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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.

23/10/2026

Betsy Frederick-Rothwell is curator and head archivist at the Environmental Design Archives in the College of Environmental Design. She is at work on a project examining the historical transition from moderately-tempered to fully-controlled indoor environments between 1930 and 1950 in the built world as well as in professional and popular discourses.

21/10/2026

Another Wednesday means another ! Join us on November 4th at 12:00 pm in the Geballe Room. Modernism’s peak in the interwar and postwar decades coincided with the eruption of antifascist and decolonization movements globally, including the League against Imperialism, the Bandung Asian-African Conference, and the Non-Aligned Movement. Viewing artistic practices through the lens of the radical intellectual possibilities that these epoch-making events prompted, Atreyee Gupta (UC Berkeley History of Art) uncovers a modernist internationalism incongruous with Westernist cultural hegemonies. Modernism, she shows, cannot be separated from concepts of freedom and autonomy generated by Third World political struggles. Gupta mobilizes concepts including liberation, anti-imperialism, development, and modernization as essential analytic categories for art history, reorienting our understanding of both global modernism and Indian art.

Intertwining stories of art and liberation, aesthetics and decolonization, and intellectual practices and political revolution in the Third World, or what is now known as the Global South, Non-Aligned (Yale University Press, 2025) follows the far-flung interwar and postwar networks in which Indian artists and intellectuals such as Francis N. Souza, Abanindranath and Gaganendranath Tagore, and Jagdish Swaminathan participated alongside interlocutors like W. E. B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, Octavio Paz, André Malraux, and Le Corbusier in Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas.

Gupta is joined by Nathaniel Wolfson (Spanish & Portuguese). After a brief discussion, they respond to questions from the audience.

Registration requested via our website.

19/10/2026

Faculty members interested in pursuing external funding for their scholarly and creative work are invited to meet key members of the campus research support team and learn about the many services available to them on Friday, October 23 at 10:00 am on Zoom. Topics include:

Applying to federal agencies and private foundations
Proposal development services
Budget preparation
UC Berkeley proposal submission process
Research administration support
This online info session is designed for faculty members in the arts, humanities, and humanistic social sciences. After short presentations by session leaders, audience members have the opportunity to ask questions.

Participants:

Berkeley Research Development Office (BRDO):
Emma Attard
David Trinkle

Foundation Relations:
Margaret Guerrero

SHARE Research Administration:
David Wolf

Registration requested via our website.

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

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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