The Irrational Decision: How We Gave Computers the Power to Choose for Us

May 5th, 2026
4:00pm-5:15pm

REGISTER

Please join us on Tuesday, May 5th from 4:00pm-5:15pm for a talk on The Irrational Decision: How We Gave Computers the Power to Choose for Us, by Benjamin Recht, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley. Professor Recht will be joined in conversation with Marion Fourcade, Professor of Sociology and Director of Social Science Matrix.

This event is co-sponsored by the D-Lab; the Algorithmic Fairness and Opacity Group (AFOG); the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine & Society (CSTMS); and the UC Berkeley Departments of Sociology and Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences.

Abstract

Mathematicians and engineers of the 1940s set out to design machines that could act as ideal rational agents in the face of uncertainty. In this pursuit, a cluster of foundational mathematical technologies — including information theory, linear programming, game theory, and neural networks — emerged as a foundation for a mathematical formalization of rationality, reshaping how we think about human decision-making itself. The Irrational Decision traces how a narrow mathematical framework for computing came to define rationality in economics, public policy, and popular culture.

Recht’s talk will discuss how these seminal computational methods have evolved into a robust discipline and industry, with success stories in accelerating computers, regulating pharmaceuticals, and deploying electronic commerce. These examples will highlight how automated decision systems excel in specific sweet spots with clear rules, well-defined goals, and well-constrained contexts. They will also show how, outside these narrow contexts, the rational program tends to absurdity. Given these strengths and limitations, the discussion will explore how to best harness 80 years of unfathomable computational progress while preserving human agency and judgment.

About the Author

Benjamin Recht is a Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley. He is the recipient of a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, the 2012 SIAM/MOS Lagrange Prize in Continuous Optimization, the 2014 Jamon Prize, the 2015 William O. Baker Award for Initiatives in Research, and the 2017 and 2020 NeurIPS Test of Time Awards. He is the author of three books: Optimization for Modern Data Analysis (2022), with Stephen J. Wright; Patterns, Predictions, and Actions: Foundations of Machine Learning (2022), with Moritz Hardt; and The Irrational Decision: How We Gave Computers the Power to Choose for Us (2026).

View Map

Matrix on Point: The U.S. Dollar Hegemony in Transition

April 8th, 2026
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM PT

Part of the Matrix on Point Event Series

red downward arrow inside a magnifying glass placed over a U.S. dollar banknote symbolizes economic decline, financial crisis, or recession in the United States.

REGISTER

The global dominance of the U.S. dollar has long shaped international trade, financial markets, and geopolitical power. Amid shifting global dynamics and the rapid development of stablecoins and other digital assets, new questions are emerging around the structure and evolution of dollar hegemony. How are technological innovation and geopolitical change reshaping the international monetary system, and what possibilities lie ahead?

This panel will bring together scholars and industry voices to examine the foundation of U.S. monetary influence and the role of financial innovation in an evolving global economy. The panel will feature Barry Eichengreen, George C. Pardee & Helen N. Pardee Chair and Distinguished Professor of Economics and Political Science at UC Berkeley, Rohan Kekre, Assistant Professor of Finance at UC Berkeley Haas, and Chenzi Xu, Assistant Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley. Brian Judge, Research Director for the UC Berkeley Program on Finance and Democracy at BESI, will moderate.

Matrix on Point is a discussion series promoting focused, cross-disciplinary conversations on today’s most pressing issues. Offering opportunities for scholarly exchange and interaction, each Matrix On Point features the perspectives of leading scholars and specialists from different disciplines, followed by an open conversation. These thought-provoking events are free and open to the public.

Co-sponsored by the Clausen Center, the Institute for International Studies, the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative (BESI) Program on Finance and Democracy, and the UC Departments of Economics and Political Science.

Panelists

Barry Eichengreen is George C. Pardee & Helen N. Pardee Chair and Distinguished Professor of Economics and Political Science at UC Berkeley, where he has taught since 1987. He is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research (Cambridge, Massachusetts) and Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (London, England). In 1997-98 he was Senior Policy Advisor at the International Monetary Fund. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (class of 1997). Professor Eichengreen is the convener of the Bellagio Group of academics and economic officials and chair of the Academic Advisory Committee of the Peterson Institute of International Economics. He has held Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowships and has been a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (Palo Alto) and the Institute for Advanced Study (Berlin). He is a regular monthly columnist for Project Syndicate.

His books include The Populist Temptation: Economic Grievance and Political Reaction in the Modern Era (2018), How Global Currencies Work: Past, Present, and Future, with Livia Chitu and Arnaud Mehl, (2017), The Korean Economy: From a Miraculous Past to a Sustainable Future (Harvard East Asian Monographs) with Wonhyuk Lim, Yung Chul Park and Dwight H. Perkins, (2015), Renminbi Internationalization: Achievements, Prospects, and Challenges, co-edited with Masahiro Kawai, (2015), Hall of Mirrors: The Great Depression, The Great Recession, and the Uses-and Misuses-of History, (2015). He was awarded the Economic History Association’s Jonathan R.T. Hughes Prize for Excellence in Teaching in 2002 and the University of California at Berkeley Social Science Division’s Distinguished Teaching Award in 2004. He is also the recipient of a doctor honoris causa from the American University in Paris.

Rohan Kekre’s research interests are at the intersection of macroeconomics and finance, with a particular focus on international finance. Among other topics, he has studied the drivers of exchange rates and interest rates, the transmission of monetary policy through financial markets, and the unique roles of the U.S. in the international financial system. His papers have been published in leading journals such as American Economic Review, Econometrica, and Review of Economic Studies. Prior to joining UC Berkeley Haas, Kekre served on the faculty at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He received his AB, AM, and PhD from Harvard University.

Chenzi Xu is an assistant professor of economics with research at the intersection of finance, international economics, and economic history. Her work focuses on the relationship between financial institutions and the flow of capital and goods, with a particular interest in understanding how historical events shape and impact modern outcomes. Prior to joining UC Berkeley, she was an assistant professor of finance at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. She holds a BA from Harvard in economics and an MPhil from the University of Cambridge in economic history, where she was the William Shirley Scholar at Pembroke College and a Cambridge Overseas Trust Scholar.

Brian Judge is the research director of the Berkeley Program on Finance and Democracy at the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative (BESI), where he leads research on how finance drives inequality and erodes democratic governance. His current work focuses on central bank digital currencies and using large language models to demystify public budget documents. His first book, Democracy in Default: Finance and the Rise of Neoliberalism in America (Columbia University Press, 2024), explores how finance reshaped American political economy. His next book project, The Economy of Knowledge, examines how economic knowledge both constructs and constrains what can be known about what we call “the economy.” He has published in Policy & Society, New Political Economy, and the Cambridge Journal of Economics. Brian holds a Ph.D. in political science from UC Berkeley and was a policy fellow at the Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence. Before academia, he was a portfolio analyst at a hedge fund.

View Map

Social Science Matrix – BESI Open House

March 11th, 2026
4:00pm-5:30pm

REGISTER

Please register to join us on March 11 at 4:00pm for the very first Matrix-BESI Open House.

Co-organized by Social Science Matrix and the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative (BESI), this event is an opportunity to network with other members of the Berkeley social science community, engage with colleagues from different disciplines, and learn more about our projects, events, and funding and research opportunities.

Light bites and refreshments will be served.

All are welcome, though please note that advance registration is required.

We hope you can make it!

Marion Fourcade, Director, Social Science Matrix

Paul Pierson, Director, BESI

View Map

Scoring Justice: Risk Assessment Tools, Court Practices, and Fairness Perceptions

April 21st, 2026
12:00pm-1:30pm

A presentation of the UC Berkeley Computational Research for Equity in the Legal System Training Program (CRELS)

REGISTER

Please join us on Tuesday, April 21 at 12:00pm for a lecture by Simone Zhang, Assistant Professor of Sociology at New York University.

This talk is part of a symposium series presented by the UC Berkeley Computational Research for Equity in the Legal System Training Program (CRELS), which trains doctoral students representing a variety of degree programs and expertise areas in the social sciences, computer science and statistics. The talk is co-sponsored by the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative (BESI) Tech Cluster, the Department of Sociology, the Algorithmic Fairness and Opacity Group (AFOG), the Criminal Law and Justice Center, and the Center for the Study of Law and Society.

Abstract

Risk assessment algorithms are increasingly adopted to improve criminal court decisions, yet their consequences remain contested. This talk presents findings from two studies leveraging a randomized controlled trial of the Public Safety Assessment (PSA) — a popular pretrial risk assessment tool — that randomized access to risk reports across cases.

In the first study, I combine transcripts of court hearings with decision outcomes to examine how risk scores shape bail decisions. When courts had access to the PSA, judges imposed cash bail at higher rates when the tool recommended it, with risk assessments serving as a rhetorical resource to justify harsher conditions.

In the second study, I investigate whether the PSA’s influence on proceedings alters how the public perceives court decisions. I randomly assigned U.S. adults to read transcripts from hearings conducted with and without the PSA. Although the PSA shifted decision-making, participants rated algorithm-assisted and algorithm-unassisted decision-making as comparable in quality, fairness, and trustworthiness. Taken together, these findings suggest that algorithmic tools can alter the punitiveness of pretrial decisions without diminishing or enhancing public perceptions of courts, complicating prospects for public accountability.

About the Speaker

Simone Zhang is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at New York University and a CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar. Her research examines how classification systems, predictive models, and AI shape the distribution of benefits, burdens, and recognition in society. Much of her work focuses on the implications of these systems for institutional decision-making in social policy, education, and law. She received a PhD in Sociology from Princeton University.

View Map

Incommunicable: Toward Communicative Justice in Health and Medicine

April 9th, 2026
12:00pm-1:30pm

Part of the Authors Meet Critics event series

REGISTER

Please join us on Thursday, April 9th from 12-1:30pm for an Authors Meet Critics panel on the book Incommunicable: Toward Communicative Justice in Health and Medicine, by Charles Briggs, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley.

Professor Briggs will be joined in conversation by Elinor Ochs, Distinguished Research Professor of Anthropology at UCLA, and Eric Snoey, Department of Emergency Medicine, Alameda Health System at Highland Hospital and Clinical Professor in Emergency Medicine at the UCSF School of Medicine. Armando Lara-Millán, Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, will moderate.

The Social Science Matrix Authors Meet Critics book series features lively discussions about recently published books authored by social scientists at UC Berkeley. For each event, the author discusses the key arguments of their book with fellow scholars. These events are free and open to the public.

The panel is co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of Anthropology, the UC Berkeley School of Public Health, the Berkeley Center for Social Medicine, and the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine & Society.

About the Book

In Incommunicable, Charles L. Briggs examines the long-standing presumptions that medical discourse translates easily across geographic, racial, and class boundaries. Bringing linguistic and medical anthropology into conversation with Black and decolonial theory, he theorizes the failure in health communication as incommunicability, which negatively affects all patients, doctors, and healthcare providers. Briggs draws on W. E. B. Du Bois and the work of three philosopher-physicians—John Locke, Frantz Fanon, and Georges Canguilhem—to show how cultural models of communication and health have historically racialized people of color as being incapable of communicating rationally and understanding biomedical concepts. He outlines incommunicability through a study of COVID-19 discourse, in which health professionals defined the disease based on scientific medical knowledge in ways that reduced varieties of nonprofessional knowledge about COVID-19 to “misinformation” and “conspiracy theories.” This dismissal of nonprofessional knowledge led to a failure of communication that eroded trust in medical expertise. Building on efforts by social movements and coalitions of health professionals and patients to craft more just and equitable futures, Briggs helps imagine health systems and healthcare discourses beyond the oppressive weight of communicability and the stigma of incommunicability.

Panelists

Charles L. Briggs is the Alan Dundes Distinguished Professor and Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley; he is the co-director and graduate advisor of the UCB-UCSF Joint PhD Program in Medical Anthropology and the co-director of the Berkeley Center for Social Medicine. His books include The Wood Carvers of Córdova, New Mexico, Learning How to Ask, Competence in Performance, Voices of Modernity (with Richard Bauman), Making Health Public (with Daniel Hallin), Stories in the Time of Cholera and Tell Me Why My Children Died (both with Clara Mantini-Briggs), Unlearning: Rethinking Poetics, Pandemics, and the Politics of Knowledge, and Incommunicable: Toward Communicative Justice in Health and Medicine. He has received many awards and honors, including being elected in 2023 as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Elinor Ochs is Distinguished Research Professor of Anthropology at UCLA. She co-pioneered the field of language socialization, which examines how children and other novices become socio-culturally competent as they acquire language. Drawing upon fieldwork in Madagascar, Samoa, Italy and the United States, her studies bridge linguistic, psychological, and medical anthropology. Ochs directed the UCLA Center on Everyday Lives of Families (2001-2010), which analyzed how social class configures communication, connectedness, childcare, health, commensality, leisure, and work. She has led 18 major research projects, with support from NSF, NIMH, NICHD, NEH, Guggenheim Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Spencer Foundation, and Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Selected honors include MacArthur Fellow, Guggenheim Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences Member, and Honorary Doctorate from Linkoping University, Sweden.

Eric Snoey: For the past 35 years, Dr. Snoey has been an Emergency Medicine physician and core faculty at Highland Hospital; a teaching and safety net hospital in Oakland, California. His areas of expertise include cardiovascular emergencies, the application of point-of-care ultrasound and medical education. More recently, Dr. Snoey has begun to focus more on macro-issues and threats to the delivery of emergency healthcare: ER over crowding, the problem of over testing and defensive medicine, budget cuts, predicted work force shortages and the challenges of end-of-life care.

Armando Lara-Millán is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at UC Berkeley. He earned his PhD in Sociology from Northwestern University and is a former Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholar. He is the current chair-elect of the Sociology of Law Section of the ASA, a faculty affiliate of the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative, and is currently a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. Lara-Millán does political economy in sociology. For him that means studying changing markets and their enabling institutions, but in such a way that centers history, culture/knowledge, and politics. He is an ethnographer of well-positioned organizations and a historian of the fields those organizations shape.

REGISTER

View Map

Algorithms of Distinction: Class, Credit Scores, and Property in South Africa

March 18th, 2026
1:30pm

Part of the UC Berkeley Computational Research for Equity in the Legal System Training Program

REGISTER

Please join us on Wednesday, March 18, 2026 at 1:30pm for a public lecture by Julien Migozzi, an economic geographer and Assistant Professor in Development Studies at the University of Cambridge. Dr Migozzi’s lecture, “Algorithms of Distinction: Class, Credit Scores, and Property in South Africa,” will examine how 21st-century class dynamics become connected with data-driven stratification systems, focusing on the digital transformation of property markets.

This talk is part of a symposium series presented by the UC Berkeley Computational Research for Equity in the Legal System (CRELS) training program, which trains doctoral students representing a variety of degree programs and expertise areas in the social sciences, computer science and statistics. It is co-sponsored by Social Science Matrix, the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative (BESI) Tech Cluster, and the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology.

Abstract

How do persistent inequalities and rapid technological change shape class formation? Centred on South Africa, the most unequal country in the world, this presentation examines how contemporary class dynamics become intertwined with racialised, data-driven mechanisms of social sorting.

Integrating computational analysis with in-depth fieldwork across the suburbs and corporate boardrooms of Cape Town, I demonstrate how digital, legal, and financial transformations have reorganised the housing market around a data imperative. Once based on racial categories to exclude the majority from urban property under apartheid, the market is now structured around credit scoring to allocate mortgages and sort the “good” from the “bad” home-seeker, encoding racial inequalities in seemingly colour-blind market outcomes.

Thinking class from the realm of digitised markets, I document and theorise how the making of the South African middle-class rests upon the production of a “mortgaged periphery”, where middle-income households earn their middle-class stripes by scoring “high enough” to access debt-leveraged homeownership in gated estates. In this suburban, post-apartheid space, physical fences and algorithmic barriers regulate the production and access to housing wealth, materialising class boundaries through asset ownership, capital gains, property aesthetics, and debt relationships.

About the Speaker

Julien Migozzi is an economic geographer and an Assistant Professor in Development Studies at the University of Cambridge, after appointments at Oxford University and the École Normale Supérieure. At the intersection of geography, urban studies and economic sociology, Julien’s research investigates how digital technologies affect markets, cities, and inequalities, with a particular interest in housing and financial markets. At Cambridge, Julien is teaching a course on digital capitalism. He is a coauthor of the Atlas of Finance (Yale University Press, 2024).

View Map

Matrix Teach-In: Ula Taylor, “The Making of Frances M. Beal’s Black Feminist House”

February 19th, 2026
12:00 PM to 1:15 PM PT

Part of the Matrix Teach-Ins Event Series

REGISTER

Please join us on Thursday, February 19 at 12:00pm as Ula Taylor, Professor and Chair of the Department of African American Studies & African Diaspora Studies, will present a Matrix Teach-In. The talk will center on Professor Taylor’s current work in progress, an oral biography of Frances M. Beal.

This talk is co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of African American Studies and the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies.

About Matrix Teach-Ins

Have you ever wished you could hear your colleague deliver the lecture that students rave about, or revisit a favorite subject yourself? Matrix Teach-Ins are a new series designed to bring UC Berkeley’s most engaging social science lectures into a public setting. Instructors will share their favorite lesson, the one students remember long after the semester ends, as a stand-alone lecture reimagined for anyone curious to learn.

Abstract

In this talk, I am going to share with you snapshots into the making of Frances M. Beal’s Black Feminist House. A house that she describes as being built by hindsight bricks, moments where she questioned, critiqued, or became angry about racism and gender oppression. The scenes are from a larger book-length project that explores how Beal became both a feminist and a radical during the 1960s and 70s. Understanding her intellectual and political evolution is important for 21st-century activists because I explore fatigue and failures alongside empowering sisterhood, pleasurable heterosexual sex, and disciplined study. By doing so, I aim to bring to the fore the exhaustion and exhilaration.

About the Speaker

Ula Taylor earned her doctorate in American History from UC Santa Barbara. She is the author of The Promise of Patriarchy: Women and the Nation of Islam, The Veiled Garvey: The Life and Times of Amy Jacques Garvey, co-author of Panther: A Pictorial History of the Black Panther Party and The Story Behind the Film and co-editor of Black California Dreamin: The Crisis of California African American Communities.

Her articles on African American Women’s History and feminist theory have appeared in the Journal of African American History, Journal of Women’s History, Feminist Studies, SOULS, and other academic journals and edited volumes.

In 2013 she received the Distinguished Professor Teaching Award for UC Berkeley. Only 5% of the academic senate faculty receive this honor, and she is the second African American woman in the history of the University to receive this award.

View Map

New Directions: Colonial Legacies, Post-Colonial Perspectives

March 10th, 2026
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM PT

Part of the New Directions event series

REGISTER

Colonial legacies continue to shape political, social, and intellectual life. While colonialism is often treated as a historical period, its structures and logics persist in contemporary debates around race, territory, knowledge, and power. This panel brings together UC Berkeley graduate students from anthropology, geography, and sociology to examine how colonial histories are reproduced, contested, and reimagined across different contexts.

The panel will feature Anna Feign, PhD Student in Sociology, Andrea Lara-Garcia, PhD Candidate in Geography, and Sophia Perez, PhD Candidate in Geography. Samera Esmeir, Associate Professor of Rhetoric, will moderate.

Co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Departments of Geography, Anthropology, and Sociology.

Panelists

Anna Feign (Palmer) is a PhD student in Sociology at UC Berkeley. Her research examines the convergence of extractivism, (post)colonial development, and the climate crisis through a qualitative and spatial lens. She is a 2025-2026 Mentored Research Award Fellow and a Global Democracy Commons Fellow. She is a co-founder of the Caribbean Coalition at Berkeley and a member of the Anti-Colonial Democracy Lab. Anna holds a BA in sociology from Occidental College and earned her MA in sociology from UC Berkeley.

Andrea Lara-García is a PhD candidate in the UC Berkeley Department of Geography. A graduate of the University of Arizona, she studies the relationship between private property and state territoriality in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Her work has been supported by the Arizona Historical Society, Bancroft Library Fellowship, and Mentored Research Award.

Sophia Perez is a Chamorro filmmaker, a doctoral student in UC Berkeley’s Geography department, and a co-founder of the Critical Pacific Islands Studies Collective. Her research focuses on militarization in the Pacific, particularly the U.S. military presence in the Mariana Islands. She’s also interested in indigenous, community-based filmmaking and is currently directing Tip of the Spear, a documentary short funded by Pacific Islanders in Communications.

Samera Esmeir (moderator) is Associate Professor of Rhetoric at UC Berkeley. Her research and teaching are at the intersection of legal and political thought, Middle Eastern history and colonial and post-colonial studies. Her central intellectual focus thus far has been to examine how late-modern colonialism, with a particular focus on the Middle East, has introduced liberal juridical logics and grammars that in turn shaped modalities of political praxis, and how those have persisted in the post-colonial era and have traveled in different countries in the Middle East. Her first book, Juridical Humanity: A Colonial History (2012, Stanford University Press), pursues this problem in relation to colonial Egypt and examines how colonial juridical powers have reconfigured the concept of the human during the late-modern colonial era by bonding the human to the law. She is currently working on a second book project also guided by the intersectionality of law and politics. The project examines the encounter between revolutions and different legal traditions (including International law) since the eighteenth century, and traces the shifting legal sensibilities, and the legal theories informing them, to revolutions. In addition, she is working on a number of essays that focus on Palestine as a site for rethinking some concepts central to legal and political thought.

View Map

Trevor Jackson: “The Insatiable Machine: How Capitalism Conquered the World”

April 7th, 2026
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM PT

Part of the Authors Meet Critics event series

REGISTRATION FOR IN-PERSON ATTENDANCE HAS BEEN CLOSED.

REGISTER HERE TO RECEIVE A LINK TO JOIN THE LIVESTREAM VIA ZOOM.

Please join us on Tuesday, April 7th from 12:00pm-1:30pm for an Authors Meet Critics panel on the book The Insatiable Machine: How Capitalism Conquered the World, by Trevor Jackson, Associate Professor of History at UC Berkeley.

Professor Jackson will be joined in conversation by Chenzi Xu, Assistant Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley, and Dylan Riley, Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley. Abhishek Kaicker, Associate Professor of History, will moderate.

This event is co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Departments of Economics, History, and Sociology.

About the Book

Today, virtually the entire world lives under the economic system called capitalism, and most people alive have never known another. But as the economic historian Trevor Jackson argues in this powerful book, it wasn’t always capitalism, it didn’t have to be capitalism, and capitalism didn’t have to be this way. How did it happen?

With a firm grasp on history and economics and a keen eye for the telling anecdote, Jackson explains the rise of capitalism from the discovery of the New World to the First World War. A fast-paced work of global history that explores the role of Chinese mulberry trees, Dutch tulips, and whale blubber — along with Spanish conquistadors, Mexican mine workers, and English bankers — The Insatiable Machine traces capitalism’s development from the accidental construction of an international monetary system to the creation of banking, the emergence of a new form of slavery, fossil–fuel industrialization, and finally the global capitalist system spread by imperialism.

Panelists

Trevor Jackson is an economic historian who researches inequality and crisis, mostly but not exclusively in early modern Europe. His first book, Impunity and Capitalism: the Afterlives of European Financial Crises, 1690-1830, was published by Cambridge University Press in Fall 2022. His current research interests focus on the problem of gluts, overproduction, and over-accumulation since the 17th century, the problems of temporality and finitude in economic thought, and problems in the historical measurement and meaning of capital. He also has an ongoing research interest in the histories of extinction and catastrophe, as well as early modern occupational health. His second book, a synthetic history of early modern capitalism entitled The Insatiable Machine: How Capitalism Conquered the World, will be published by W.W. Norton in March 2026. He sometimes writes about money, banking, and economic crisis for the popular press, at places like Dissent, The Baffler, The Nation, and the New York Review of Books.

Chenzi Xu is Assistant Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley, with research at the intersection of finance, international economics, and economic history. Her work focuses on the relationship between financial institutions and the flow of capital and goods, with a particular interest on understanding how historical events shape and impact modern outcomes. Prior to joining UC Berkeley, she was an assistant professor of finance at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. She holds a BA and PhD from Harvard in economics and an MPhil from the University of Cambridge in economic history, where she was the William Shirley Scholar at Pembroke College and a Cambridge Overseas Trust Scholar.

Dylan John Riley studies capitalism, socialism, democracy, authoritarianism, and knowledge regimes in a broad comparative and historical perspective. His first book, The Civic Foundations of Fascism in Europe: Italy, Spain, and Romania 1870-1945 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), argues that fascist regimes arose paradoxically on the basis of strong civil societies in the pre-fascist period. Reviewers have called this book “the most original and provocative new analysis of the preconditions of Fascism that has appeared in years,” and “brilliant and courageous.” A second book, How Societies and States Count: A Comparative Genealogy of Censuses (with Rebecca Jean Emigh and Patricia Ahmed in preparation for Palgrave), argues, against state centered accounts of official information, that censuses work best where there is intense interaction between state and society. In addition, Riley has started a new project investigating the connection between the meaning and substance of democracy in interwar and post-war Europe. He has published articles in the American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, Catalyst, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Comparative Sociology, Social Science History, The Socio-Economic Review, and the New Left Review. He is a member of the editorial committee of the New Left Review.

Abhishek Kaicker (moderator) is an historian of Persianate South Asia (c. 1200-1900), with focus on the history of the Mughal empire. He is interested in questions of intellectual history and the history of concepts; early modern global history; religion, politics and the city; and more generally in the continuities between precolonial and postcolonial South Asia. His first book, The King the People: Sovereignty and Popular Politics in Mughal Delhi (Oxford University Press, 2020), shows how ordinary urbanites emerged as assertive political subjects in the Mughal capital of Shahjahanabad (Delhi) over the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries. He is now engaged in two new major research projects: one, a prehistory of the British conquest of Bengal in 1757 from the perspective of the Mughal empire; and another on the transformation of Mughal modes of popular politics into modern modes of communalism in North India under colonial rule in the 18th and 19th centuries. More immediately, he is writing a biography of Anand Ram Mukhlis, an eighteenth-century courtier, scribe, essayist, diarist, poet, connoisseur, gourmand, and inveterate aficionado of all things Delhi. Together with Professors Asad Ahmed (Berkeley) and Lawrence McCrea (Cornell), Kaicker is an editor of the Journal of South Asian Intellectual History, a new peer-reviewed venue for emerging conversations on the intellectual history and culture of premodern South Asia.

View Map

POSTPONED: Daniela Cammack: “Demos: How the People Ruled Athens”

April 20th, 2026
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM PT

Part of the Authors Meet Critics event series

POSTPONED

This event, originally scheduled for April 20th, has been postponed. Please stay tuned to the Matrix website and/or newsletter for future updates.

Join us for an Authors Meet Critics panel on the book Demos: How the People Ruled Athens, by Daniela Cammack, Assistant Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley, with a courtesy appointment in the Department of Ancient Greek and Roman Studies (formerly Classics). The book is scheduled to be published in May 2026 by Princeton University Press.

Professor Cammack will be joined in conversation by Alison McQueen, the Nehal and Jenny Fan Raj Civics Faculty Fellow in Undergraduate Teaching and an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University; and James Porter is Irving Stone Professor in Literature and Distinguished Professor in Rhetoric. Marianne Constable, Professor in the Department of Rhetoric, will moderate.

This event is co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of Political Science and the Department of History.

About the Book

Historians and political theorists have long believed that they knew the meaning of the ancient Greek word demokratia. To democracy’s detractors, it meant mob rule; to its supporters, it meant the rule of the entire citizen community over itself. This book argues, by contrast, that the ancient Greeks shared a conception of demokratia that partly overlapped with each of these interpretations while transcending them both. Demokratia was the organized rule of the mass over its leading men. Ordinary citizens, assembled in large numbers, ruled over their own politicians and thereby over the community as a whole.

This regime was underpinned by kratos, the power of the stronger, epitomized by the victories of the Athenian demos in civil conflicts in 508, 411, and 404 BC. But it was routinely manifested by the supreme political authority — or “sovereignty,” to use Hobbes’s term — of large crowds of ordinary men acting as policymakers, citizen-judges, and lawmakers. Especially in the years 403 to 322, which Aristotle correctly diagnosed as the era of “ultimate democracy,” the Athenians pulled off a feat unmatched by democrats today: making use of talented and ambitious politicians without being ruled by them. Demos asks: can we do the same?

Panelists

Daniela Cammack is Assistant Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley, with a courtesy appointment in the Department of Ancient Greek and Roman Studies (formerly Classics). She holds a B.A. in Modern History and English Literature (2002) from Oxford, an M.Phil. in Political Theory and Intellectual History (2005) from Cambridge, and a Ph.D. in Political Theory (2013) from Harvard, where her dissertation, Rethinking Athenian Democracy, won Harvard’s Noxon Toppan Prize for the best dissertation in Political Science. Before moving to Berkeley in 2019, she was a Junior Fellow in Harvard’s Society of Fellows and an Assistant Professor at Yale. Over the past decade, she has published in numerous edited volumes and journals including Political Theory, History of Political Thought, The Journal of Political Philosophy, Polis, The Journal of Politics, Classical Quarterly, Classical Philology, and The Journal of Sortition. Cammack studies the differences and similarities between ancient and modern democratic ideas and practices, focusing on the themes of crowd power, deliberation, representation, and sovereignty. Authors of special interest are Aristotle, Hobbes, and Rousseau. Her first book, Demos: How the People Ruled Athens, will be published in May 2026 by Princeton University Press. A sequel, entitled What was Democracy? A Short History, is in progress and also under contract with Princeton.

Alison McQueen is the the Nehal and Jenny Fan Raj Civics Faculty Fellow in Undergraduate Teaching and an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University. Her research focuses on early modern political theory and the history of International Relations thought. McQueen’s book, Political Realism in Apocalyptic Times (Cambridge University Press, 2018), traces the responses of three canonical political realists — Niccolò Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, and Hans Morgenthau — to hopes and fears about the end of the world. A second book project, Absolving God: Hobbes’s Scriptural Politics, tracks and explains changes in Thomas Hobbes’s strategies of Scriptural argument over time. She is also working on treason and betrayal in the history of political thought.

James Porter is Irving Stone Professor in Literature and Distinguished Professor in Rhetoric. His teaching and research has followed a few different trajectories. One is a study of Nietzsche’s thought, early and late (Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future and The Invention of Dionysus: An Essay on ‘The Birth of Tragedy’ (both Stanford University Press, 2000). Another is a study of models of aesthetic sensation, perception, and experience in ancient Greece and Rome, which he explored in The Origins of Aesthetic Thought in Ancient Greece: Matter, Sensation, and Experience (Cambridge University Press, 2010; pbk. 2016). A continuation of this inquiry is The Sublime in Antiquity (Cambridge University Press, 2016; pbk. 2020), which received the C. J. Goodwin Award of Merit from The Society for Classical Studies (2017). A further strand is Jewish literary and critical thought in authors from Spinoza to Freud, Adorno, and Arendt. His most recent book is Homer: The Very Idea (University of Chicago Press, 2021; pbk. 2023), which captures some of his interest in classical reception studies. He is co-editor of the preeminent series in this field, “Classical Presences” (Oxford University Press, 2005– ), and a member of the collective that published “Postclassicisms” (Chicago University Press, 2019). All of these topics spill over into his teaching, and many of them have begun their life there, because he finds that the classroom is one of the most productive places you can ever be.

Marianne Constable (moderator), Professor in the Department of Rhetoric, is a widely interdisciplinary legal scholar whose work on law crosses into both humanities and social sciences. Recipient of the James Boyd White Award from the Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities in 2011, she is the author of Our Word is Our Bond: How Legal Speech Acts (Stanford U. Press, 2014), Just Silences: the Limits and Possibilities of Modern Law (Princeton U. Press, 2005), and The Law of the Other: The Mixed Jury and Changes in Conceptions of Citizenship, Law and Knowledge (U. of Chicago Press, 1994; winner of the Law and Society Association’s J. Willard Hurst Prize in Legal History). An expert on law and language, she has co-edited two books on law and society, another in interdisciplinary legal studies, and a special issue in legal history. She has written numerous articles on such topics as Foucault and immigration law, Nietzsche and jurisprudence, the rhetoric of “community,” Arendt and the rhetoric of sustainability, law in the liberal arts, the paper shredder, and language in politics. She is currently completing a history of the “new unwritten law” that ostensibly exonerated women who killed their husbands in Chicago a hundred years ago; she also has some shorter pieces on philosophical dialogues in the works.

View Map

American Contradiction: Revolution and Revenge from the 1950s to Now

January 21st, 2026
4:00pm-5:15pm

REGISTER

Please join us on Wednesday, January 21, 2026 from 4:00pm-5:15pm for a book talk by Paul Starr, Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs, and Stuart Professor of Communications and Public Affairs, at Princeton University. Professor Starr will discuss his book, American Contradiction: Revolution and Revenge from the 1950s to Now.

The talk will be moderated by Jake Grumbach, Associate Professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley.

This talk is co-sponsored by the Goldman School of Public Policy, the Institute of Governmental Studies (IGS), and the Department of Sociology.

About the Book

How did Americans come to elect Barack Obama-and then Donald Trump? Those choices capture, in a nutshell, what Paul Starr calls the American contradiction.

The whole truth about America, Starr argues in this new history of the United States since the 1950s, has never been contained in one consistent set of values or interests. Our nation was born in the contradiction between freedom and slavery. Today it is beset by a contradiction between a changing people and a resisting nation, a nation with entrenched institutions that have empowered those who fear the changes and look to restore an old America of their imagining.

Starr tells this history from the dual standpoints of the progressive movements that changed the American people and of the movements that emerged in response. Black Americans, he argues, served as a model minority, setting in motion America’s twentieth-century revolutions in gender as well as race and rights. With industry’s decline and the rise of economic inequality, millions of Americans have felt dispossessed and want the old America back. Trump is their revenge. American Contradiction tells the story of how 1950s America became the almost unrecognizable America of the 2020s.

View Map

Paola Bacchetta, “Co-Motion: Rethinking Power, Subjects and Feminist and Queer Alliances”

February 5th, 2026
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM PT

Part of the Authors Meet Critics event series

REGISTER

Please join us on February 5th from 12pm-1:30pm for an Authors Meet Critics panel on the book Co-Motion: Re-Thinking Power, Subjects, and Feminist and Queer Alliances, by Paola Bacchetta, Professor and Chair of the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley.

Professor Bacchetta will be joined in conversation by Roshanak Kheshti, Professor of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley, and Leti Volpp, Professor and Robert D. and Leslie Kay Raven Chair in Access to Justice at UC Berkeley School of Law. Lawrence Cohen, Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley, will moderate.

This event is co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Institute for South Asia Studies, and the Department of Anthropology; Department of Gender and Women’s Studies; Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies; and Department of French Studies.

About the Book

In Co-Motion, theorist Paola Bacchetta proposes a new lexicon for analyzing power, subjects and alliances. Employing what she calls ‘theory-assemblages’ to describe how diverse theoretical and political approaches inspire movements and produce different kinds of alliances, Bacchetta engages the inseparability of power relations—such as colonialism, capitalism, racism, caste, misogyny, and speciesism—and how their combinations, operability, and the analyses they require, shift in different contexts and lives of subjects. Focusing on France, India, Italy, and the US from the 1970s to the present, Co-Motion addresses a wide activist, artivist, and social movement archive— group statements, banners, pamphlets, graffiti, posters, poetry, sit-ins, films, art exhibits—to think and feel with the many ways that people, historically and today, come together to act. Through her expansive engagement with varied bodies of scholarship, sites of analysis, and kinds of reading, Bacchetta offers new approaches to analyze, confront, and transform power, and to enact freedom.

Panelists

Paola Bacchetta is Professor and Chair in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley. She was the first Chair of Berkeley’s Gender Consortium. She currently serves as Co-coordinator of Decolonizing Sexualities Network, a transnational convergence of scholars, artivists and activists. Her other books include Fatima Mernissi For Our Times, co-edited with Minoo Moallem (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2023); Global Raciality: Empire, Postcoloniality, and Decoloniality, co-edited with Sunaina Maira, Howard Winant (New York: Routledge, 2019); Femminismi Queer Postcoloniali (co-edited with Laura Fantone, Verona, Italy: Ombre Corte, 2015); Gender in the Hindu Nation (India: Women Ink, 2004); and Right-Wing Women (co-edited with Margaret Power, New York: Routledge, 2002). She has published over 70 articles and book chapters on: feminist queer decolonial theory; transnational feminist and queer theory; lesbian and queer of color theorie artivisms and activisms; decolonial feminist translating; gender, sexuality and right-wing movements (India, France, U.S., Brazil). She has translated multiple texts, including Fatima Mernissi’s only (co-authored) film project, The Lionesses (French to English). She recently oversaw the translation of Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera : The New Mestiza into French (2022). She is the recipient of multiple awards: Harvard Divinity School, Fulbright, Mellon Foundation, State of Kerala Erudite Scholar Award, European Union funding awards, France-Berkeley Fund award, and more.

Leti Volpp is the Robert D. and Leslie Kay Raven Professor of Law in Access to Justice and the Director of the campus-wide Center for Race and Gender at UC Berkeley, where her research focuses on questions of immigration and citizenship. Her most recent publications include “Crossing Borders, Criminality, and Indigenous Sovereignty” in Critical Times (2024) and “Weep the People: On the Limits of Citizenship,” in UC Law Review (2024). She is the editor of Looking for Law in All the Wrong Places: Justice Beyond and Between (with Marianne Constable and Bryan Wagner) (Fordham University Press, 2019), and of Legal Borderlands: Law and the Construction of American Borders (with Mary Dudziak) (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). At Berkeley, she is also an affiliate of the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program, the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory, the Center for the Study of Law and Society, Gender and Women’s Studies, and the Institute for European Studies. She is also a core faculty member of the Othering and Belonging LGBTQ Citizenship Cluster and the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative.

Roshanak Kheshti is an anthropologist, feminist, queer and race theorist, born in Tehran, Iran, and raised in Nashville, Tennessee. Her work sits at the intersection of sound, the senses, film and performance studies with an emphasis on diaspora and psychoanalysis. She is the author of Modernity’s Ear: Listening to Race and Gender in World Music (NYU Press, 2015) and Switched-on Bach (Bloomsbury Academic, 33 1/3, 2019). She is currently completing her third book, tentatively titled “We See with the Skin: Zora Neale Hurston’s Synesthetic Hermeneutics”. She has previously published in the Radical History Review, American Quarterly, Current Musicology, Feminist Media Histories, Hypatia, Feminist Studies, GLQ, Theater Survey, and Sounding Out!

Lawrence Cohen is Professor in Anthropology and South and Southeast Asian Studies at UC Berkeley and the co-director of the Medical Anthropology Program. His current work is on large genealogical platforms and on the discovery of unknown kin as a mode of relatedness, with attention in particular to how kinship was digitized and monetized before the advent of genetic relatedness platforms. Like his work on Indian surveillance and platform capitalism, the focus is on “de-duplication” as an emergent rationality of both relationship and of truth. Much of this work has been centered in urban north and central India, particularly in Delhi, Kolkata, Lucknow, Mumbai, Patna, and Varanasi. In addition to working with undergraduate and graduate students and postdoctoral scholars at UC Berkeley, he has held appointments at the University of Zurich and Tokyo University. His primary appointment at UC Berkeley is in the Department of Anthropology, with a secondary appointment in the department of South and Southeast Asian Studies. He was hired sometime in the previous century to teach medical anthropology, and became a part of a terrific group of scholars in the Joint UC Berkeley-UCSF Medical Anthropology Program. He currently co-directs the Berkeley side of this two-campus program. Previously he directed the Institute for South Asia Studies and held the Sarah Kailath Chair in India Studies.

View Map