Category Archives : Past Events

Wikimedia’s gender trouble is documented. In a 2011 survey, the Wikimedia Foundation found that less than 15% of its contributors identify as female. The reasons for the gender gap are up for debate; suggestions include leisure inequality, how gender socialization shapes public comportment, and the sometimes contentious nature of Wikipedia’s talk pages. The practical effect of this disparity, however is not. Content is skewed by the lack of female participation. This represents an alarming absence in an increasingly important repository of shared knowledge. Let’s change that!

Lifes a Beach. Then you die. Christopher Chen, TDPS alumnus and Glickman Prize winner for The Hundred Flowers Project, returns to UC Berkeley with a bold new play! In this humorous, absurdist take on Euripides, King Agamemnon faces a heart-wrenching choice: Sacrifice his beloved only daughter to the gods, or condemn the entire Greek army to defeat before ever reaching Troy.

Following up on the question he asked in the title of his 2012 essay “Where is Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities?”, Alan Liu will present early drafts from a book he is writing that imagines a mode of cultural criticism appropriate and native to the digital humanities.

This year’s edition of the annual spring seriesDocumentary Voices features masters of the medium. We begin with Robert Flaherty’s landmark Nanook of the North; his effort to salvage traditional Inuit culture is considered to be the first documentary film ever made. Frederick Wiseman, best known for his complex chronicles of social institutions (including UC Berkeley!), made Titicut Follies to expose conditions at a state-run mental hospital.

The Institute for South Asia Studies at UC Berkeley is proud to announce that UC Berkeley’s Regents’ Lecturer for Spring 2015 is internationally renowned tabla virtuoso, Zakir Hussain. Zakir Hussain is one of the foremost percussionists of the contemporary world, not only of Indian classical music but also of jazz and world music.