Townsend Center at UC Berkeley

We’re so back! 🤩 Welcome back to another semester, we’re so excited to announce all the upcoming events we have this semester. Don’t forget to mark your calendars! #ucberkeley #berkeley #cal #humanities #townsend #events

Join us for the last #BerkeleyBookChat on Wednesday, April 29th at 12:00 pm for Benjamin Saltzman (English Language & Literature, University of Chicago; PhD @ucberkeleyenglish ) offers a sweeping account of how we are at our most human when we turn away from the pains of the world. Why do we look away from the suffering of others? Why do we cover our faces in shame? Why do we lower our heads in grief? Few gestures are as universal as the averted gaze. Fewer still are as ambivalent and inscrutable. In this incisive study, Saltzman reveals how the kaleidoscopic appearance of these gestures in art, poetry, and philosophy has turned them into an essential language for our uncomfortable engagements with the world, challenging us to reflect on the ways we fundamentally relate to others. Into the horizon of contemporary discourse, Turning Away (@uchicagopress 2026) sets out from five influential scenes in which figures avert their gaze: Timanthes’s Sacrifice of Iphigenia, Plato’s Republic, Augustine’s Confessions, Christ’s Crucifixion, and the Fall and Expulsion of Adam and Eve. The gestures of aversion in these scenes refract across visual media, through philosophy and politics, into modernity and the present day, having been reimagined along the way by thinkers like Hannah Arendt, artists like Marc Chagall and Salvador Dalí, poets like Langston Hughes, and many others. Saltzman offers a timely critique of the privilege of turning away and of the too-easy condemnation of our tendencies to do so. Saltzman is joined by Martin Jay (@ucberkeleyhistory ). After a brief discussion, they respond to questions from the audience. Registration requested via our website. #ucberkeley #berkeley #turnaway #ancient

Join us on Wednesday, April 29 at 4:30 PM for a book talk on "So Many Stars: An Oral History of Trans, Nonbinary, Genderqueer, and Two-Spirit People of Color" with the author, @caro_derobertis . Caro is an award-winning novelist who will present a first-of-its-kind oral history of queer and trans elders of color. Register! bit.ly/CaroStars Sponsors: @ucbgeneq Night Out / Night Off Center for the Study of Sexual Culture @tswiberkeley @townsendcenter @officialmccberkeley #berkeleyevents #booktalk #trans

How is Berkeley’s Reading and Composition (R&C) requirement, originally established in 1919, complicated by AI’s entrance into the classroom? What new challenges do teachers of writing face in the age of AI? Now that this writing technology is in the hands of our students, how do we reapproach teaching courses aimed at providing them with the writing skills they need to succeed in college? Join us on Thursday, April 23 at 4:00 pm in the Geballe Room. AI has been greeted on the Berkeley campus by a vigorous debate reflecting a variety of perspectives and values. Our symposium — the third in a series dedicated to a fresh examination of Berkeley’s R&C requirement — offers a space for faculty, graduate student instructors, and other interested parties to discover and discuss inventive writing pedagogical practices and philosophies, both for and against the use of AI. Registration requested via our website. #ucberkeley #berkeley #ai #writing #artificialintelligence

Join us for Lucrecia Martel: Un destino común Filmmaker in Residence at BAMPFA until Sunday, April 19th! In conjunction with the acclaimed director’s residency at UC Berkeley, the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, BAMPFA, and the Townsend Center present Lucrecia Martel: Un destino común, a retrospective of Martel’s films, including short films rarely seen on the big screen, that offer insights into her methods and obsession with dislocating the stories that uphold the illusion of a single world. Martel’s atmospheric movies explore the moral, psychological, and social decay of characters willfully blind to the historical violence and continuing social cost they pay for their privilege. In the Salta trilogy, set in Martel’s home province in Argentina’s northwest, middle-class adults exist in an atmosphere of looming threat, self-absorbed and lurching toward self-destruction, as their servants endure and their children are forgotten. Set in the late eighteenth century, Zama (2017) depicts the depravity of colonialism via the delusions of an officer of the Spanish crown. Palpably present in all these films, Indigenous people are the central focus of Our Land/Nuestra Tierra, Martel’s first documentary. A decade in the making, it chronicles, according to Martel, “Argentina’s strategies to deny the Chuschagasta community their territory.” Martel concentrates the film around the trial of the men who killed activist Javier Chocobar in 2009, showing the defense team working to deny the existence of the Chuschagasta, while interviews with community members who share their stories, home movies, and photographs offer irrefutable evidence of their existence. See @bampfa for more details and to purchase tickets. #bampfa #film #filmmaker #lucreciamartel #berkeley

Winnie Wong is an art historian with a special interest in fakes, forgeries, and counterfeits. Her work examines such issues as authorship, property, and likeness through interdisciplinary inquiry. She is the author of Van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade (2014) and co-editor of Learning from Shenzhen (2017). Her forthcoming book is The Many Names of Anonymity: Portraitists of the Canton Trade. #ucberkeley #berkeley #humanities #arthistory #china

Estelle Tarica studies modern Latin American history and literature, with a focus on racial ideologies, nationalism, and Jewish and Indigenous memory in the aftermath of genocide. Her current research examines the Guatemalan Revolution (1944-1954), a fascinating period of anti-fascist culture and politics that included strong support for the partition of Palestine. Studying this topic has given her new insights into the present moment. #townsend #humanities #ucberkeley #berkeley #spanish

We hope you’ll join us for “The Voices of Strangers and the Foreigner’s Home,” a lecture by Professor Meg Arenberg (Smith College) next Wednesday (3/18) at 5 pm in Wheeler 300. More info at link in bio! What rethinking of the notions of the foreigner, the stranger, the native does our current moment demand? What deep attention might we devote to our concepts of home? This talk will consider the work of two disparate literary figures who have attended to these terms with poetic sensitivity and political force – American Nobel laureate Toni Morrison and Zanzibari poet Mohammed Khelef Ghassani – reading them separately and together, and with an eye to the deeper resonances of meaning a translational sensibility can offer to our readings of literature. Meg Arenberg is a scholar of African literary and cultural studies and a literary translator from Kiswahili. Her work focuses on literary form, intertextuality, and digital media with particular focus on East Africa. Her translation of Mohammed Khelef Ghassani’s collection I Have a Home, There is a We was recently released in the African Poetry series at University of Nebraska Press and her translation of Ali Hilal Ali’s novel The Swallowers of Bones, recognized with a PEN-Heim Translation Fund Grant in 2024, will be published in the new African language literature series from University of Georgia Press. Arenberg teaches courses in world literatures and translation at Smith College. Sponsored by the Department of English, The Townsend Center for the Humanites, African American & African Diaspora Studies, The Center for African Studies, and the Department of Comparative Literature.

Building off Monday’s stellar, sold-out presentation at the California Academy of Sciences’ Morrison Planetarium, our Native Seas program continues this evening with The Last Schools of Traditional Pacific Navigation, a keynote lecture on the UC Berkeley campus. Join us today, Wednesday, March 11, at 5pm, in the Grimes Engineering Center’s Jarvis Auditorium, as our visiting navigators from Micronesia bridge history, arts, and oceanic wisdom, presenting their ancient knowledge systems and cosmology, sharing incredible firsthand accounts of seafaring voyages, and discussing their collective efforts to preserve their cultural heritage. This event is free and open to the public. BCNM is honored to be hosting Native Seas, a week-long educational program, from March 9 to 12, curated by Sophia Perez, Indigenous Technologies coordinator and UC Berkeley PhD. The program will bring several traditional navigators, including students and relatives of Papa Mai Piailug, from the Northern Mariana Islands to the Bay Area. These distinguished navigation teachers will be traveling from across the Pacific, representing the only two remaining schools of traditional Pacific navigation and carrying forward ancient knowledge systems that have guided oceanic travel for centuries without modern instruments. As teachers, their work is foundational to keeping the ancient art of traditional navigation alive, and they will be visiting UC Berkeley to foster intellectual exchange and create visibility for Pacific Islander and Indigenous communities. Visit bcnm.berkeley.edu for more info!

Join us on Thursday, March 19th at 12 pm in the Geballe Room for Esra Akcan “When Repair Isn’t Enough: Architecture and the Right to Heal”! Please join us for a symposium on the book Architecture and the Right to Heal: Resettler Nationalism and the Aftermath of Conflict and Disaster (@dukeuniversitypress , 2025) by Esra Akcan, Professor of Architecture at Cornell University and Senior Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center. Akcan will be joined in conversation by Christine Philliou, professor of history and chair of the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures; Deniz Göktürk, professor of German; Diana Martinez, assistant professor of architecture; and Shiben Banerji, associate professor of history of art. William W. Wurster Dean of the College of Environmental Design Renee Y. Chow will deliver opening remarks. #ucberkeley #humanities #cal #architecture #bookchat

Named a New Yorker Best Book of the Year, Whiskerology (@harvardpress , 2025) presents a surprising history of human hair in 19th-century America, where length, texture, color, and coiffure became powerful indicators of race, gender, and national belonging. Join us for this next #BerkeleyBookChat on Wednesday, March 18th in the Geballe Room at noon! Hair is always and everywhere freighted with meaning. In nineteenth-century America, however, hair took on decisive new significance as the young nation wrestled with its identity. During the colonial period, hair was usually seen as bodily discharge, even “excrement.” But as Sarah Gold McBride (American Studies) shows, hair gradually came to be understood as an integral part of the body, capable of exposing truths about the individuals from whom it grew — even truths they wanted to hide. As the United States diversified, and divisions over race, class, citizenship status, and region intensified, Americans sought to understand and classify one another through the revelatory power of hair: its color, texture, length, even the shape of a single strand. While hair styling had long offered clues about one’s social status, the biological properties of hair itself gradually came to be seen as a scientific tell: a reliable indicator of whether a person was a man or a woman; black, white, Indigenous, or Asian; Christian or heathen; healthy or diseased. Hair was even thought to illuminate aspects of personality — whether one was courageous, ambitious, or perhaps criminally inclined. Yet if hair was a teller of truths, it was also readily turned to purposes of deception in ways that alarmed some and empowered others. Indeed, hair helped many Americans to fashion statements about political belonging, to engage in racial or gender passing, and to reinvent themselves in new cities. Gold McBride is joined by David Henkin (@ucberkeleyhistory ). After a brief discussion, they respond to questions from the audience. Registration requested via our website! #ucberkeley #humanities #berkeley #history

BCNM is honored to be hosting Native Seas, a week-long educational program, from March 9 to 12, curated by Sophia Perez, Indigenous Technologies coordinator and UC Berkeley PhD. The program will bring several traditional navigators, including students and relatives of Papa Mai Piailug, from the Northern Mariana Islands to the Bay Area. These distinguished navigation teachers will be traveling from across the Pacific, representing the only two remaining schools of traditional Pacific navigation and carrying forward ancient knowledge systems that have guided oceanic travel for centuries without modern instruments. As teachers, their work is foundational to keeping the ancient art of traditional navigation alive, and they will be visiting UC Berkeley to foster intellectual exchange and create visibility for Pacific Islander and Indigenous communities. Join us for The Ancient Art of Voyaging: A Night with Traditional Master Navigators of Micronesia, on Monday, March 9, at 7pm, at the California Academy of Science’s Morrison Planetarium in San Francisco. Experience a glimpse into the realm of traditional master navigators of Micronesia, as they share stories of stars, voyages, navigation, and the enduring quest to keep their ancient knowledge, practices, and legacy alive. Witness CalAcademy’s Morrison Planetarium transformed into an immersive celestial map, as the presenters share traditional seafaring methods, star and constellation identification, and Indigenous scientific knowledge systems, offering a rare opportunity to learn about the Pacific region outside of a colonial perspective. (Note: We invite you to join the waitlist for a complimentary ticket. We have already reached capacity for complimentary pre-registration, but we anticipate cancellations by the end of Thursday, March 5, and will notify you if a complimentary ticket becomes available for you. Alternatively, California Academy of Sciences is selling tickets for $15 (general) and $12 (youth/seniors), and you can secure your seat by purchasing your ticket directly from them.) Visit bcnm.berkeley.edu for more info!