Townsend Center for the Humanities

In Human Forms: The Novel in the Age of Evolution (Princeton, 2019), Ian Duncan (English Department, UC Berkeley) shows how the novel became a major experimental instrument for managing a new set of divisions — between nature and history, individual and species, human and biological life. Duncan is joined by Kevin Padian (Department of Integrative Biology).

Loving Writing / Ovid’s Amores (Cambridge, 2019) offers a fresh reading of the Amores centered on the aggressive, opportunistic, pleasure-seeking character — the poet-lover of the collection, called Naso. Resisting the scholarly tendency to segregate the poet from the lover, Ellen Oliensis (Departments of Classics and Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley) teases out the affiliations between Naso's most “poetic” performances and his seamy erotic adventures, showing that his need to write the script of his own subjection corresponds with other features of his generally masochistic profile. Oliensis is joined by Timothy Hampton (Comparative Literature and French Departments; Townsend Center director).

In James Joyce and the Matter of Paris (Cambridge, 2019), Catherine Flynn (Department of English, UC Berkeley) explores the ways in which Joyce's imaginative consciousness was shaped by the paradigmatic city of European urban modernity. Joyce’s trip to the French metropole at the age of 20 sparked a question that motivated his work for the rest of his life: what, given the force of modern capitalism, is art?  Flynn is joined by Michael Lucey (Comparative Literature and French Departments).

In her debut short story collection, Beth Piatote (Ethnic Studies Department, UC Berkeley) explores Native American life in the modern world. The stories find unifying themes in the strength of kinship, the pulse of longing, and the language of return: a woman teaches her niece to make a pair of beaded earrings while ruminating on a fractured relationship; in 1890, two young men at college — one French and the other Lakota — each contemplates a death in the family; a Nez Perce-Cayuse family is torn apart as they debate the fate of ancestral remains in a reimagining of the Greek tragedy Antigone. The Beadworkers (Counterpoint, 2019) draws on indigenous aesthetics and forms to offer a powerful and sustaining vision of Native life. Piatote is joined by Kathleen Donegan (English Department).

In Pindar, Song, and Space (Johns Hopkins, 2019), Leslie Kurke (Classics and Comparative Literature Departments, UC Berkeley) and coauthor Richard Neer (University of Chicago) develop a new, integrated approach to classical Greece — a "lyric archaeology" that combines literary and art-historical analysis with archaeological and epigraphic materials. The focus of their study is the poet Pindar of Thebes, best known for his odes in honor of victors at the Olympic Games and other competitions. While recent classical scholarship has tended to isolate poetry, art, and archaeology, Kurke and Neer argue that poems, statues, bronzes, tombs, boundary stones, roadways, beacons, and buildings worked together as a suite of technologies for organizing and inhabiting space that was essentially political in nature. Kurke and Neer are joined by Mario Telò (Classics Department, UC Berkeley).

Anne Walsh (Dept. of Art Practice, UC Berkeley) engaged in an ongoing artistic response to surrealist painter Leonora Carrington’s 1974 feminist novella, The Hearing Trumpet, and spent time with Carrington before her death at age 94. In Hello Leonora, Soy Anne Walsh (No Place Press, 2019), Walsh casts herself as an “apprentice crone” who stalks old people and takes selfies with them, becomes a mother, passes through menopause, and attends “elder theater” classes. Walsh is joined by Julia Bryan-Wilson (History of Art Dept.), whose work is included in the book.

From the opening of trade with Britain in the 1850s, Japan occupied a unique and contradictory place in the Victorian imagination, regarded as both a rival empire and a cradle of exquisite beauty. In Quaint, Exquisite (Princeton, 2019), Grace Lavery (Dept. of English, UC Berkeley)explores the enduring impact of this dramatic encounter, showing how the rise of Japan led to a major transformation of Western aesthetics at the dawn of globalization. Lavery is joined by Judith Butler (Dept. of Comparative Literature).

In Climate Change and the Art of Devotion (Washington, 2019), Sugata Ray (History of Art Department, UC Berkeley) shows how this place-centered theology emerged in the wake of the Little Ice Age (ca. 1550-1850), an epoch marked by climatic catastrophes across the globe. In a major contribution to the emerging field of eco-art history, Ray compares early modern conceptions of the environment and current assumptions about nature and culture. Ray is joined by Whitney Davis (History of Art Department).

The fate of the food supply has slipped into a handful of the world’s largest companies, with more than half of commercial seed varieties owned by three agri-chemical companies. In Seeds of Resistance (Skyhorse, 2018) Mark Schapiro (School of Journalism, UC Berkeley) examines what this corporate stranglehold is doing to our daily diet, from the explosion of genetically modified foods to the rapid disappearance of plant varieties to the elimination of independent farmers who have long been the bedrock of our food supply. Schapiro is joined by Deirdre English (Journalism).

In None Like Us (Duke, 2018) Stephen Best (English Department, UC Berkeley) reappraises what he calls “melancholy historicism,” in which the imagination is directed toward the recovery of a “we” at the point of “our” violent origin. Through an examination of cultural texts including the literature of Toni Morrison and Gwendolyn Brooks and the visual art of El Anatsui and Mark Bradford, Best argues that there can be no “we” following from such a time and place, that black identity is constituted in and through negation. Best is joined by Damon Young (Film & Media and French Departments).