On October 3, 2020, UC Berkeley celebrated the 150th anniversary of admitting women as undergraduate students. The 150 Years of Women at Berkeley History Project has responded to Chancellor Carol Christ’s call to “convert this anniversary into a lasting archive” by documenting the struggles and achievements of students, faculty, and staff since 1872 — from the earliest days of “co-education,” to the “gender revolution” of the sixties and seventies, and beyond.

To join in the commemoration, the Townsend Center presents An Ongoing Revolution: Reflections on Gendered Struggles and Feminist Scholarship in the Humanities. Faculty members representing Comparative Literature, English, East Asian Languages & Cultures, History of Art, Music, and Spanish & Portuguese gather for a discussion of the role and experience of women at Berkeley, asking such questions as, how have departmental and disciplinary cultures changed over the years? How have issues of gender and feminism been brought to bear on scholarship and teaching? What has been the changing relationship between political battles in the streets and research in the academy? Whose stories have we lost track of as institutional life continues to transform? What fights are still to come?

Representations board member Catherine Gallagher (English) will moderate, joined by former board member Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby (History of Art), Francine Masiello (Comparative Literature and Spanish & Portuguese), current board member Mary Ann Smart (Music), and Sophie Volpp (Comparative Literature and East Asian Languages & Cultures).
About the Speakers:

Catherine Gallagher is Ida May and William J. Eggers Professor Emerita in the Department of English, and co-chair of the 150 Years of Women at Berkeley History Project. A long-standing board member of Representations, she is the author of a number of articles, including “The Politics of Culture and the Debate over Representation” (Representations 5), “George Eliot: Immanent Victorian” (Representations 90), and “The Formalism of Military History” (Representations 104).

Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby is the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor in the Arts and Humanities and winner of the Clark Prize for Excellence in Arts Writing. A former board member of Representations, her essays “Rumor, Contagion, and Colonization in Gros’s Plague-Stricken of Jaffa (1804)” (Representations 51), “Patina, Painting, and Portentous Somethings” (Representations 78), and “Negative-Positive Truths” (Representations 113) have appeared in the journal.

Francine Masiello is Sidney and Margaret Ancker Professor Emerita in the Departments of Comparative Literature and Spanish & Portuguese.

Mary Ann Smart is Gladyce Arata Terrill Professor of Music. A current board member of Representations, she is the co-editer the special forum on “Quirk Historicism” in Representations 132 and is the author of “The Queen and the Flirt” in Representations 104.

Sophie Volpp, professor of East Asian Languages & Cultures and Comparative Literature, specializes in Chinese literature of the 16th through 19th centuries.

Click Here to Watch the Livestream.

Through an engagement with the philosophies of Marcel Proust’s contemporaries Félix Ravaisson, Henri Bergson, and Georg Simmel, author Suzanne Guerlac (French) presents an original reading of Proust’s magnum opus, Remembrance of Things Past (A la recherche du temps perdu). Challenging traditional interpretations, Guerlac argues in Proust, Photography, and the Time of Life (Bloomsbury, 2020) that Proust’s novel is not a melancholic text, but one that records the dynamic time of change and the complex vitality of the real.

Situating Proust’s novel within a modernism of money, and broadening her analysis through the exploration of visual technologies and cultural developments of the period — including commercial photography, photojournalism, and pornography — Guerlac reveals that Proust’s true subject is the adventure of living in time, on both the individual and the social level, at a concrete historical moment.

Guerlac is joined by Representations board member Damon Young (French and Film & Media). After a brief discussion, they respond to questions from the audience.

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Suzanne Guerlac is the author of “Humanities 2.0: E-Learning in the Digital World” (Representations 116, Fall 2011) and “The Useless Image: Bataille, Bergson, Magritte” (Representations 97, Winter 2007) and a contributor to “Reflections on Durational Art” (Represenations 136, Fall 2016) for the Representations Special Issue Time Zones: Durational Art and Its Contexts.

Katrina Dodson will be in conversation with Representations author Kathryn Crim on the art of translation.

“To think and write beyond our own experience is a necessary transgression if we are to expand our understanding of the world,” Katrina Dodson writes of her approach to translating the work of Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector. “To translate the stories, I had to perform a double incarnation, to inhabit Clarice inhabiting her various characters.”

For her translation from the Portuguese of Lispector’s Complete Stories, Dodson won the 2016 PEN Translation Prize, the American Translators Association Lewis Galantière Prize, and a Northern California Book Award.

Translating Lispector became a quasi-religious endeavor for Dodson, who pinned a photograph of the author above her desk to help her channel her subject. “I did my best to divine where Clarice’s significant distortions of language lay and how I might convey them faithfully, to use a fraught term for translators,” Dodson writes in an essay in The Believer. “Yet we know there is no such thing as a perfect translation—the pieces that make up different languages never correspond exactly. In the end, it’s someone’s grubby fingerprints all over the Word of another, no matter how much the translator wants to let the spirit take over and speak through her. Translation is interpretation.”

Dodson holds a PhD in comparative literature from UC Berkeley and teaches translation at Columbia University. She is currently adapting her Lispector translation journal into a book, and translating the 1928 Brazilian modernist classic Macunaíma: The Hero with No Character by Mário de Andrade.

She talks with Kathryn Crim, who recently completed her PhD in comparative literature at UC Berkeley with a dissertation on “Fit and Counterfeit: The Emergence of a Documentary Aesthetic.”

Click here to watch the livestream.

For more on translation from Representations, see Haun Saussy’s “Death and Translation” from Issue 94, Spring 2006.