Strategically located for trade, rich in resources, and containing a variety of cultural traditions, the civilizations of Southeast Asia are among the most dynamic in the world. Art historian Robert DeCaroli examines the cultural and artistic traditions of ancient Southeast Asia with a focus on the royal arts of the great civilizations that arose within the borders of modern Thailand, Cambodia, Indonesia, Burma (Myanmar), and Vietnam. (World Art History Certificate core course, 1 credit)
The American musical has a rich and expansive history reaching back to the 1800s. Musical theater artist and historian Ben West details and dissects the evolution of this uniquely American art form, including its maturation in the middle of the 20th century; its often overlooked Black and female artists; and its outside influences such as minstrelsy, vaudeville, nightclubs, and burlesque.
The ascendent judicial philosophy of textualism that now dominates the Supreme Court interprets the Constitution by reading the text carefully and examining the language as it was understood at the time the document was written—to the exclusion of other evidence. Drawing from his new book, Reading the Constitution: Why I Chose Pragmatism, Not Textualism, recently retired Supreme Court Associate Justice Stephen Breyer deconstructs the textualist approach of the current Court’s supermajority and makes the case for a better, more traditional way to interpret the law. In conversation with Nina Totenberg, NPR's legal affairs correspondent, he examines different judicial approaches to the Constitution and reveals why he believes that textualism alone cannot and will not work.
Enjoy a three-course lunch at Washington’s modern Japanese restaurant Nama Ko and learn how a single fish can be used to make essential Japanese pantry ingredients, both fresh and preserved. Chef Derek Watson uses a whole bonito or skipjack tuna to demonstrate how it is used in each course of the menu, which includes miso soup, tuna sashimi with house-made ponzu sauce, and salmon donburi.
In the centennial year of the Washington Senators’ unlikely but victorious World Series run, sports historian Fred Frommer and author and historian Gary Sarnoff cover the compelling story of this history-making team and touch on the mostly fallow years that followed.
More than two centuries after his birth, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s reputation as the prophet of self-reliance has obscured a complicated figure—one who spent a lifetime wrestling with injustice, philosophy, art, desire, and suffering. Emersonian lecturer, editor, and translator James Marcus pieces together a new portrait of Emerson’s life that reveals an eerily modern persona of rebel, lover, friend, husband, and father.
In our deluge of information, it's getting harder and harder to distinguish the revelatory from the contradictory. Drawing from their multidisciplinary UC Berkeley Big Ideas course and their book Third Millennium Thinking: Creating Sense in a World of Nonsense physicist Saul Perlmutter, philosopher John Campbell, and psychologist Robert MacCoun tackle how to better understand the world and make informed decisions as scientists do—with discernment, discipline, and firm foundations of reason.