and his son worked assiduously to build political and economic foundations for success as officials loyal to the new dynasty. Yet the family’s traumas continued to haunt them, shaping personalities and priorities in gendered ways, complicating aspirations for family cohesion, and presaging the betrayals that would destroy the family in the mid-eighteenth century.

Janet Theiss is Associate Professor of History at the University of Utah. She is the author of Disgraceful Matters: The Politics of Chastity in Eighteenth-Century Chinaand co-author ofGender in Modern East Asia, China, Korea, Japan: An Integrated History.This talk comes from her current book project, Scandal and the Limits of Self-Invention in Qing China,which charts the rise to prominence of Zhejiang literati family in the wake of the Qing conquest and its destruction amidst a notorious sex and corruption scandal in the early years of the Qianlong reign.




https://events.berkeley.edu/townsend/event/243614-haunting-loyalties-the-making-and-unmaking-of-an
American Shtetl: The Making of Kiryas Joel, a Hasidic Village in Upstate New York, March 21https://events.berkeley.edu/townsend/event/243615-american-shtetl-the-making-of-kiryas-joel-a

To RSVP for this event, click here.

Settled in the mid-1970s by a small contingent of Hasidic families, Kiryas Joel is an American town with few parallels in Jewish history—but many precedents among religious communities in the United States. Professors Nomi M. Stolzenberg (USC, Gould School of Law) and David N. Myers (UCLA) will relate the story of how a group of pious, Yiddish-speaking Jews has become a thriving insular enclave and a powerful local government in suburban New York. Their co-authored book, American Shtetl: The Making of Kiryas Joel, a Hasidic Village in Upstate New York (Princeton, 2022), was awarded the 2022 National Jewish Book Award in American Jewish studies.

David N. Myers is Distinguished Professor of History and holds the Sady and Ludwig Kahn Chair in Jewish History at UCLA, where he serves as the director of the UCLA Luskin Center for History and Policy. He also directs the UCLA Initiative to Study Hate. He is the author or editor of many books in the field of Jewish history. From 2018-2023, he served as president of the New Israel Fund.

Nomi Stolzenberg holds the Nathan and Lily Shapell Chair at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law. Her research spans a range of interdisciplinary interests, including law and religion, law and liberalism, law and feminism, law and psychoanalysis, and law and literature. She is currently working on the subject of religious liberty theory and “faith-based discrimination.”

Stolzenberg received her JD from Harvard University. She has taught at Tel Aviv University, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Columbia Law School. At the USC Gould School, she helped establish the USC Center for Law, History, and Culture, which she currently codirects.



Stolzenberg and Myers document how this group of pious, Yiddish-speaking Jews has grown to become a thriving insular enclave and a powerful local government in upstate New York.

American Shtetl won the National Jewish Book Award, was a New Yorker Best Book of the Year, and received Honorable mention for the Saul Veiner Book Prize, American Jewish Historical Society.

https://events.berkeley.edu/townsend/event/243615-american-shtetl-the-making-of-kiryas-joel-a
International House Celebration & Awards Gala, March 21https://events.berkeley.edu/live/events/239141-international-house-celebration-awards-gala

International House (I-House) at UC Berkeley will hold its Annual Celebration and Awards Gala on Thursday, March 21, 2024. I-House proudly celebrates and honors advocates and trailblazers who embody the purpose of I-House to promote a more just and peaceful world. This year we are pleased to highlight the contributions of the following individuals:

Chenming Hu (IH 1969-71) recipient of the Global Impact Award for his contributions to the semiconductor industry which have led to transformative improvements in computing and communications around the globe;

Chiara Medioli-Fedrigoni (IH 1993-94) recipient of the Alumna of the Year Award for promoting cultural heritage preservation efforts at universities, museums, archives, and libraries in Europe and throughout the world;

Okechukwu Iroegbu (IH 2022-24) recipient of the Executive Director’s Outstanding Community Leadership Award for his dedication to the mission of I-House and the positive impact his leadership has had on the resident community;

Ronald E. Silva (I-House Board Member) recipient of The Sherry and Betsey Warrick Mission Service Award for his dedication to the preservation and improvement of I-House.

Read their bios at ihouse.berkeley.edu/gala.

Proceeds from the Gala benefit The Fund for I-House. Shaun R. Carver, Executive Director I-House, points to this Fund as an important resource, providing for room and board scholarships and financial aid, mission-centered programming, and preservation of the historic 93-year-old building. “I-House, a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization, relies on philanthropic support from alumni, foundations, corporations and friends,” says Carver.

Reception and dinner will be provided by award-winning Executive Chef Abigail Serbins and our Dining, Catering and Events teams. Entertainment will be provided by the very talented residents of International House. For more information on our honorees, sponsorship opportunities, or to buy event tickets, visit ihouse.berkeley.edu/gala

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Film Screening: Kuxa Kanema: The Birth of Cinema, March 21https://events.berkeley.edu/townsend/event/243616-film-screening-kuxa-kanema-the-birth-of-cinema

After five hundred years of Portuguese colonial rule, Mozambique was one of the last African countries to gain independence. President Samora Machel’s first cultural act was to establish the National Institute of Cinema, which produced weekly newsreels—Kuxa Kanema—for and about the people. Mobile cinema units reminiscent of Aleksandr Medvedkin’s cine-trains, traveled around the country to engage people with what it means to be free in an independent nation. When filmmaker Margarida Cardoso visited the institute, it was already in ruins, but she discovered newsreel footage in an abandoned building. Interviews with filmmakers who were involved with the institute—including Licínio Azevedo, Jose Cardoso, and Ruy Guerra—and sequences from the newsreels bear witness to the birth of Mozambique’s cinema in concert with the birth of the nation.

https://events.berkeley.edu/townsend/event/243616-film-screening-kuxa-kanema-the-birth-of-cinema
Workshop on Tannishō Commentarial Materials, March 22https://events.berkeley.edu/townsend/event/243617-workshop-on-tannish-commentarial-materials

The Centers for Japanese Studies and Buddhist Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, together with Ōtani University and Ryūkoku University in Kyoto announce a workshop under the supervision of Mark Blum that will focus on critically examining premodern and modern hermeneutics of the Tannishō, a core text of the Shin sect of Buddhism, and arguably the most well-read religious text in postwar Japan. We plan to meet twice this year as before: in Berkeley from March 22 to 24, and in Kyoto at Ōtani University from June 28 to 30. Organized around close readings of the most influential materials produced in early modern, modern, and postmodern Japan, the workshop aims at producing a critical, annotated translation detailing the salient ways in which this text has been both inspirational and controversial, as well as a series of essays analyzing a wide spectrum of voices in Japanese scholarship and preaching that have spoken on this work. For the early modern or Edo period, the commentaries by Enchi (1662), Jukoku (1740), Jinrei (1808), and Ryōshō (1841) will be examined. Papers will also be given on receptivity of the text in the modern period. Note that there are travel funds available to assist graduate students attend either or both of these workshops.

Format: The language of instruction will be primarily English with only minimal Japanese spoken as needed, and while the texts will be primarily in Classical Japanese and Modern Japanese, with some outside materials in kanbun and English. Participants will be expected to prepare the assigned readings, and on occasion make relevant presentations in English about content.

Dates: For 2024, the seminar in Berkeley at the Jōdo Shinshū Center will take place from March 22 to 24, and the seminar at Ōtani University will take place in Kyoto from June 28 to 30. We anticipate the 2025 meetings to take place in Berkeley in March and in Kyoto in June; exact dates to be announced later. Note that participation in one meeting does not require participation in another.

Cost: There is no participation fee, but in recognition of the distance some will have to travel to attend, a limited number of travel fellowships will be provided to qualified graduate students, based on preparedness, need, and commitment to the project.

Participation Requirements: Although any qualified applicant will be welcome to register, graduate students will be particularly welcome and the only recipients of financial assistance in the form of travel fellowships. Affiliation with one of the three hosting universities is not required. We welcome the participation of graduate students outside of Japan with some reading ability in Modern and Classical Japanese and familiarity with Buddhist thought and culture as well as native-speaking Japanese graduate students with a scholarly interest in Buddhism. Although we welcome students attending both meetings each year, participation in only one is acceptable.

Application Procedure: Applications must be sent for each year that one wants to participate. To apply for the 2024 workshop in Berkeley, send C.V. and a short letter explaining your qualifications, motivations, and objectives to Kumi Hadler at cjs@berkeley.edu by February 29, 2024. Applications are by email only. Graduate students who apply for travel stipends should include the request in this letter with specifics of where you will be traveling from. Questions about the content of the workshop may be sent to Professor Blum at mblum@berkeley.edu. Communication regarding the Kyoto meeting may be sent to Professor Michael Conway at conway@res.otani.ac.jp.

https://events.berkeley.edu/townsend/event/243617-workshop-on-tannish-commentarial-materials
Radio CLACS: Brasil com André Nicolitt e Flávia Oliveira, March 22https://events.berkeley.edu/townsend/event/243618-radio-clacs-brasil-com-andre-nicolitt-e-flavia

Descrição do evento

Radio CLACS é uma nova série que busca unir temas como democracia, movimentos sociais e neocolonialismo na região. Na última sexta-feira de cada mês teremos dois palestrantes para discutirem a situação política e social do seu país.

Cada episódio focará em um país diferente da América Latina e do Caribe, mas busca responder às mesmas perguntas:

  1. Democracia: ¿O que está acontecendo com a democracia no Brasil?
  2. Movimentos Sociais: Qual a sua relação e participação com a democracia?
  3. Economia: Como é percebido o neocolonialismo chinês no Brasil?

O evento será em português e será transmitido em nosso canal no YouTube às 14h na Califórnia e às 18h no horário de Brasilia.

Assista aqui à transmissão ao vivo do programa: https://youtube.com/live/eVV5cxQMjuE

Palestrantes

André Nicolitt é Professor da Universidade Federal Fluminense, no Brasil. É Juiz de Direito do Tribunal de Justiça do Estado do Rio de Janeiro e atualmente é Visiting Scholar na University of California Berkeley.

Flávia Oliveira é Jornalista, colunista do jornal O Globo, especializada em economia. Em 2003, recebeu o Prêmio Elizabeth Neuffer da Associação dos Correspondentes da ONU, por uma série de reportagens sobre desenvolvimento humano.

https://events.berkeley.edu/townsend/event/243618-radio-clacs-brasil-com-andre-nicolitt-e-flavia
Creative Careers Week | Arts & Humanities, April 1https://events.berkeley.edu/live/events/241151-creative-careers-week-arts-humanities

Monday, April 1, 2024
Berkeley Career Engagement
2-3pm, Dwinelle Hall 370
Presented by the Career Center

Learn the best practices for networking and more.

Tuesday, April 2, 2024, Register here
Creative Careers Networking Mixer
5-7pm, Platform Art Space, Bauer Wurster Hall
Hosted by Division of Arts & Humanities

Meet recent graduates and mid-career alumni who are working in their fields with a range of professional represented. We’ll have a great spread of food, swag, and prizes!

Wednesday, April 3, 2024, Register here
Creative Career Talk with Jill Foley, VP of Peloton Apparel
in conversation with Sara Guyer, Dean of Arts & Humanities

 Noon-1pm, Maude Fife, Wheeler Hall

Join a talk with Jill Foley, VP of Peloton Apparel to hear about her career trajectory and how her degree in Film & Media serves her role as an industry leader and entrepreneur.

/live/events/241151-creative-careers-week-arts-humanities
AI & the Humanities: AI is Weird, April 1https://events.berkeley.edu/live/events/242393-ai-the-humanities-ai-is-weird

with Erik Davis
Writer, Journalist, and Lecturer

The AI & the Humanities series is a collaboration between the Townsend Center and the Berkeley Center for New Media.

The contemporary humanities is largely concerned with the social and political function of texts and images, often at the expense of the meta-discipline’s long engagement with the uncanny, the visionary, the paradoxical, the otherworldly, and the abject. But it may be these latter concerns that become most salient in the humanistic encounter with contemporary AI and its exploding impact on culture and consciousness. Drawing from ideas developed in his book High Weirdness (MIT Press, 2019) and his Burning Shore Substack, Davis will explore how the concept of the weird helps illuminate the speculative and reality-bending properties of AI discourse and practice, as algorithms, machine learning, and massive data sets open up an ontologically unstable space of mythology, weird fiction, and dreamlike encounters with the simulacrum.

About Erik Davis

Erik Davis is an author, award-winning journalist, and teacher based in San Francisco. His wide-ranging work focuses on the intersection of alternative religion, media, and the popular imagination. He is the author, most recently, of High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies, co-published by MIT Press and Strange Attractor. He also wrote Nomad Codes: Adventures in Modern Esoterica (2010), The Visionary State: A Journey through California’s Spiritual Landscape (2006), a critical volume on Led Zeppelin (2005), and the celebrated cult classic TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information (1998). Erik’s scholarly and popular essays on music, technoculture, drugs, and spirituality have appeared in scores of books, magazines, and journals, and his writing has been translated into a dozen languages. For a decade, he explored the “cultures of consciousness” on his groundbreaking weekly podcast Expanding Mind. Davis has spoken widely at universities, conferences, retreat centers, and festivals, and has been interviewed by CNN, the BBC, NPR, and the New York Times. He graduated from Yale University in 1988, and more recently earned his PhD in religious studies at Rice University. His book on the history of LSD blotter art will be published in 2024.

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Grant Farred | Diaspora-in-Place, April 2https://events.berkeley.edu/live/events/236103-grant-farred-diaspora-in-place

This project stands as the mark of a previous insufficiency. In my recent monograph, The Perversity of Gratitude: An Apartheid Education, one of the concepts on offer is diaspora-in-place. The concept was, however, not brought into its fullness – it remained as a provocation, a provocation demanding address. Thus, this writing – this still provisional – rendering of the diaspora-in-place. The recognition that the diaspora, much as it turns on departure, leaving, the dream of returning, making a place in an unfamiliar locale, also possesses a different dimension. Contains within it a mobility-in-stasis. To leave without departing. To be gone while remaining in place. That is the condition that this presentation subjects to thinking.

 

Please Note: For the pre-circulated paper, please write to Patty Dunlap at pattydunlap@berkeley.edu

 

Speaker Biography

Grant Farred is a Professor of Africana Studies at Cornell University and the author of Long Distance Love: A Passion for Football and T he Burden of Over-representation: Race, Sport, and Philosophy , and the editor of Africana Studies: Theoretical Futures (all Temple University Press), among several other books and pamphlets in theory, postcolonial studies, race, intellectuals, sport, and cultural and literary studies.

Sponsors

In generous collaboration with the Center for African Studies, the Center for Race and Gender, the Department of African American Studies, the Department of Comparative Literature, the Department of English, the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, the Department of Geography, the Department of Political Science, the Department of Rhetoric, the Department of Sociology, the Institute for International Studies, the Irving Stone Chair in Literature, the Marion E. Koshland Chair in the Humanities, the Office of the Dean of the Social Science Division, the Rachel Anderson Stageberg Chair in English, the Social Science Matrix, and the Townsend Center for the Humanities.

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From Farming to Importing Food: Colonial Racial Capitalism, Sovereignty, and Cuisine in the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico from 1919 to the present (Natasha Fernández-Preston), April 3https://events.berkeley.edu/live/events/242597-from-farming-to-importing-food-colonial-racial-capita

This talk will take place in person at the ARF and on Zoom (you must have a Zoom account to attend). Register for online attendance here.

Abstract: 

The purpose of this research is to trace food practices, landscape changes, and cuisine changes in the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico for the last century (1919-2018) relating them to the processes of colonial racial capitalism and sovereignty. Since the mid-twentieth century, Puerto Rico went from being a mostly agricultural archipelago to an archipelago where there is barely any agriculture and that imports 85% of the food it consumes. This transformation was led by the development strategies that were initiated in 1947, under the political banner of bringing a better quality of life to the archipelago. However, there is a lack of specific knowledge of how agriculture was abandoned, and political narratives tend to blame individuals who did not want to continue farming. Most people are familiar with the result, which is the 85% importation of food, but not how these changesrelate to sociopolitical and economic decisions, broadscale inequities, and day-to-day cooking practices. Preliminary data from this dissertation illustrates how the abandonment of subsistence agriculture and development strategies such as industrialization by invitation could have been purposeful and necessary steps for establishing a secure market for U.S. food products in Puerto Rico. This is especially so since after World War II, U.S. agriculture experienced an increased growth in the production of surplus products due to Green Revolution technologies. While this was happening in the U.S. mainland, agriculture was being abandoned in the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico, and national identities and “traditional” dishes (cuisine), many of which are composed of imported ingredients, were becoming emblemized and institutionalized as part of “Puerto Rican culture.” Thus, the central questions that will guide this research are: How do food practices and cuisine relate to the processes of colonial racial capitalism? How do food practices and cuisine relate to ideas and enactments of sovereignty? I will explore the material traces left of past food practices in archival records (censuses, importation and exportation records, and cookbooks) to understand agricultural landscape uses, food trade, and cooking practices. These food practices will be visualized in GIS maps, as well as graphs and tables. With cuisine enacted through these food practices, I will then analyze what is the role of cuisine in the perpetuation or breaking of broader political-economic systems with the concepts of colonial racial capitalism and sovereignty.

 

/live/events/242597-from-farming-to-importing-food-colonial-racial-capita
Lunch Poems: Brandon Shimoda, April 4https://events.berkeley.edu/live/events/236916-lunch-poems-brandon-shimoda

Lunch Poems, Berkeley’s storied noontime poetry series, welcomes Brandon Shimoda.

Brandon Shimoda is the author of several books of poetry and prose, including: The Grave on the Wall, recipient of the PEN Open Book Award; Evening Oracle, recipient of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America; and his two-volume Tucson/desert book, The Desert. His latest work, Hydra Medusa, was published by Nightboat Books this year. He is an associate professor at Colorado College, and curator of the Hiroshima Library, an itinerant reading room/collection of books on the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

/live/events/236916-lunch-poems-brandon-shimoda
Colloquium: Western Categories, Knowledge Building, and the Scientific Value of Sinological Discourse, April 4https://events.berkeley.edu/live/events/230007-colloquium-western-categories-knowledge-building

How do European-language scholars with a Western cultural background perceive, understand and describe the human phenomena they observe in East Asia? How does their mind process written or spoken information conveyed in foreign script and languages? This lecture will discuss the cognitive and epistemological relationship existing between Sinology and source-language data from several complementary perspectives, including the role of metalanguage and culturally predetermined categories in the generation of learned discourse, the formation of terminologies, the coinage of neologisms, the epistemic value of the information produced, and the conditions of its reception by neighbouring disciplines in the humanities and by the educated public.


Grégoire Espesset is associate member of the Groupe Sociétés Religions Laïcités (GSRL) in Paris, France, and a research partner of the International Consortium for Research in the Humanities (IKGF) in Erlangen, Germany. A historian and a philologist, he has conducted research at the Academia Sinica and the Centre for Chinese Studies in Taiwan; the Institute for Research in Humanities, Kyoto University, Japan; German federally-sponsored international centres hosted by the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg and the Ruhr University Bochum; the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and Université de Paris in France. He has taught the history of Taoism and Chinese religions at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE) in Paris (2008-2010). His current research focuses on intellectual and literary production in imperial China from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages, with a special focus on remnants of the “Weft” or “Confucian Apocrypha”; the comparative epistemology of premodern China and the modern West; and contemporary scholarly discourse in European languages on history, knowledge and religion in East Asia.

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Ocean Vuong, Writer, April 4https://events.berkeley.edu/townsend/event/243304-ocean-vuong-writer

Poet and novelist Ocean Vuong is the 2023-24 Avenali Chair in the Humanities.

Vuong is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019), which was named one of the top ten books of 2019 by the Washington Post and has been translated into 37 languages. Vuong has also published two collections of poetry: Time is a Mother (2022) and Night Sky with Exit Wounds (2016), which won the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Whiting Award, the Thom Gunn Award, and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. His other honors include a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, a Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Elizabeth George Foundation, and the Academy of American Poets. His work has appeared in the Atlantic, Granta, Harper’s, the Nation, the New Republic, the New Yorker, the New York Times, and the Paris Review.

Born in Saigon, Vuong came to the United States as a refugee with his family at the age of two and was raised in Hartford, Connecticut in a working-class family of nail salon and factory laborers. He attended Manchester Community College before transferring to Pace University to study international marketing. Without completing his first term, he dropped out and enrolled at Brooklyn College, where he graduated with a BA in English. The novelist and poet Ben Lerner, Vuong’s teacher at Brooklyn College, has said of him, “once in a while, you get a student who’s not testing to be a writer, but who is already one.” Vuong went on to earn his MFA in poetry at New York University, where he now serves on the faculty as professor of creative writing.

With its award of a 2019 fellowship, the MacArthur Foundation described Vuong as “a poet and fiction writer whose works explore the ongoing trauma of war and conditions of exile with tragic eloquence and clarity. […] Vuong is a vital new literary voice demonstrating mastery of multiple poetic registers while addressing the effects of intergenerational trauma, the refugee experience, and the complexities of identity and desire.”

For the Avenali Lecture, Vuong is in conversation with writer and Berkeley faculty member Cathy Park Hong (English), whose New York Times bestselling book of creative nonfiction, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography, and earned its author recognition on TIME’s 100 Most Influential People of 2021 list. Hong is also the author of poetry collections Engine Empire; Dance Dance Revolution, chosen by Adrienne Rich for the Barnard Women Poets Prize; and Translating Mo’um. She is the recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.

https://events.berkeley.edu/townsend/event/243304-ocean-vuong-writer
Ocean Vuong, Poetry Reading, April 5https://events.berkeley.edu/townsend/event/243307-ocean-vuong-poetry-reading

Ocean Vuong, the 2023-24 Avenali Chair in the Humanities, reads from his poetry and engages with questions from the audience.

Vuong is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, among other awards. His most recent poetry collection, Time is a Mother (2022), was written after the publication of his celebrated novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Working in the wake of his mother’s death from cancer at age 51 and during the darkest days of the pandemic, Vuong returned to poetry in order to wrestle with themes of loss, trauma, and memory, both personal and societal. “I was grieving, the world was grieving, and the only thing I really had was to go back to poems,” he notes.

At age two, Vuong and his family fled Vietnam, lived in a refugee camp in the Philippines, and ultimately settled in Hartford, Connecticut. His mother, who suffered childhood trauma during the Vietnam War, made her living working in a nail salon. The first in his immediate family to learn to read in any language and the only one fluent in English, Vuong felt a deep sense of linguistic responsibility toward his mother: “I have to speak for you,” he imagines saying to her. “I have to speak for your pain. I have to verbalize your humanity.” Time is a Mother gives voice to that imperative.

Vuong’s first book of poetry, Night Sky with Exit Wounds (2016), won numerous awards including the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Whiting Award, the Thom Gunn Award, and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. In her New York Times review of Vuong’s “remarkable” collection, Michiko Kakutani writes, “There is a powerful emotional undertow to these poems that springs from Mr. Vuong’s sincerity and candor, and from his ability to capture specific moments in time with both photographic clarity and a sense of the evanescence of all earthly things. Whether he is writing about war or family or sex, there is a presentiment of loss — wrought by violence, by misunderstanding or the simple ticking of the calendar and clock.”

https://events.berkeley.edu/townsend/event/243307-ocean-vuong-poetry-reading
Sarah Wolff | Secular Power Europe: insights on decentring international relations, April 9https://events.berkeley.edu/live/events/223910-secular-power-europe-insights-on-decentring-internati

Based on her award winning book (European Union Studies Association Best Book award 2023) Secular Power Europe and Islam and through an exploration of Europe’s secular identity, an identity that is seen erroneously as normative, Professor Wolff shows will explain how Islam confronts the EU’s existential anxieties about its security and its secular identity. Islam disrupts Eurocentric assumptions about democracy and revolution and human rights. She will document how EU’s diplomats are trying to address that issue and to conduct some ‘religious engagement’. She will also discuss the avenues provided by the decentring agenda, which involves provincialising Europe, engaging with the perspective of the others and reconstructing EU’s agency as a global actor.

Sarah Wolff is Professor in International Studies and Global Politics at Leiden University in the Netherlands. She holds until January 2024 a Professor position in European Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary University of London where she also leads the Centre for European Research (2017-2023), led the NEXTEUK Jean Monnet Chair of Excellence (2020-2023) on the future of EU-UK relations. She was the Director of the QMUL MA in International Relations in Paris (2021-2023). Her research concentrates on EU-UK foreign and security cooperation, EU migration and asylum policies, EU-Middle East and North Africa, as well as EU’s policies on gender and religion abroad. She is on the Editorial Board of the journal Mediterranean Politics. Her book Michigan University Press on ‘Secular Power Europe and Islam: Identity and foreign policy’(summer 2021) was conducted thanks to a Fulbright-Schuman and a Leverhulme research grants. She is Visiting Professor at the College of Europe and on the steering committee of UACES and of ECPR SGEU.

If you require an accommodation for effective communication (ASL interpreting/CART captioning, alternative media formats, etc.) or information about campus mobility access features in order to fully participate in this event, please contact Ray Savord at rsavord@berkeley.edu or (510) 642-4555 with as much advance notice as possible and at least 7-10 days before the event.

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Sonali Deraniyagala, April 10https://events.berkeley.edu/townsend/event/243594-sonali-deraniyagala

While on vacation at a beach resort on the coast of Sri Lanka in 2004, Sonali Deraniyagala lost her husband, their two sons, her parents, her best friend, and her best friend’s mother in the Indian Ocean tsunami. Deraniyagala herself was carried two miles inland by the water; by clinging to a tree limb, she was the only member of the group to survive.

Wave is Deraniyagala’s account of the nearly incomprehensible event and its emotional aftermath. An economist who currently teaches at the University of London and Columbia, Deraniyagala did not have a background in personal, creative, or literary writing. Her decision to write a memoir began at the advice of her therapist, who suggested that she write down her painful memories in an effort to work through her trauma and suffering.

Described by Cheryl Strayed as “the most exceptional book about grief I’ve ever read,” Wave became a New York Times bestseller and won the PEN Ackerley Prize in 2013. Hailed for its “scrupulous honesty and unsentimentality,” it was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography/memoir.

In her visit to Berkeley, Deraniyagala engages in conversation about her writing practices, her evolution as a memoirist, and the emotional and intellectual experience of writing Wave.

The Art of Writing Lecture is supported by a generous endowment created in memory of Michael Rogin, who taught political science at UC Berkeley for more than three decades.

https://events.berkeley.edu/townsend/event/243594-sonali-deraniyagala
Holloway Poetry Series: LaTasha Nevada Diggs, April 10https://events.berkeley.edu/live/events/236178-holloway-poetry-series-latasha-nevada-diggs

The Holloway Series presents a reading by poet LaTasha Nevada Diggs.

LaTasha Nevada Diggs is a poet and sound artist from Harlem. She is the author of Village (Coffee House Books, 2023), TwERK (Belladonna*, 2013), the chapbooks Ichi-Ban: from the files of muneca morena linda (MOH Press, 1998) and Ni-Ban: Villa Miseria (MOH Press, 2001), and the album “Televisíon” (2003). Her work has been featured at the Venice Biennale, the Whitney, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art. Her honors include fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and Cave Canem, as well as a C.D. Wright Award for Poetry from the Foundation for Contemporary Art and a Whiting Award. She earned her MFA at California College of the Arts and is currently a faculty member at Stetson University and Brooklyn College.

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Cristina Rivera Garza: Bedri Distinguished Writers Series, April 11https://events.berkeley.edu/live/events/236385-cristina-rivera-garza-bedri-distinguished-writers

Professor Cristina Rivera Garza will deliver the 2024 lecture in the Bedri Distinguished Writers Series on April 11th, 2024, at 5 PM in Wheeler Hall, Room 315.

Professor Cristina Rivera Garza is an author, translator and critic. Recent publications include Liliana’s Invincible Summer (Hogarth, 2023), which was long listed for the National Book Award in nonfiction. The Taiga Syndrome, trans. by Suzanne Jill Levine and Aviva Kana, (Dorothy Project, 2018) was awarded the 2018 Shirley Jackson Award. Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country, trans. by Sarah Booker (The Feminist Press, 2020) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle for Criticism. In 2020, she was a MacArthur Fellow and is currently Artist-In-Residence at DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst) in Berlin. She is M.D. Anderson Distinguished Professor and founder of the PhD Program in Creative Writing in Spanish at the University of Houston, Department of Hispanic Studies.

/live/events/236385-cristina-rivera-garza-bedri-distinguished-writers
Berkeley Book Chats: Shannon Steen, April 17https://events.berkeley.edu/townsend/event/229983-berkeley-book-chats-shannon-steen

The Creativity Complex: Art, Tech, and the Seduction of an Idea

With its associations of brilliance and achievement, “creativity” is a seductive concept — variously conceived as a shield against conformity, a channel for innovation across the arts, sciences, technology, and education, and a mechanism for economic revival and personal success.

But creativity has not always evoked these ideas. In The Creativity Complex (Michigan, 2023), Shannon Steen (Theater, Dance & Performance Studies) traces the history of how creativity has come to mean the things it now does, and explores the ethical implications of how we use this term today for both the arts and the social world more broadly. Richly researched, the book explores how creativity has been invoked in arenas as varied as Enlightenment debates over the nature of cognition, Victorian-era intelligence research, the Cold War technology race, contemporary K-12 education, and modern electoral politics.

Ultimately, The Creativity Complex asks how our ideas about creativity are bound up with those of self-fulfillment, responsibility, and the individual, and how these might seduce us into joining a worldview and even a set of social imperatives that we might otherwise find troubling.

https://events.berkeley.edu/townsend/event/229983-berkeley-book-chats-shannon-steen
Holloway Poetry Series: Tim Wood, April 17https://events.berkeley.edu/live/events/237723-holloway-poetry-series-tim-wood

The Holloway Series presents a reading by poet Tim Wood.

Tim Wood is the author of Otherwise Known as Home (BlazeVOX, 2010) and Notched Sunsets (Atelos, 2016). He is co-editor of The Hip Hop Reader (Longman, 2008), and his critical work has been published in Jacket2, Convolution, the Colorado Review, The Iowa Review, and the Boston Review. He earned his Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley, an M.F.A. from The Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and is currently an associate professor of English at SUNY Nassau Community College in Garden City, New York. In Spring 2024, he is Holloway Lecturer in the Practice of Poetry at UC Berkeley. 

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2024 Charles Mills Gayley Lecture: Professor Stephen Best, April 18https://events.berkeley.edu/live/events/240460-2024-charles-mills-gayley-lecture-professor

Stephen Best, Professor & Rachael Anderson Stageberg Chair in English, will deliver the annual Charles Mills Gayley Lecture on April 18th at 5 PM.

Stephen Best’s scholarship encompasses a variety of fields and materials: American and African-American literature and culture, cinema and technology, rhetoric and the law, and critical theory. His research pursuits in the fields of American and African American criticism have been rather closely aligned with a broader interrogation of recent literary critical practice. To be specific, his interest in the critical nexus between slavery and historiography, in the varying scholarly and political preoccupations with establishing the authority of the slave past in black life, quadrates with an exploration of where the limits of historicism as a mode of literary study may lay, especially where that search manifests as an interest in alternatives to suspicious reading in the text-based disciplines. To this end, Professor Best has edited a number of special issues of the journal Representations (on whose board he sits) – “Redress” (with Saidiya Hartman), on theoretical and political projects to undo the slave past, “The Way We Read Now” (with Sharon Marcus), on the limits of symptomatic reading, and “Description Across Disciplines” (with Sharon Marcus and Heather Love), on disciplinary valuations of description as critical practice.

Best is the author of two books: The Fugitive’s Properties: Law and the Poetics of Possession(link is external)(link is external)(link is external) (University of Chicago, 2004), a study of property, poetics, and legal hermeneutics in nineteenth-century American literary and legal culture; and, most recently, None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life(link is external)(link is external)(link is external) (Duke University Press, 2018).

His work has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Hellman Foundation, the Humanities Research Institute (University of California), and the Ford Foundation. In 2015-2016, he was the Mary Bundy Scott Professor at Williams College, and in spring 2020 he was the Whitney J. Oates Fellow in the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University. He is currently director of the Townsend Center for the Humanities. 

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Forests and Foods of Ancient Arenal, Costa Rica (Venicia Slotten), April 24https://events.berkeley.edu/live/events/242599-forests-and-foods-of-ancient-arenal-costa-rica-venici

This talk will take place in person at the ARF and on Zoom (you must have a Zoom account to attend). Register for online attendance here.

Abstract: 

Paleoethnobotanical investigations at multiple domestic structures in Arenal, Costa Rica, reveal the plant resources utilized by past peoples living in this volcanically active setting from 1500 BCE to 600 CE. Roughly 200 different genera of plants have been recovered and identified between the two sites (G-995 La Chiripa and G-164 Sitio Bolivar) from the preserved seeds, fruits, and wood charcoal including cacao, maize, beans, manioc, achiote, avocado, cashew, cherry, fig, guava, guanabana, jocote, mamey, nance, palms, ramon, sapodilla, and tobacco. These preserved plant remains represent the diverse assemblage of edible fruits, leaves, or vegetative material that the ancient inhabitants would have incorporated into their daily cuisine. The people of ancient Arenal were knowledgeable arboriculturalists who did not rely heavily on agriculture, but rather would have collected from a variety of trees and root crops for their subsistence needs. The macrobotanical results suggest that the ancient inhabitants employed mixed strategies for subsistence and may have preferred food resources that would have remained accessible during times of ecological stress.

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The Wednesday Club: a new musical written and directed by Joe Goode, April 25https://events.berkeley.edu/live/events/wednesday-club

TDPS presents:

The Wednesday Club

Book, Lyrics, and Direction by Joe Goode
Music by Ben Juodvalkis

April 25–28, 2024
Zellerbach Playhouse

What do a gay cowboy, a slam poetry genius, a revolutionary poet, a naturalist, a couple of starry-eyed lovers, and a doomsayer have in common? They all want to experiment with the theatrical form as members of the Wednesday Club, a group of drama nerds who get together to test out their theatrical innovations on each other every Wednesday evening in a church basement.

Based on songs from the repertoire of the Joe Goode Performance Group, this piece looks at the sometimes painful process of collaboration and the wisdom that can be gleaned from listening and slogging through the rough stuff to arrive at a place of equanimity and trust.


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Film Screening and Panel Discussion: Of Color & Ink: Chang Dai-chien After 1949, April 25https://events.berkeley.edu/live/events/239128-film-screening-and-panel-discussion-of-color-amp

Widely acclaimed as China’s foremost 20 th century painter, Chang Dai-chien (1899-1983) spent his last three decades living in self-imposed exile from his beloved homeland. This film unravels the mystery and controversy of his creative and spiritual quest abroad and his journey East to West to become an artist of global significance.

“Of Color and Ink” is a feature-length documentary that follows the journey of the Chinese artist Chang Dai-chien as he embarks on a quest from the East to the West in search of the Peach Blossom Spring, a utopian place of life and the ultimate truth of art. The film delves into Chang’s extraordinary exile journey and sheds light on his mission in the global art world.

From CINEQUEST:

Winner Best International Feature Documentary Film Award at The 47th Sao Paulo International Film Festival

Winner Best Feature Documentary Film Award at The China (Guangzhou) International Documentary Film Festival

The wonderful Of Color and Ink uncovers the creative, political, and spiritual journeys of China’s foremost 20th-century painter Chang Dai-chien (1899-1983). The film follows his unusual life journey from pre-Communist China to Argentina, the jungles of Brazil; his much acclaimed exhibits in Paris and Germany in the 1960s; as well as his final years in California and Taiwan, in a thirty-year exile in the West that has been shrouded in mystery.

Director Zhang Weimin’s captivating film explores Chang Dai-chien’s pursuit of a vision of Peach Blossom Spring, a utopian ideal of harmony and tolerance, in a world far removed from the traditional China he left behind, as he moved from East to West to become the first Chinese artist to achieve international renown, whose works today command the highest auction prices of any of any post World War II painter.

Through innovative techniques and visual styles, “Of Color and Ink” spectacularly offers an illuminating, refreshing, artistic, and entertaining exploration of an emblematic influential figure in 20th century art.

Panelists:

Weimin Zhang is an award-winning filmmaker, cinematographer, and professor at San Francisco State University. As one of China’s Sixth Generation filmmakers, she worked on numerous award-winning films, documentaries, and TV drama series in both China and the U.S. as a director, cinematographer, and editor. Her film, The House of Spirit (2000) won the Women in Film Award; She also produced, wrote, and directed the feature documentary Missing Home: The Last Days of Beijing Hutongs (2013) which was presented at more than a dozen international film festivals. In 2007, the Library of Congress acquired her interactive multimedia DVD-ROM, Nushu: The Women’s Secret Writing for its permanent collection.

Mark Dean Johnson is a professor of art. He was educated at Yale University, where he was a personal assistant to Josef Albers, and received his M.F.A. from UC Berkeley. He previously was a professor at Humboldt State University in Arcata, CA, and associate dean of Academic Affairs at the San Francisco Art Institute. His publications include Asian American Art: A History, 1850-1970 (2008: Stanford University Press), and AT WORK: The Art of California Labor (2003: California Historical Society Press).

Carl Nagin has worked as an editor, teacher, and independent journalist in print and documentaries for four decades. His features have appeared in The New Yorker, Art and Antiques, The Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, BBC World, and New York magazine. He wrote and reported documentaries for the PBS series FRONTLINE, the BBC, and ABC News. At Harvard University, he taught writing, rhetoric, and journalism, and served as a speechwriter, editor, and researcher for Joseph Nye, dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government. A three-time recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities for his work on Chang Dai-ch’ien, he is completing the artist’s first English-language biography and produced the 1993 documentary Abode of Illusion: The Art and Life of Chang Dai-ch’ien. For the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, he served as chief editor for the award-winning catalogue, Tales from the Land of Dragons: 1000 Years of Chinese Painting and for Masterpieces of Chinese Painting: Tang, Sung, and Yuan Dynasties published by Otsuka Kogeisha. He currently serves as a Professor of Humanities and Sciences at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

Jun Hu is an assistant professor; Mr. & Mrs. Pai Ruchu Presidential Professor in Arts & Humanities at UC Berkeley. He specializes in Chinese art and architecture, with an emphasis on how the material process of art-making intersects with other modes of knowledge production. His research and teaching engage with the history of Chinese architecture and its connections to other scholarly traditions, print culture and painting theory in the early modern period, and interregional interactions between China, Japan, and Korea.

Winnie Wong is an associate professor in the Department of Rhetoric at UC Berkeley. Her research is concerned with the history and present of artistic authorship, with a focus on interactions between China and the West. Her theoretical interests revolve around the critical distinctions of high and low, true and fake, art and commodity, originality and imitation, and, conceptual and manual labor, and thus her work focuses on objects and practices at the boundary of these categories. 

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Colloquium: Lang Shining as Daemon: Giuseppe Castiglione and the Language of European Sinology, May 2https://events.berkeley.edu/live/events/235610-colloquium-lang-shining-as-daemon-giuseppe

In the eighteenth century, what we generally define as chinoiserie comprehended different forms, from painting to furniture, created in Europe in dialogue with real Chinese productions. These items displayed elements recognized as Chinese but created along the lines of European poetics. The world of chinoiserie thus became one of the loci of a language of appropriation which structured descriptions of pretended exchanges between Europe and China. Here, I discuss such a context from the perspective of European artists and missionaries living in China, especially through the lenses of a Jesuit lay-brother and painter, Giuseppe Castiglione (1688-1766), who worked in the imperial painting workshops in Beijing. By discussing the evidence related to his experiences, we have the chance to shed light on significant European views on China, and in turn, to explore some of the colonial concepts concealed into sinological and art-historical narratives.

Marco Musillo is an independent scholar working on early modern China-Europe artistic dialogues. He has published on the eighteenth-century pictorial encounters at the Qing court, and on the historiography of transcultural art forms, from the Renaissance to the modern period. In 2016 he published The Shining Inheritance: Italian Artists at the Qing Court, 1699-1812(Getty Research Institute Publications); he is author of Tangible Whispers, Neglected Encounters: Histories of East-West Artistic Dialogues, 1350-1904(Mimesis International, 2018); and co-editor of Art, Mobility, and Exchange in Early Modern Tuscany and Eurasia (Routledge, 2020).

This event is co-sponsored by the Department of Art History, UC Berkeley.

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