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Townsend Center for the Humanities

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The Townsend Center for the Humanities encourages an interdisciplinary approach to scholarship.

16/10/2026

Blake Oetting is at work on a book project exploring how artists in the late 1980s and 1990s identified and critiqued an emergent change in art’s institutional apparatus. Rather than strictly physical places like museums and galleries, these artists understood “the institution” as a diffuse technique of subject construction through which identity, social life, counterculture, and the creative role of the artist were increasingly commodified. The practices he surveys offer a tactical roadmap for how to continue resisting these forces in a moment when social media, the corporate takeover of identity politics, and artificial intelligence have only exacerbated these conditions.

15/10/2026

Should universities remain institutionally neutral on the great political and social questions of our time? Or does neutrality itself represent a choice about the role universities should play in public life? Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan University, discusses institutional neutrality, academic freedom, and the responsibilities of university leaders in a deeply polarized political environment on Thursday, October 29th at 5:00 pm in the Geballe Room!

Drawing on his experience leading Wesleyan University and his extensive scholarship on higher education, Roth explores when universities should speak, when they should listen, and how institutions can protect open inquiry while engaging the challenges facing democracy.

Roth has served as president of Wesleyan University since 2007. A historian, author, curator, and public advocate for liberal education, he previously served as president of California College of the Arts and as associate director of the Getty Research Institute. His books include Safe Enough Spaces: A Pragmatist’s Approach to Inclusion, Free Speech, and Political Correctness (2019).

Roth visits campus in conjunction with the Townsend Center’s yearlong Sawyer Seminar on Neutrality: The Problems and Challenges of the Public University, funded by the Mellon Foundation. He is in conversation with Seminar leaders Stephen Best (English; Townsend Center) and Colleen Lye (English).

Registration requested via our website!

14/10/2026

Baseball season is coming to a close but end the season with this on Wednesday, October 28th at 12 pm in the Geballe Room! In Out of the Ballpark (Oxford, 2026), David Henkin (Berkeley Department of History) reconsiders the character, meaning, and delights of baseball by exploring the game’s unusual features and the sport’s many resonances with other aspects of modern life. To this end, he abandons several assumptions and mythologies that underlie most approaches to histories of baseball: that it is unique among sports and fundamentally different from other kinds of entertainment; that it is specific to the United States; that it has changed fundamentally in recent years; and that the keys to understanding it lie primarily in examining what happens on the field of play.

Instead, Henkin moves across time and space to examine baseball’s history since the nineteenth century and beyond US borders. He takes readers inside the structures of clubs and leagues, interprets the sacred scripture of rulebooks, and illuminates some of baseball’s rites and rituals that are often associated with honor and manhood. He charts baseball’s significance along the routes of American and Japanese imperial expansion and the shifting maps of race and ethnicity in the US. Baseball is found at negotiating tables that pit capital against labor and in pivotal moments in the history of mass media. He shows us how baseball might offer a complex and capacious space for thinking about such things as spectatorship, success, community, order, and contingency in the modern world.

Henkin is joined by Alva Noë (Philosophy at Cal). After a brief discussion, they respond to questions from the audience.

Registration is requested via our website.

13/10/2026

Thank you to everyone who came out last month for our Sappho and Critical Theory symposium! 💜

09/10/2026

Sylvie Thode explores the psychic and social effects of making sexuality into a basis for political action, specifically in the context of the HIV/AIDS crisis. Her dissertation tracks four different literary forms — the novelesque, the roman à clef, the lyric, and the vatic voice — that champion inassimilable individual subjectivity in an era of activist esprit de corps and collective mourning.

Jeffrey Berg Fellow

07/10/2026

Another for you on Wednesday, October 21st at 12:00 pm in the Geballe Room! In The Profligate Colonial (Cornell University Press, 2025) Lisandro Claudio (South & Southeast Asian Studies) reveals how austerity, long before it became a buzzword of modern technocracy, was a tool of US empire.

Austerity is often praised as prudence in hard times, a responsible response to crisis. In the Philippines today, it is treated as common sense, an unquestioned commitment to a strong currency, low inflation, and fiscal restraint. Claudio argues that this orthodoxy is in fact a colonial inheritance — a legacy of American rule that cast Filipinos as reckless spenders and imposed monetary discipline as a civilizing force. At the center of this logic is the “profligate colonial,” a feminized, racialized figure who wastes public funds and so requires the steady hand of imperial governance.

Focusing on key moments in Philippine economic history across the twentieth century, Claudio charts how austerity was first exported through empire, then domesticated in line with nationalist ambitions. He shows that generations of Filipino policymakers, central bankers, and intellectuals absorbed the lessons of American “money doctors,” transforming what was a means to build a colonial state on the cheap into a postcolonial moral imperative. Austerity became not just policy, but an ideology that transcended political divides and reshaped the boundaries of the Philippine economic imagination.

Claudio is joined by Trevor Jackson (Berkeley Department of History). After a brief discussion, they respond to questions from the audience.

Registration requested via our website.

05/10/2026

Angela Yu’s dissertation examines how 19th- and 20th-century scientific and medical practitioners contended with the inactivity internal to life, from animal hibernation to cell cycle arrest.

Albert Lepawsky Fellow

01/10/2026

Another on Wednesday, October 14th at 12 in the Geballe Room! During US colonial rule in the Philippines, reinforced concrete was used to the near exclusion of all other building materials. In Concrete Colonialism (Duke University Press 2025), Diana Martinez (UC Berkeley Architecture) examines the motivations for and lasting effects of this forgotten colonial policy. Arguing that the pervasive use of reinforced concrete revolutionized techniques of imperial conquest, Martinez shows how concrete reshaped colonialism as a project that sought durable change through the reformation of environments, colonial society, and racialized biologies. Martinez locates the origins of this material revolution in the development of Chicago, highlighting how building this urban center atop exceptionally challenging geology made it possible to transform diverse global ecologies. She details how the material’s stability, plasticity, strength, and other qualities served the shifting imperatives of the US colonial regime, playing a central role in defending territory, controlling disease, and constructing monuments to nation and empire. By describing a world irreversibly remade, Martinez urges readers to consider how colonialism persists — in concrete forms — despite claims of its conclusion.

Martinez is joined by Matthew Shutzer (Berkeley Department of History). After a brief discussion, they respond to questions from the audience.

Registration requested via our website.

28/09/2026

Sloane Nilsen studies the history of life at night in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany. His dissertation, “Nazi Nights: A Time of Fantasy and Catastrophe,” explores the ways in which darkness shaped experiences of dictatorship between 1933 and 1939.

Jeffrey Berg Fellow

25/09/2026

Trans negativity names a negative relation to trans life, as it presents itself in the devaluation of trans people across contemporary discourses, the withholding of rights and care, and the mobilization of suffering in public policy and anti-gender movements. At the same time, trans negativity also names an exciting turn within trans thought that, drawing on debates that have shaped q***r theory for over two decades, refuses to be edifying and instead embraces the bleak, dissociative, and antagonistic. This symposium seeks to engage various senses of the negative and to elaborate its implications for trans study. Gathering scholars and artists working across psychoanalysis, aesthetics, theory, and political history, our program takes on negativity as an occasion for collective thought and practice.

Program:

Thursday, October 8, 4 - 5:30 pm
Maude Fife, 315 Wheeler Hall, UC Berkeley. Grace Lavery presents her new book Personal Demons, in conversation with Jessy Nyiri and Ava Kim.

Friday, October 9, 9.45 am - 6 pm
Maude Fife, 315 Wheeler Hall, UC Berkeley. Paper presentations and panel discussions with Cameron Awkward-Rich, Salar Mameni, Jack Halberstam, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Roshanak Kheshti, Joshua Falek, Eva Hayward, Jessy Nyiri, Damon Young, Lieks Hettinga, Ava Kim, Willa Smart, Hil Malatino, Ianna Hawkins Owen, Julian Kevon Kamilah Glover, aeryka hollis-o’neil, Eric Stanley, Chris Lee.

Saturday, October 10, 1 - 3 pm
The Lab, 2948 16th Street, San Francisco. Jack Halberstam and artist Leila Weefur in conversation, preceded by a reading by Cameron Awkward-Rich.

The Trans Negativity symposium is organized by Be Schierenberg and Simon(e) van Saarloos and sponsored by the Center for the Study of Sexual Culture (CSSC), the Center for Race and Gender, Othering & Belonging Institute, the Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry (CICI), Arts Research Center, the Townsend Center for the Humanities, the Trans Student Wellness Initiative (TSWI), The Big C, Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies, Gender & Women’s Studies, and the Departments of Rhetoric, German, and English at UC Berkeley.

Address

Shubra Khit

Opening Hours

Monday	9am - 5pm
Tuesday	9am - 5pm
Wednesday	9am - 5pm
Thursday	9am - 5pm
Friday	9am - 5pm

Telephone

+1 510-643-9670

Website

http://townsendcenter.berkeley.edu/

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