UC Berkeley Graduate Council Lectures (Audio)

UC Berkeley Professor Yuri Slezkine is an innovative historian whose work focuses on the early years of the Soviet Union. In this lecture, he focuses on the private lives of Bolshevik government officials: their wives, maids, lovers, children, and other comrades. The argument is that revolutions devour their parents and that they begin as tragedy and end at home. By centering the cultural and poli...

The founding fathers were political theorists of the highest order, and founded the modern era of constitutional design. But how have their propositions fared over the course of the subsequent two centuries, in which over 900 constitutions have been written? Tom Ginsburg, Professor of International Law, and Deputy Dean, University of Chicago Law School, summarizes empirical work on constitutions r...

The Neanderthals are the closest extinct relatives of all present-day human and the Neanderthal genome sequence provides unique insights into modern humans origins. Svante Pääbo, a biologist and evolutionary anthropologist, describe the current understanding of the genetic contributions of Neanderthals to present-day humans and to extinct human groups. He also describes preliminary analyses of gen...

Sarah Broadie, a specialist in classical philosophy and professor at the University of St. Andrews, explores the human being as theoretical adventurer, through the eyes of Plato and Aristotle. Series: "UC Berkeley Graduate Lectures" [Humanities] [Show ID: 28101]

University of Virginia’s Charles McCurdy explores how the Founding Fathers dealt with the unanticipated emergence of hotly contested, increasingly political interpretations of the Constitution during the first decade of the Early Republic and also how they responded to fact that constitutional change had occurred through interpretation rather than through constitutional amendment. Series: "UC Berk...

Nell Painter combines the discursive meanings of scholarship with the visual meaning of painting, to answer, literally, why white people are called 'Caucasian,' what that looks like, and how they all relate to our ideas about personal beauty. Series: "UC Berkeley Graduate Lectures" [Humanities] [Show ID: 26025]

Telomeres were first recognized in the late 1930s as important structures on chromosome ends. In the 1970s the sequence of these structures was identified in the ciliated protozoa Tetrahymena by Elizabeth Blackburn. In the 1980s telomerase was discovered as an enzyme that elongates telomeres and compensates for natural telomere shortening. Carol Greider, Director of Molecular Biology and Genetics,...

Telomeres are the chromosomes end-part, that are needed to protect chromosome ends. Due to the way chromosomes are copied, these telomeres shorten with each round of cell division. This shortening is kept in check by the enzyme telomerase which elongates telomeres. However because of the limited amount of telomerase, telomere shorten with age in humans. People who cannot effectively elongate telom...

Why don't people just say what they mean? In this lecture, Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker explains the paradoxical appeal of euphemism, innuendo, politeness, and other forms of shilly-shallying. Series: "UC Berkeley Graduate Lectures" [Humanities] [Show ID: 27932]

Believe it or not, violence has been in decline for long stretches of time, and we may be living in the most peaceful era in our species existence. Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker presents the data supporting this surprising conclusion, and explains the trends by showing how changing historical circumstances have engaged different components of human nature. Series: "UC Berkeley Graduat...

Drawing on fieldwork in new charismatic evangelicals churches in the Bay Area and in Accra, Ghana, Tanya Luhrmann, Stanford University, explores the way that cultural ideas about mind and person alter prayer practice and the experience of God. Luhrmann's work focuses on the way that objects without material presence come to seem real to people, and the way that ideas about the mind affect mental e...

Geographer Carl Ortwin Sauer demonstrated through his work and writings that landscapes are the long-term contingent product of interactions between natural processes and cultural forces. In this lecture, Patrick Kirch, Professor of Anthropology and Integrative Biology, University of California, Berkeley, applies the concept of landscape to the islands of Polynesia. Drawing upon recent multi-disci...

The Fulbright Program, administered by the U.S. Department of State, was founded in 1946 for the purposes of fostering exchange between American and international students. In this lecture Harriet Fulbright provides an intimate look into the origins of the program, describing how the idea for international exchange evolved over the course of her husband’s career in Congress. She traces the program...

Robert Brandom, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, University of Pittsburgh, argues that genealogies (Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Foucault) present the revenge of naturalism on rationalism. Hegel teaches us how to replace the genealogical hermeneutics of suspicion with a hermeneutics of magnanimity that allows us to see naturalism and rationalism as complementing rather than competing with one ano...

Domestic dogs, Canis familiaris, have insinuated themselves into our society and imagination: long present in our art and narratives, they are now ubiquitous in American homes. Alexandra Horowitz, Barnard College, Columbia University, discusses the dog's historical and contemporary role, attributions typically made to dogs, and an alternative empirical approach to considering dogs. Series: "UC Ber...

Women have achieved parity in obtaining doctoral degrees, but do not experience the same career trajectory as men. Is this discrimination or family formation? Mary Ann Mason, Professor of the Graduate School and Faculty Co-Director of the Earl Warren Institute for Law and Social Policy, University of California, Berkeley explores twelve years of research to address the question of the effect of fa...

Top incomes represent a small share of the population but a very significant share of total income and total taxes paid. Emmanuel Saez, Professor of Economics and Director, Center for Equitable Growth, University of California, Berkeley presents evidence on income inequality gathered by a collective group of researchers in the World Top Incomes Database. Series: "UC Berkeley Graduate Lectures" [Pu...

Leon Wieseltier is an American writer, critic, and longstanding literary editor of The New Republic. In this UC Berkeley Forester lecture, he discusses the Jewish belief in a Messiah. Series: "UC Berkeley Graduate Lectures" [Humanities] [Show ID: 24599]

Are intelligent machines possible? If they are, what will they be like? Jeff Hawkins, an inventor, engineer, neuroscientist, author and entrepreneur, frames these questions by reviewing some of the efforts to build intelligent machines. He posits that machine intelligence is only possible by first understanding how the brain works and then building systems that work on the same principles. He desc...

How the brain creates intelligence is viewed by many as the greatest scientific quest of all time. We are living at the time when rapid progress is being made and a comprehensive theory of brain function is emerging. Jeff Hawkins, an inventor, engineer, neuroscientist, author and entrepreneur, presents the big picture of what we know so far and describes recent progress in a core issue: why neuron...

There is widespread agreement that happiness is good, but is it the sole ultimate good? Princeton University Professor Peter Singer explores arguments for and against such a conclusion. He considers the implications for public policy that take happiness as one of the most important goods that individuals can achieve. Singer specializes in applied ethics, approaching ethics from a secular preferenc...

Theda Skocpol surveys the current political landscape and explores its most consequential questions: What happened to Obama’s “new New Deal”? Why have his achievements enraged opponents more than they have satisfied supporters? How has the Tea Party’s ascendance reshaped American politics? At this moment of economic uncertainty and extreme polarization, as voters prepare to render another verdict...

All the ancient philosophers, pagans and Christians alike, agreed that death is the separation of a soul and a body. While there was much disagreement on the precise relationship between a being and his soul, as well as what sort of thing they took a soul to be, it is the agreement among the philosophers rather than their differences that calls for critical attention. Jonathan Barnes examines why...

Michael Marmot is an internationally acclaimed public health specialist and a distinguished epidemiologist. Marmot heads an active epidemiology research program on social and cultural determinants of health and ill-health. His work on cardiovascular disease has led to important strategies of prevention and heath policy. His new research includes investigating social gradients in health in Japan, c...

Norman Myers was born in Clitheroe, Lancashire and attended Keble College in Oxford. He is a British environmentalist and authority on biodiversity and is a Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Sciences. He is currently a professor and Visiting Fellow at Green College in Oxford, and holds visiting professorships at UC Berkeley, Harvard, Cornell and Stanford. Myers has studied the mass exti...