Harvard Radcliffe Institute and the Harvard Alumni Association welcome Drew Gilpin Faust, Harvard University president emerita; Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor; and founding dean of the Radcliffe Institute, to discuss her book, Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury. Faust’s reading will be followed by a conversation with Tomiko Brown-Nagin, dean, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study; Daniel P.S. Paul Professor of Constitutional Law, Harvard Law School; and professor of history, Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences....
This lunchtime lecture is free. There is currently a waitlist for in-person attendance, register to attend via Zoom
Join Ceramics Program Instructor Jenny Peace and her coil building class for a lunchtime slideshow describing the two-week onggi workshop she attended in Icheon, South Korea. She will offer an overview of the large-scale coiling method she learned from onggi master Kwak Kyungtae, and share contact information with anyone who might be interested in traveling to Korea to learn about onggi first hand.
Johnson-Kulukundis Family Gallery, Byerly Hall, 8 Garden St., Cambridge
Join the artist Alia Farid for a tour of Water Stories: River Goddesses, Ancestral Rites, and Climate Crisis and a discussion of the artwork Chibayish, 2023. Chibayish is part of a larger group of works that Farid has developed since 2018, focused on the impact of extractive industries on southern Iraq and Kuwait's ecological and social fabric.
Join curatorial assistant Casey Monahan to explore how investigating the verso (reverse side) of a painting can sometimes help construct the history and provenance of a work. Monahan will share how details such as labels, numbers, and other elements that are normally “unseen” are essential for curators as they research and catalogue works in the collections.
How wild, really, is Albert Bierstadt’s wilderness in Rocky Mountains, "Lander’s Peak"? Curatorial intern Saffron Sener will discuss this American landscape.
A presentation from 2023–2024 Evelyn Green Davis Fellow Francesca Wade
At Radcliffe, Wade is completing her second book, "Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife," a new biography of Stein told through the story of her posthumous legacy. She will also begin work on a new project, exploring the intersecting lives and work of several women poets and activists in 1970s New York.
Johnson-Kulukundis Family Gallery, Byerly Hall, 8 Garden St., Cambridge
Join the artist and educator Evelyn Rydz for an afternoon of conversation and collective artmaking within the exhibition Water Stories: River Goddesses, Ancestral Rites, and Climate Crisis, on view September 18–December 16, 2023.
The exhibition presents artworks that tell alternative stories of water experience in the context of climate change, while encouraging viewers to appreciate the multivalent meaning of water and their own relationship to it. Rydz has repeatedly observed the increasing impacts on natural and cultural ecosystems throughout her various field...
Klarman Hall, Harvard Business School, Kresge Way, Boston
This talk features astonishing aerial images of Earth from Colonel Terry Virts' book and takes of life from the edge of the atmosphere.
Colonel (USAF retired) Terry Virts has spent over seven months in space during his two spaceflights, piloting the Space Shuttle Endeavour in 2010 and commanding the International Space Station in 2014/2015. He served in the US Air Force as a fighter pilot, test pilot, NASA astronaut, and is a graduate of the US Air Force Academy, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, and Harvard Business School General Management Program.
Online or at Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Knafel Center, 10 Garden St., Cambridge
This conference, “Responsibility and Repair”—led by Harvard University’s Native American Program in collaboration with Harvard Radcliffe Institute—will bring together Native and university leaders to advance a national dialogue, expand research, and establish and deepen partnerships with Indigenous communities. Using the landmark Report of the Presidential Committee on Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery (2022) as a starting point, the conference and its participants—activists, scholars, Native leaders, tribal historians, and others—will explore the responsibility of...
Online or at Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Knafel Center, 10 Garden St., Cambridge
This conference, “Responsibility and Repair”—led by Harvard University’s Native American Program in collaboration with Harvard Radcliffe Institute—will bring together Native and university leaders to advance a national dialogue, expand research, and establish and deepen partnerships with Indigenous communities. Using the landmark Report of the Presidential Committee on Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery (2022) as a starting point, the conference and its participants—activists, scholars, Native leaders, tribal historians, and others—will explore the responsibility of...
Harvard Graduate School of Design, Gund Hall, Piper Auditorium (48 Quincy St., Cambridge)
Join the Harvard Graduate School of Design for a Rachel Dorothy Tanur Memorial Lecture presented by Angela D. Brooks.
Angela Brooks is the Director of the Illinois office of the Corporation for Supportive Housing and the President of the American Planning Association. She currently serves on the Chicago Board of Zoning Appeals, the Illinois Affordable Housing Advisory Commission, and is co-chair of the national Housing Supply Accelerator, helping communities meet the housing needs of residents.
Houghton Library welcomes conservator Julia Miller, editor of the Suave Mechanicals history of bookbinding series, who will give this fall's Philip and Frances Hofer Lecture on the Art of the Book.
The lecture covers the inception of Suave Mechanicals, its goals and challenges, with a brief description of how the series is managed—the nuts and bolts of editing and publishing nine volumes of essays over twelve years (2013–2025). Miller describes the series' impact on research and writing on the history of bookbinding and the history of the book, as viewed through its broad...
Harvard Graduate School of Design, Gund Hall, Piper Auditorium (48 Quincy St., Cambridge)
“City-making” can be approached from different points of view and disciplines, whether starting from global theoretical reflections or from a particular and pragmatic approach to solving concrete problems. One can contribute to ‘city-making’ as a thinker, sociologist, economist, legislator, planner, developer, policymaker, or even an agitator. Architect Manuel Salgado will discuss how he has contributed to this process in three different ways: as a planner, architect, and policymaker.
The Woodberry Poetry Room invites you to a launch party for Audre Lorde at Fassett Studio, 1970, our latest collaborative release with Fonograf Editions: Here to help us celebrate is current Poet Laureate of San Francisco and Lorde LP contributor Tongo Eisen-Martin, author of Blood on the Fog (City Lights, 2021) and Heaven Is All Goodbyes (2017).
Eisen-Martin will get the event rolling with a brief reading of his own poems (and a selection of Lorde's works) and then we will cue up the record for its premiere on the Aalto turntables. Come one, come all to this evening of...
Harvard Graduate School of Design, Gund Hall, Piper Auditorium (48 Quincy St., Cambridge)
The Architecture of Disability, David Gissen’s newly published book, situates experiences of impairment as a new foundation for the built environment. With its provocative proposal for “the construction of disability,” this book fundamentally reconsiders how we conceive of and experience disability in our world. Gissen will be joined by GSD alum Sara Hendren for a conversation surrounding the publication and how we might look beyond traditional notions of accessibility to positively reimagine the roots of architecture.
Houghton Library and the Standing Committee on Medieval Studies present Christopher Baswell on "Arthurian Immobilities: Disabled Kings and Nobles in the Lancelot Prose Cycle."
While the lived reality of disability in the Middle Ages was surely a wretched one, at the same time we encounter persistent associations between disabled and royal or aristocratic bodies in medieval culture, its imagery, and narratives. Nowhere is this truer than in the Arthurian world, at whose core there lies a powerful but immobile figure, the Rich Fisher King. In this talk, Christopher Baswell will...
Online or at Geological Lecture Hall, 24 Oxford St., Cambridge
“Oh Unas, you have not gone away dead, but alive.” The Pyramid Text quoted here tells us that the ancient Egyptians believed in the continued influence of the dead in the lives of the living. The dead in ancient Egypt were supernatural intermediaries, folk heroes, and some were even deified, worshiped as gods in the Egyptian pantheon.
This talk will build on the research found in Dr. Troche’s first book, Death, Power, and Apotheosis in Ancient Egypt (Cornell University Press, 2021) and invite audiences to learn about the spectrum of deceased actors in ancient Egypt....
Harvard Ceramics Program, 224 Western Ave., Allston
Janice Jakielski is a Massachusetts and Colorado based sculptor. By inventing new ways of casting and manipulating ultra-thin porcelain sheets she is able to create impossible objects of curiosity, objects to provide focus, retreat and pause in an overwhelming world.
Valentina Rozas-Krause is an assistant professor in design and architecture at Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, in Chile. She is an architect and a historian of the built environment who focuses on global cultural practices across the Americas and Europe. In this lecture, Rozas-Krause will examine the role that memorials play in symbolic and material reparation after political conflicts.
Harvard Graduate School of Design, Gund Hall, Piper Auditorium (48 Quincy St., Cambridge)
This lecture explores how developments in the earth sciences—specifically geology, evolutionism, and biogeography—ushered in advances in design methodologies for large public–realm landscapes in late nineteenth-century Boston.
Speaker: Anita Berrizbeitia Berrizbeitia is a Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. She served as Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture between 2015-2022 and as Program Director of the Master in Landscape Architecture Degree Programs between 2012-2015. Her research explores...