Tag: Events
Lunch Poems: Michael Palmer
When: 12:10 pm – 12:50 pm, October 6, 2016
Where: Morrison Library
Cost: Free and open to the public
See the 2016-2017 series schedule.
From the Lunch Poems website:
Michael Palmer is a poet and translator who for over forty years has worked with the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company and has collaborated with many composers and visual artists. Among his numerous awards is the Arts and Letters Prize in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His work has been translated into over thirty languages and he himself has translated poems and prose from French, Brazilian Portuguese, and Russian. He has taught at universities in the United States, Europe and Asia. His most recent publications are Active Boundaries: Selected Essays and Talks, Madman With Broom (selected poems with Chinese translations by Yunte Huang), and Thread. Palmer’s new book of poems, The Laughter of the Sphinx, was published in 2016 by New Directions.
Ecosystems of California: author celebration Oct. 7
Date: Friday, October 7
Time: 5:00 – 6:30 pm
Location: Marian Koshland Bioscience & Natural Resources Library, 2101 VLSB
Free and open to the public
The event will include a panel discussion with some of the UC Berkeley contributors; light refreshments will be offered.
Event sponsored by the UC Berkeley Library, Life & Health Sciences Division.
The Library attempts to offer programs in accessible, barrier-free settings. If you think you may require disability-related accommodations, please contact Bioscience Librarians, 510-642-0456; bios@library.berkeley.edu prior to the event.
Post submitted by:
Susan Koskinen, Becky Miller, Elliott Smith, Life & Health Sciences Librarians
Global comics exhibit draws on librarian’s diverse background
Story by Damaris Moore, Library Communications
Video by Campus News Services; see story by Public Affairs
In 1991, Liladhar Pendse was working in food services at UCLA Catering after a move from the Soviet Union in search of a fresh start. A polyglot fluent in seven languages and familiar with an additional 13, Pendse frequently visited the library to borrow books from Russia and India. There, he encountered a librarian who ended up changing the course of his life.
Eudora Loh encouraged Pendse to attend classes and to consider librarianship as a career. “I was intimidated by librarians and computers,” Pendse recounts, “but she was so kind, showing me how to locate a book and walking me to the stacks. We started talking, became friends, and in time she encouraged me to attend classes at a local community college.”
Twenty five years and four degrees later, Pendse combines his passion for diversity, his love of language and his quest to share knowledge and information as a scholar librarian at UC Berkeley. This month, Pendse’s rich understanding of global materials is on display in an exhibit of comics and graphic novels from a dizzying array of cultures, including Egypt, Poland, South Africa, Israel, the Czech Republic, Colombia, and Japan.
“Beyond Tintin and Superman: The Diversity of Global Comics” can be viewed in Doe Library’s Bernice Layne Brown Gallery through March 2017. Pendse hopes that the exhibit will inspire viewers to reflect on issues treated in the materials — around censorship, race relations, political agendas and gender biases.
“The world has always been a violent place,” says Pendse. “And so my question as a professional is how can I contribute to peace? Through building our uniquely rich collections, and making information available, I believe I am contributing to increased understanding in the world and in cultures at large.”
From India to Belarus and the U.S.
Pendse grew up primarily in Mumbai, but spent parts of his youth in several regions of the then-Soviet Union due to the tumultuous political climate of the time. Although he had earned an M.D. in Internal Medicine in Belarus, Pendse realized he had to start over when he moved to the United States. He worked a variety of jobs while living in Los Angeles, and eventually found that education was his path to success.
He earned his BA in History and Arabic/Islamic Studies with honors from UCLA in 2004. After working in the UCLA library, he earned his MLIS and an MA in Latin American Studies. Following positions at UCLA’s Library and at Princeton, he came to Berkeley’s University Library in 2012. In 2013, he defended his Ph.D. at UCLA.
Growing up in three very different cultures inspired Pendse to focus his work on inclusion and acceptance of different types of people. He hopes that the materials in the “Beyond Tintin and Superman: The Diversity of Global Comics” exhibit help break down cultural barriers by offering authentic, personal accounts of social and political issues around the world.
The comics on display were curated by Pendse and include comics from his own personal collection. There is a copy of the DC Comics 1987 classic, Watchmen, as well as graphic novels and comics covering atomic bomb survivors, young Yemeni women forced into marriage, a collection created in response to the January 2015 terrorist attack on the French satirical weekly magazine Charlie Hebdo, love in a Japanese boys’ boarding school, and a translation of a two-volume work of a French professor of Middle Eastern studies/historian and an award-winning artist that tells the complicated stories of the United States involvement in the Middle East.
“One person, one tongue”
At UC Berkeley, Pendse’s title is as long as an arm — Librarian for East European, Armenian, Caucasus, Central Asian, Balkan, Baltic, and Mongolian Studies, and Acting Librarian for African Studies.
His knowledge of many different languages has empowered him to work effectively across a diverse group of faculty, students and visiting scholars. Along with fluency in Marathi and Hindi/Urdu, Russian, Gujarati, Portuguese, Spanish, and English, he is at an intermediate level in Azerbaijani, Sanskrit, Arabic, and Turkish; and basic in Armenian, Romanian, French, Italian, Swahili, Polish, Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian, Slovak, and Turkmen.
Previous exhibits Pendse has helped curate include displays of posters and printed works from Cuba and Soviet Union during the Cold war, and on the 1867 purchase of Alaska, highlighting the Library’s Russian-American collections. He is involved in planning several future exhibits, one on popular literature in Brazil, and another on Bollywood and Africa.
Asked about his extraordinary gift for languages, Pendse ties it to an abiding interest in understanding between cultures. A few years ago, an elderly woman in Istanbul repeated a saying to him: “one person one tongue (Bir lisan bir insan).” Pendse comments that “the more languages, the better you can reach out to other people.”
Pendse’s varied life path has fostered in him a deep personal appreciation of diversity. “The world of Berkeley is very meaningful to me,” he notes, especially “the spirit of flexibility and seeing things from others’ perspectives. Maybe you don’t agree, but you listen and you learn. Passing through Sproul Plaza on my way home from work, I feel invigorated and enriched by all the different people and activities. The vibrancy and the diversity of our community always inspires me!”
Exhibit opening reception
Date: Friday, October 14
Time: 5-7pm
Place: Morrison Library
Brown Gallery Viewing 5-5:30pm
Welcome & Introduction at 5:30pm with Liladhar Pendse, Exhibit Curator
with special guest speakers Ron Turner & Ivy Mills, Ph.D.
Enjoy the Exhibit 6:30-7pm
Ron Turner is the founder of the Last Gasp, a book and underground comics publisher and distributor based in San Francisco.
UC Berkeley Lecturer Ivy Mills, Ph.D. specializes in the visual and literary cultures of Africa and the African diaspora.
The Library attempts to offer programs in accessible, barrier-free settings. If you think you may require disability-related accommodations, please contact the event sponsor prior to the event. The event sponsor is Ashley Bacchi, 510-664-7737.
Moffitt Opens Up: Revitalized floors welcome students Nov. 2
Students can enter contest to win 10 hours of study space during finals
After a year of rebuilding, the fourth and fifth floors of the Moffitt Library will reopen on Wednesday, Nov. 2. During the opening celebration, 2 to 4 pm, the UC Berkeley community can explore the new 24-hour, snack-friendly space, experiment with emerging technology, and scope out Cal’s premier study spots.
The Moffitt Opens Up event will feature live acapella by Cal students, student art and a chance to meet the artists, and student demos of virtual reality, drones and 3D printing. Current Cal students can enter a raffle of iPad Airs, video cameras, wireless headphones, gift cards and more (student ID required).
To kickoff the announcement, the Library is awarding study space during finals week to three student supporters, who will help create and share stories during the Moffitt Opens Up event. Interested students should submit a short pitch here by Friday, Oct. 7.
The reimagined floors four and five are expected to become a top study destination, with technology services, a wide variety of flexible study and discovery spaces, and student-friendly policies. Studios equipped for Web conferencing and presentation practice are available, as well as an expanded tech help desk, a tech lending service, meeting rooms for group learning, and writeable glass walls to aid in collaboration and brainstorming. A wellness room and living room-like spaces round out the offerings, while expansive windows allow for abundant natural light and sweeping views of Memorial Glade.
The Library attempts to offer programs in accessible, barrier-free settings. If you think you may require disability-related accommodations, please contact the event sponsor — ideally at least two weeks prior to the event. The event sponsor is Ashley Bacchi, 510-664-7737, abacchi@berkeley.edu.
Movies @ Moffitt, Oct. 5 – Forgetting Vietnam
The Movies @ Moffitt series features films selected by students for students, on the first Wednesday of each month.
Title: Forgetting Vietnam
Director: Trinh T. Minh-ha
Synopsis: Influential anti-imperialist and feminist theorist, filmmaker and Cal professor Trinh T. Minh-ha creates a dialogue between fact and fiction in this exploration of Vietnam four decades after the end of the war. Over the course of the film, she interweaves myth with observation, deconstructs national identity into its most basic symbolic elements and re-constructs personal and political memory of place, trauma and dynamism.
Date: Wednesday, October 5
Time: 7pm
Place: 150D Moffitt Library
Doors open @ 6:30pm
You must have a Cal Student ID to attend
The Library attempts to offer programs in accessible, barrier-free settings. If you think you may require disability-related accommodations, please contact the event sponsor prior to the event. The event sponsor is Tim Dilworth tdilwort@library.berkeley.edu
Post contributed by Tim Dilworth, First Year Coordinator, The Library
Event: Editions Inside of Archives: Literary Editing and Preservation at the Mark Twain Project
I’m sharing this event announcement because it may be of interest to you.
The Literature and Digital Humanities Working Group, and the Americanist Colloquium, would like to invite you to join us at the following talk:
Editions Inside of Archives: Literary Editing and Preservation at the Mark Twain Project
Christopher Ohge
Thursday October 13th, 6.30pm
DLib Collaboratory, 350 Barrows Hall
The Mark Twain Papers & Project not only contains the largest collection of material by and about Mark Twain, it also employs several editors working toward a complete scholarly edition of Mark Twain’s writings and letters. The editors in the Project are sometimes involved in archival management, preservation, and “digital humanities” endeavors. Yet the goals of the archive both overlap with and diverge from those of a scholarly edition, especially in that editions produced by the Mark Twain Project use material from other archives, and considering the limit to which editorial work can faithful to physical manuscripts. Archival projects are sometimes done at the expense of editorial projects, and vice versa; each enterprise has its gains and losses.
Digital scholarly editing can also depart from more traditional print editorial enterprises. When editorial policy modifications occur simultaneously with the evolution of digital interfaces, what is an editor to do? Put another way, when “digitizing” an old book with a different editorial policy, is one obliged to “re-edit” the text or compromise about how to present the product of a different set of expectations for editing and designing scholarly editions? How do notions of readability and reliability change with concurrent technological innovations? I shall examine instances where the physical archive, the digital archive, and editions at the Mark Twain Project have illuminated common as well as new ground on reading, editing, and cultural heritage.
Book Talk with Ben Madley on An American Genocide – October 4
Please join us for an engaging talk by Professor Benjamin Madley, who will be visiting UC Berkeley to speak about his new book, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873 (Yale University Press, 2016).
Date: Tuesday, October 4
Time: 5:00 – 6:00pm
Place: Morrison Library
UC Berkeley
This book takes readers into pre-contact California and through a Gold Rush which stirred white vigilante violence. Over the course of three decades in the 1800s, 80% of California Indians were slaughtered—over 120,000 people—with the complicity of state and federal government. As the US Army responded to local government and vigilante action, state and federal governments spent over $1,700,000 on campaigns against California Indians. Madley asks what makes a genocide, taking us through historical methods that can be used to explore other genocides in America and beyond.
Join us for this engaging and important presentation from Professor Madley. Copies of his book will be on sale at the event. The talk is sponsored by the UC Berkeley Library and the Ethnic Studies Library at UC Berkeley.
The Library attempts to offer programs in accessible, barrier-free settings. If you think you may require disability-related accommodations, please contact the event sponsor prior to the event.
The event sponsor is Celia Emmelhainz (510)642-5339 emmelhainz@berkeley.edu.
Post submitted by:
Celia Emmelhainz and Melissa Stoner
Event: $1 Book Sale — Homecoming, October 1st
$1 BOOK SALE
Homecoming at UC Berkeley
Saturday, October 1st
9am – 3pm
303 Doe Library
The 4,500+ books on the shelves of 303 Doe will be offered for $1 each. Most books are fresh – that is, they have not been offered for sale before.
The Doe Library building will open at 9am on the day of the sale. The best place to wait, if you plan to arrive in advance, is at the main (North) entrance to Doe.
Trio of fall exhibits offer diverse pleasures
Three fall exhibits at the Library—on global comics, the Spanish Civil War, and African-American history and culture—testify to the extraordinary richness of our collections. We invite you to come tour the exhibits at your leisure.
“Beyond Tintin and Superman: The Diversity of Global Comics” showcases comics and graphic novels from a dizzying array of countries, including Egypt, Poland, South Africa, Israel, the Czech Republic, South Africa, Colombia, and Japan. While treating societal issues generated by censorship, race relations, political agendas and gender biases, the comics also provide great enjoyment through their striking imagery and cultural diversity. See a video about the exhibit. (Doe Library – Bernice Layne Brown Gallery; opens Sept 19).
Exhibit opening reception:
Date: Friday, October 14
Time: 5-7pm
Place: Morrison Library
Brown Gallery Viewing 5-5:30pm
Welcome & Introduction at 5:30pm with Liladhar Pendse, Exhibit Curator
with special guest speakers Ron Turner & Ivy Mills, Ph.D.
Enjoy the Exhibit 6:30-7pm
Ron Turner is the founder of the Last Gasp, a book and underground comics publisher and distributor based in San Francisco.
UC Berkeley Lecturer Ivy Mills, Ph.D. specializes in the visual and literary cultures of Africa and the African diaspora.
The Library attempts to offer programs in accessible, barrier-free settings. If you think you may require disability-related accommodations, please contact the event sponsor prior to the event. The event sponsor is Ashley Bacchi.
“The Gift to Sing: Highlights of the Leon F. Litwack and the Bancroft Library African American Collections” includes treasures such as Harlem Renaissance first editions with strikingly illustrated dust jackets, and a 1845 copy of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave with an inscription by the famous abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. One of UC Berkeley’s iconic professors and a noted scholar, Leon Litwack retired from a storied career in 2007. His collection—arguably the world’s finest private collection of books on African American history and culture—will be coming to the Bancroft as a bequest. (The Bancroft Library Gallery, opens Sept. 23)
“Guerra Civil at 80” marks the 80th anniversary of the beginning of the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). A visual and textual display of the struggle to defend the Second Spanish Republic, the exhibition documents the role of the Republicans and the Nationalists; the impact on civilians and on American volunteers; and the intense creative response from within and outside Spain. (Bancroft Library, 2nd floor corridor, between Bancroft and Doe, through June 2017)
A companion exhibit, “Incite the Spirit: Poster Art of the Spanish Civil War” will be on exhibit through December 16 at the Townsend Center for the Humanities, 220 Stephens Hall. Please visit spanishcivilwar80.berkeley.edu to learn more about the UC Berkeley events commemorating the 80th Anniversary of the Spanish Civil War.
Post submitted by:
Damaris Moore, Library Communications Office
Voting Rights and the US Constitution – FSM Café Sept. 21
Voting Rights and the US Constitution:
The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied
A conversation with Jonathan Stein JD ’13, MPP ’13, Voting Rights Attorney for Asian American Advancing Justice – Asian Law Caucus, on the state of voting rights in the United States.
Place: Free Speech Movement Café, Moffitt Library
Date: Wednesday, September 21, 2016
Time: 6-8pm
Jonathan Stein is a voting rights attorney, currently of Asian Americans Advancing Justice – Asian Law Caucus and previously of the ACLU of California. He works to increase access to California’s democracy for historically disenfranchised communities. While receiving a joint MPP/JD from UC Berkeley, Jonathan served as the Student Regent on the University of California’s Board of Regents, fighting for access, diversity, and affordability and advocating for the interests of the UC’s students. At Berkeley Law, Jonathan was a member of the Men of Color Alliance and the South Asian Law Student Association. Prior to graduate school, Jonathan spent four years as a journalist at Mother Jones magazine.
Jonathan serves as Chair of the Board of Directors of the nonprofit organization California Common Cause and is a Commissioner on the City of Oakland Public Ethics Commission.
» See the event flyer
This event is free, open to the public, and all are invited to participate. Sponsored by the University Library’s Free Speech Movement (FSM) Café Programs Committee For more information: contact fsmprograms@lists.berkeley.edu.
The Library attempts to offer programs in accessible, barrier-free settings. If you think you may require disability-related accommodations, please contact the event sponsor prior to the event. The event sponsor is Jean Ferguson, fsmprograms@berkeley.edu, 510-768-7618