Past Events

Professor Kadji Amin, Associate Professor of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Emory University, will present a talk entitled “Training Bourgeois Selves: Magnus Hirschfeld and the Subsumption of Pederasty," focused on a key architect of modern sexuality, the German Jewish homosexual sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld.

The pandemic and the war in Ukraine have reshaped global geopolitics, trade, and security. How will these changes affect the relationship between the US and China, Europe, and the Global South? This panel will feature Mariano-Florentino (Tino) Cuéllar, President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; James Fearon, Theodore and Frances Geballe Professor in the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences; and Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, Director of Research of the International Monetary Fund. John Zysman, Professor Emeritus at UC Berkeley, will moderate.

Please register to join us on February 15 for a Matrix Distinguished Lecture by Mariano-Florentino (Tino) Cuéllar, the tenth president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. A former justice of the Supreme Court of California, Justice Cuéllar served two U.S. presidents at the White House and in federal agencies, and was a faculty member at Stanford University for two decades.

Register to join us on February 1, 2023 at 1pm for an Authors Meet Critics panel on "Microverses: Observations from a Shattered Present," by Dylan Riley, Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley. Riley will be joined in conversation by Colleen Lye and Donna Jones from the UC Berkeley Department of English; the panel will be moderated by Alexei Yurchak, Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley.

In this webinar, representatives from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the European Commission (EC), and the Association of State Floodplain Managers (ASFPM) will talk about how the concept of "nature-based solutions" is being conceptualized in the context of risk management in the US, Europe, and beyond.

Join us for a panel on the outcome of this year’s midterm elections, hosted by the Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research. Panelists Lynn Vavreck, Marvin Hoffenberg Professor of American Politics and Public Policy at UCLA, Eric McGee, Senior Fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, and Gabriel Lenz, Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley, will help us understand and interpret the election results.

Register to join us on November 9 for an "Authors Meet Critics" panel on "How the Clinic Made Gender: The Medical History of a Transformative Idea," a new book by Sandra Eder, Associate Professor of History at UC Berkeley and Acting Director of the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine and Society (CSTMS). Eder will be joined in conversation by Professors Laura Nelson and Danya Lagos; the panel will be moderated by Catherine Ceniza Choy.

What is the future of the modern university in an emerging global context of international competition? Join us for a discussion with Harvard University's William C. Kirby and Nicholas Dirks, President and CEO, New York Academy of Sciences, and former Chancellor of UC Berkeley.

Join us on October 20 for a Matrix on Point panel on the implications of the conservative turn in the Supreme Court. With Thomas Biolsi, Professor of Comparative Ethnic Studies and Native American Studies; Khiara Bridges, Professor of Law at UC Berkeley School of Law; Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean, Jesse H. Choper Distinguished Professor of Law at Berkeley Law; and Ronit Stahl, Associate Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of History. Co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley School of Law.

Join us on October 14 for an Authors Meet Critics panel on "Keeping It Unreal: Comics and Black Queer Fantasy," by Darieck Scott, Professor of African American Studies at UC Berkeley. Scott will be joined in conversation by Ula Taylor and Scott Bukatman, and Greg Niemeyer will moderate.

Presented by the Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research, this panel will focus on challenges related to public opinion polling — and how they can be addressed. Panelists include Elliott Morris, Data Journalist and Correspondent, The Economist; Mark Di Camillo, Director, IGS Survey, UC Berkeley; Erin Hartman, Assistant Professor, UC Berkeley; and Jon Cohen, Chief Research Officer, Momentive/SurveyMonkey. The panel will be moderated by Jack Citrin, Professor of the Graduate School, UC Berkeley.

Algorithms can be complex, opaque, and intimidating—and it can be tempting to pretend that hard moral questions have simple technological answers. This "Authors Meet Critics" panel will focus on the book "Voices in the Code: A Story About People, Their Values, and the Algorithm They Made," by David Robinson, a visiting scholar at Matrix, in conversation by Iason Gabriel and Deirdre Mulligan.