Representations’ Alexei Yurchak in conversation with Mary Neuburger

Posted on April 21, 2015 by Reps Admin

Alexei Yurchak, Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at UC Berkeley and Representations board member, will participate in a conference on “The Pleasures of Backwardness: Consumer Desire and Modernity in Eastern Europe.” Yurchak will provide a response to the opening keynote address by Mary Neuburger, Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin and Director of the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies, entitled “To the ‘West’ and Back: Pleasure, Restraint, and ‘Civilization’ in Eastern Europe.”

The event will take place on Thursday, April 23, at 5:15pm in the Heynes Room at the Faculty Club, UC Berkeley. For more information about the conference schedule, please visit: http://history.berkeley.edu/events.

Yurchak’s recent essay, “Bodies of Lenin: The Hidden Science of Communist Sovereignty,” is available in Representations 129 (Winter 2015).

Representations’ Tom Laqueur on Museums and the Construction of Narrative

Posted on April 20, 2015 by Reps Admin

Thomas W. Laqueur, Helen Fawcett Professor of History at UC Berkeley and founding board member of Representations, will present a talk on “Museums and the Construction of Narrative” at the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life at UC Berkeley. Part of the Magnes Collection’s PopUp Exhibition series, in which speakers present lectures based on selected collection items, this talk will discuss the challenges that contemporary museums face in creating and preserving narratives. On display for this talk will be a 2500-year-old coin and a glass vessel from Ancient Judaea; a basketball jersey from Peninsula Temple Beth El in San Mateo (California); and a painting by Sarah Samuels Stein, Gertrude Stein’s sister-in-law, a student of Henri Matisse, and a collector of Matisse’s work.

The talk will take place at noon on Wednesday, April 22, at the The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, located at 2121 Allston Way, Berkeley.

John P. McCormick presents “On the Myth of the Conservative Turn in Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories”

Posted on April 1, 2015 by Reps Admin

John P. McCormick, Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, will present a talk at UC Berkeley entitled “On the Myth of the Conservative Turn in Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories.” The event will take place on Wednesday, April 1 at 5:00pm in 300 Wheeler Hall.

McCormick’s article, “Prophetic Statebuilding: Machiavelli and the Passion of the Duke” is available in Representations 115.1 (Summer 2011).

The University in Crisis

Posted on March 30, 2015 by Reps Admin

The University in Crisis:

The Destruction and Dismantling of the University of California

Panel Discussion | April 1 | 2-4 p.m. | 159 Mulford Hall, UC Berkeley

The Berkeley Anthropology Undergraduate Association presents a critical discussion of ongoing University of California issues such as budget, salary, and funding transparency and negotiations; student protests and administrative response; corporate and private interest involvement on campus; faculty, employee, and student unions’/associations’ interests; curriculum standards and canons of knowledge; and academic freedom.

UCB Faculty Panelists: Laura Nader, Professor, Department of Anthropology; Paul Rabinow, Professor, Department of Anthropology; Brian Barsky, Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences; James Vernon, Professor, Department of History.

James Vernon, with Colleen Lye and Christopher Newfield, edited the 2011 Representations special issue The Humanities and the Crisis of the Public University.

Death with Interruptions

Posted on March 12, 2015 by Reps Admin

Death With Interruptions premiere and associated events

In conjunction with the premiere of the opera Death with Interruptions, co-created by Representations founding editor Thomas Laqueur, two free public discussions will be held at UC Berkeley. Based on Nobel Prize winner José Saramago’s novel of the same name, Death with Interruptions features music composed by Kurt Rohde and a libretto by Laqueur.

On Wednesday, March 18, longtime Saramago translator Margaret Jull Costa will join in discussion of the opera with Dennis Washburn (Jane and Raphael Bernstein Professor in Asian Studies and Chair of Comparative Literature at Dartmouth and translator of the forthcoming Norton edition of Tale of Genji), Robert Alter (Class of 1937 Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley and translator of Genesis and The Five Books of Moses), and Paula Varsano (Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures at UC Berkeley and translator of premodern Chinese poetry). The event will take place from 5:00-7:00 pm in Room 308A in the Doe Library.

On Thursday, March 19, Representations editorial board co-chair Mary Ann Smart leads a discussion of the opera with Laqueur, Kurt Rohde (Professor of Music at UC Davis), Majel Connery (Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Music at UC Berkeley and co-founder and executive director of Opera Cabal), and Shalom Goldman (Professor of Religious Studies and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University). The event will take place from noon to 2:00 pm in 3335 Dwinelle Hall.

Ticketing information for the San Francisco performances at ODC Theater on March 19 and March 21 can be found on the Left Coast Ensemble’s website.

A free noon concert will be offered Monday, March 16 at UC Berkeley in Hertz Hall. Please see the event listing for more information.

Leah Price presents “Reading Against Time”

Posted on March 10, 2015 by Reps Admin

Leah Price, Francis Lee Higginson Professor of English at Harvard University, will present a talk at UC Berkeley entitled “Reading Against Time” The event will take place on Wednesday, March 18 at 4:00pm in 3335 Dwinelle Hall.

Price’s article, “From The History of a Book to a “History of the Book” appeared as part of the Representations 108 special issue on “Surface Reading” (Fall 2009). More recently, she contributed a response to the “Search” Special Forum, available in Representations 127 (Summer 2014).

Neoliberalism + Biopolitics | Conference

Posted on February 27, 2015 by Reps Admin

Neoliberalism + Biopolitics | Conference

February 27-28, 2015

Maude Fife Auditorium, Wheeler Hall, UC Berkeley

Featuring Representations editor Colleen Lye and authors Christopher Newfield and James Vernon. (Lye, Newfield, and Vernon are also the editors of the Representations special issue The Humanities and the Crisis of the Public University, 2011.)

The Neoliberalism and Biopolitics conference investigates the role of neoliberalism and biopolitics as both contemporary objects of study and paradigms of analysis for humanistic and social scientific inquiry. Organized by Berkeley’s Program in Critical Theory, the conference brings together diverse scholars to evaluate contemporary work on neoliberalism and biopolitics, while also interrogating the compatibility of different approaches seeking to deploy both concepts.

For the conference schedule, please visit nbpc.berkeley.edu.

Sponsors: Cultural Services-French Embassy in the United States, French American Cultural Society, and the University of California Humanities Research Institute along with UC Berkeley’s Program in Critical Theory, Divisions of Arts & Humanities and Social Sciences, Center for the Study of Law & Society, Class of 1936 First Chair of Political Science funds, Departments of English, Political Science, Rhetoric, and Sociology, Maxine Elliot Professor funds, and The Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities.

Eric Hayot presents “What Happens to Literature If Persons Are Artworks?”

Posted on February 3, 2015 by Reps Admin

Eric Hayot, Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at Pennsylvania State University, will present a talk at UC Berkeley entitled “What Happens to Literature if Persons are Artworks?” The event will take place on Thursday, February 12 at 4:00pm in the Maude Fife Room (Wheeler Hall, 3rd floor).

Hayot for blog

The premise of the talk is that the ethics of reading that dominates the human sciences is borrowed essentially wholesale from a Romantic relation to the humanistic object of study, one of whose origins can be found in Kant. Hayot argues that this ethics is neither practically nor philosophically viable, and so he proposes an alternative to it that also, along the way, would produce a new way of thinking about the relationship between humans, artworks, and the market.

The first decade of Hayot’s career focused on what he describes as “the ways in which China (and a variety of correlates each working to undermine the geographic, cultural, or political singularity of the word “China”) have affected the intellectual, literary, and cultural history of the West (similarly undermined).” His “Chinese Bodies, Chinese Futures” is available in Representations 99 (Summer 2007).

Sarah Winter presents “ ‘Have-his-carcase’: Habeas Writs, (Human) Rights, and Pickwick”

Posted on December 1, 2014 by Reps Admin

Sarah Winter, Professor of English and Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Connecticut, will present an upcoming talk at UC Berkeley entitled “’Have-his-carcase’: Habeas Writs, (Human) Rights, and Pickwick.”

The event will take place on Monday, December 8 at 5pm in 306 Wheeler Hall. The talk will focus on a pre-circulated paper (to obtain a copy, contact Wendy Xin at wendy.xin@berkeley.edu). The event is sponsored by the Nineteenth Century British Cultural Studies Townsend Center Working Group and the Florence Green Bixby Chair in English.

Sarah Winter’s essay, “Darwin’s Saussure: Biosemiotics and Race in Expressions,” winner of the North American Victorian Studies Association’s Donald Gray Prize for the best article in Victorian studies from 2009, is available in Representations 107 (Summer 2009).

Quirk Historicism

Posted on October 23, 2014 by Reps Admin

Quirk Historicism and the End(s) of Art History: A One-Day Symposium

Organized by Nicholas Mathew and Mary Ann Smart

Saturday, Nov. 1, UC Berkeley
Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall, Townsend Center for the Humanities, UC Berkeley

In many humanities disciplines, the past twenty years or so have witnessed a dramatic expansion in the types of objects and ideas that can be meaningfully invoked in the course of historical study. One consequence of this has been a new reveling in the allure of objets trouvés or historical micronarratives – the conversion of the obscurity, strangeness, and distance of historical debris into a form of rhetoric, which frequently acts as a substitute for more conventional forms of argument or exposition. The emergence of this tendency, which we’re calling Quirk Historicism, is thus partly a story about how historical study has been turned into a kind of aesthetic experience.

Participants include Nicholas Mathew, Mary Ann Smart, James Davies, Emily Dolan, Deirdre Loughridge, James Currie, Benjamin Piekut, Aoife Monks, Ellen Lockhart, Benjamin Walton, Thomas Laqueur, and Alan Tansman.

To find out more, visit the conference website at http://quirkhistoricism.wordpress.com.