Past Events

Please join us on November 15 at 5:00pm for a talk by Nivedita Menon, Professor at Centre for Comparative Politics and Political Theory at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. Professor Menon will discuss her book, Secularism as Misdirection: Critical Thought from the Global South, and will be joined in conversation by Poulomi Saha, co-director of the Program in Critical Theory at UC Berkeley.

Register to join us in person for an Authors Meet Critics panel on "Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights," by Dylan Penningroth, Professor of Law and Alexander F. and May T. Morrison Professor of History at UC Berkeley, and Associate Dean, Program in Jurisprudence and Social Policy / Legal Studies at Berkeley Law. With Ula Yvette Taylor, Professor and 1960 Chair of Undergraduate Education in the UC Berkeley Department of African American Studies and African Diaspora Studies; and Eric Schickler, Professor, Jeffrey & Ashley McDermott Endowed Chair in the Charles and Louise Travers Department of Political Science at UC Berkeley.

Join us on October 31, 2023 as a group of panelists will discuss the current state of commercial real estate in San Francisco — and what lies ahead. Panelists include Ted Egan, Chief Economist of the City and County of San Francisco; Nicholas Bloom, the William Eberle Professor of Economics at Stanford University; and Nancy Wallace, the Lisle and Roslyn Payne Chair in Real Estate Capital Markets at Berkeley Haas. Amir Kermani, Associate Professor of Finance and Real Estate at the Haas School of Business and Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, will moderate.

Register to attend a mini-conference focused on the legacy and impact of W.E.B. Du Bois in the field of sociology, with two panels and a keynote presentation by José Itzigsohn, Professor of Sociology, Brown University.

Register to attend an Authors Meet Critics panel on the book "Reactionary Mathematics: A Genealogy of Purity," by Massimo Mazzotti, Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of History and the Thomas M. Siebel Presidential Chair in the History of Science. Professor Mazzotti will be joined in conversation by Matthew L. Jones, the Smith Family Professor of History at Princeton University, and David Bates, Professor of Rhetoric at UC Berkeley. Thomas Laqueur, the Helen Fawcett Distinguished Professor Emeritus at UC Berkeley, will moderate.

Please join us fon October 17 for a talk by Vincent Bevins, an award-winning journalist and correspondent, focused on his new book, "If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution." The panel will be moderated by Daniel Aldana Cohen, Assistant Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley and Director of the Socio-Spatial Climate Collaborative, or (SC)2.

Please join us as Simon Johnson, Ronald A. Kurtz (1954) Professor of Entrepreneurship, MIT Sloan School of Management, discusses his recent co-authored book Power and Progress, based on a thousand years of history and contemporary evidence, in conversation with Brad DeLong, Professor of Economics, UC Berkeley.

From Zoom classrooms to students leaving higher education, colleges have needed to change modalities to adapt to public health risks and the emergence of new technologies. Please join us on October 5, 2023 at 4pm for a panel discussion on the future of higher education, featuring Jonathan Glater, Professor of Law and Associate Dean, J.D. Curriculum and Teaching at Berkeley Law; Michal Kurlaender, Chancellor’s Leadership Professor at the UC Davis School of Education; and Mitchell Stevens, Professor of Education at Stanford University.

Please join us on October 4, 2023 from 4:00pm-6:00pm for a talk by Michèle Lamont, author of "Seeing Others: How Recognition Works — and How It Can Heal a Divided World." Lamont is a Professor of Sociology and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, where she is also the Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies. Co-sponsored by Berkeley Law, the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology, the Berkeley Immigration and Migration Initiative (BIMI), and the Center for Race & Gender. 

This talk will feature Peter Spiegler, Senior Researcher at The New Institute of Political Economy, celebrating the launch of Spiegler's new report, “Marketcrafting" (co-authored with Chris Hughes), which argues for a specifically progressive marketcrafting vision that can achieve major policy goals in a just and equitable manner while also minimizing inflationary impacts.

In this Matrix on Point panel, experts will discuss current events in light of Iran’s history and the significance of gender in contemporary protest movements. Panelists include Sholeh Asgary, an interdisciplinary artist and lecturer at UC Berkeley, and Minoo Moallem, Professor of Gender and Women's Studies. Moderated by Cihan Tuğal, Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley. Register to attend.

The Biden administration has resurrected industrial policy with a vengeance, reviving old intellectual debates about the virtues and vices of industrial policy and sparking new ones. This program brings together scholarly debates about industrial policy with a discussion of the practical challenges of designing and implementing industrial policy in the United States. Register to attend.