Past Events

Presented by the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion, Dr. Bradley Onishi will come to Matrix for the Berkeley Lecture on Religious Tolerance, titled, “Project 2025, Christian Nationalism, and November Elections.” Dr. Onishi s a member of the faculty of the University of San Francisco and co-host of the podcast, “Straight White American Jesus.”

In this Matrix on Point panel, UC Berkeley experts will discuss the recent surge in warfare in Ukraine, Gaza, and other regions. The panel will feature Michaela Mattes, Associate Professor of Political Science; Andrew W. Reddie, Associate Research Professor at UC Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy; and Daniel Sargent, Associate Professor of History and Public Policy at UC Berkeley. Moderated by Vinod Aggarwal.

Register to join us on Tuesday, September 17, 2024 for a lecture by Jacob Faber, Associate Professor of Sociology and Public Service in New York University's Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service, with a joint appointment in NYU's Sociology Department. Professor Faber's talk will focus on the role of inequality across lending institutions in racial discrimination in mortgage lending.

Join us on Sept. 16 for an Authors Meet Critics panel on the book "Puta Life: Seeing Latinas, Working Sex," by Juana María Rodríguez, Professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. Professor Rodriguez will be joined in conversation by Clarissa Rojas, Associate Professor of Chicana/o Studies at UC Davis, and Courtney Desiree Morris, Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley. The discussion will be moderated by Alberto Ledesma, Assistant Dean for Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity in the Division of Arts & Humanities at UC Berkeley.

UC Berkeley students, faculty, and staff are invited to join us on May 8, 2024 from 2:00pm-3:00pm for a town hall meeting with Gita Gopinath, the First Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund. The event will feature an interview of Dr Gopinath conducted by current UC Berkeley students on topics ranging from debt sustainability to economic fragmentation and the role of the dollar in the global economy, followed by an open question period.

Register to join us on May 1 at 3:30pm for a lecture by Paul Seabright, British Professor of Economics in the Industrial Economics Institute and Toulouse School of Economics at the University of Toulouse, France, focused on his book "The Divine Economy: How Religions Compete for Wealth, Power and People," a novel economic interpretation of how religions have become so powerful in the modern world. Moderated by Duncan MacRae, Associate Professor in the Department of Ancient Greek and Roman Studies at UC Berkeley.

Why did the shift to work from home endure, rather than reverting to pre-pandemic levels? Join us on April 26 for a lecture by Steven J. Davis, the Thomas W. and Susan B. Ford Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR). Davis will consider how work-from-home rates vary by worker age, sex, education, parental status, industry and local population density, and why it is higher in the United States than other countries, as well as some implications for pay, productivity, and the pace of innovation.

Please register to join us on April 22 at 3:30pm for a panel on "Caste, Education, and Social Struggle in Modern India," featuring Ajantha Subramanian, Professor of Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center, and Shailaja Paik, the Charles P. Taft Distinguished Professor of History and Affiliate in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Asian Studies at the University of Cincinnatti. Moderated by Aarti Sethi, Assistant Professor at the Department of Anthropology at UC Berkeley, and 2023-2024 Matrix Faculty Fellow.

The Department of African American Studies Banned Scholars Program presents a conversation between Alisha Gaines and Robin D. G. Kelley. The scholars will discuss the defense of academic freedom and public higher education and the importance of Black study in the face of the current racist backlash. 

Please join us on Wednesday, April 17 at 12:00pm for an in-person lecture by Dr. Alex Hanna, Director of Research at the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR). A sociologist by training, her work centers on the data used in new computational technologies, and the ways in which these data exacerbate racial, gender, and class inequality. Presented as part of the CRELS Symposium Series.

Join the Department of African American Studies for a talk from the first scholar in residence of the Banned Scholars Program: Dr. Alisha Gaines. In “Children of the Plantationocene,” Alisha Gaines considers two interrelated questions: MacArthur Genius Tiya Miles’s 2020 query in The Boston Globe, “What should we do with plantations?;” and Christina Sharpe’s question in In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, “how do we defend the dead?”

Join us on April 8 for an Author Meets Critics panel on the book, Sweet Deal, Bitter Landscape: Gender Politics and Liminality in Tanzania’s New Enclosures, by Professor Youjin Chung, Assistant Professor in the Energy and Resources Group and the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at UC Berkeley.