Meghan O’Rourke RI ’15 is an award-winning writer, poet, and editor. In this book talk, O’Rourke will be discussing The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness (Riverhead Books, 2022).
Miguel Syjuco RI ’14 is an author, journalist, civil society advocate, and assistant professor of practice, literature and creative writing at New York University Abu Dhabi. This book talk will feature Syjuco’s most recent work, I Was the President’s Mistress!! (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022).
Focusing on a small selection of drawings, conservator Penley Knipe will explore how Dutch artists of the 17th century creatively combined drawing media to dazzling effect in their pursuit of rendering local landscapes. Visitors will learn about well-known materials like charcoal and watercolor and lesser-known materials like gum arabic and “oatmeal” paper, as well as how the work of paper conservators advances research and scholarship.
Gish Jen RI ’02 is the award-winning author of Thank You, Mr. Nixon (Knopf, 2022), eight other books, and dozens of short stories and articles. Jen’s reading will be followed by a discussion with Alice Kessler-Harris RI ’02, R. Gordon Hoxie Professor Emerita of American History at Columbia University.
Join Elisa Germán, curatorial fellow and exhibition contributor, for an introduction to the exhibition Prints from the Brandywine Workshop and Archives: Creative Communities, on view through July 31, 2022. Germán will share insights about the research and preparation for this exhibition as one of the label authors.
Join Christina Taylor, assistant paper conservator and exhibition contributor, for an introduction to the exhibition Prints from the Brandywine Workshop and Archives: Creative Communities, on view through July 31, 2022. Taylor will share insights about the research and preparation for this exhibition.
Seventeenth-century artist Simon de Vlieger was one of many Dutch draftsmen who captured panoramas of the cities and towns that surrounded them. In his observed and accurate drawing of Weesp, a municipality located outside Amsterdam on the river Vecht, aspects of this recognizable view speak to larger questions of commerce and the environment. Join curatorial research associate Susan Anderson to discover these details within the broader artistic and cultural milieu of landscape drawing in the Dutch Republic.
Curator Sara Schechner, from Harvard’s Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, and Lynette Roth, curator of the Busch-Reisinger Museum, will team up to explore a 120-year-old Zeiss photographic microscope. The curators will look at the assemblage of its various parts and share with visitors what they tell us about how scientists work with such a microscope. Its diverse components, housed in a wooden case, reveal not only the technical challenges of taking photographs through a microscope lens, but also the instrument’s inherent social, cultural, and aesthetic connections....
Mamphela Ramphele, the celebrated activist, physician, businesswoman, and political thinker, envisions a world that is equitable, sustainable, and peaceful. As co-president of The Club of Rome, Ramphele brings together leaders from around the globe to think through the urgent challenges of our day. In this Q&A, she'll discuss her vision, and she'll reflect on lessons learned from her remarkable career.
Seventeenth-century Dutch artists, such as Abraham Bloemaert, Hendrick Avercamp, and Albert Cuyp, achieved coloristic effects through a variety of means. Join curator Joachim Homann in an exploration of colorful papers, inks, and washes from artists of the Dutch Republic.
In this Children’s Author Series event, the Askwith Education Forum will welcome Mona Golabek, author of The Children of Willesden Lane. These books, written for different age groups, are stories of courage, perseverance, and resilience, centered on how Lisa Jura, Mona’s mother and a teenage refugee, held on to her dreams, survived the Holocaust, and illustrated the power of music as a form of healing. The discussion will delve into the story behind the books, the process of writing for multiple age groups...
Living through the COVID-19 pandemic over the past two years has prompted renewed appreciation of the excitement and pleasures, as well as the challenges and dangers, of travel. In this lecture, we’ll learn about the experiences 17th-century Dutch draftsmen had to face as they journeyed from their studios to places near and far. Jane Shoaf Turner will focus on drawings by artists who traveled beyond the Dutch Republic’s borders—across the Channel to England, north and east to Germany and Scandinavia, south to France, over the Alps to Italy, and across the Atlantic to Brazil.
Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian—Online
Join the CfA live from the Smithsonian Castle in Washington, DC to learn about exciting new results from the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), the team that brought us the first-ever image of a black hole!
Moderated by Smithsonian Under Secretary for Science and Research and former Chief Scientist at NASA, Dr. Ellen Stofan, this event will be live streamed and is open to the public. Panelists will include Shep Doeleman, founding director of the EHT; Kari Haworth chief technology officer of the CfA; and astrophysicists Angelo Ricarte and Paul Tiede.
Sandra Susan Smith is a Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at Harvard Radcliffe Institute and the Daniel & Florence Guggenheim Professor of Criminal Justice at Harvard Kennedy School, where she also directs the Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management. An expert on urban poverty, race and ethnicity, and social capital and social networks, Smith’s most recent work has focused on criminal case processing, especially the consequences of pretrial detention and diversion.
Heather Knight will present work from the Collaborative Humans and Robotics: Interaction, Sociability, Machine learning and Art (CHARISMA) robotics lab at Oregon State University (OSU). The pandemic has brought increasing automation into everyday human spaces, making ever more relevant CHARISMA’s work in service robots, expressive communication, and autonomous and human-in-the-loop robot behavior systems.
Using examples from 20 years in the field, this talk illustrates...
This talk will highlight the work and artistic process of Anna Atkins (1799–1871), creator of the first photographically illustrated book. It will also explore the importance of Atkins's photograms to scientific research and documentation in the 19th century.
Harvard Division of Science, Harvard Library, and Harvard Book Store—Online
By the time a baby is born, its brain is equipped with billions of intricately crafted neurons wired together through trillions of interconnections to form a compact and breathtakingly efficient supercomputer. "Zero to Birth" takes you on an extraordinary journey to the very edge of creation, from the moment of an egg’s fertilization through each step of a human brain’s development in the womb―and even a little beyond.
Grassroots organizers in Greater Boston are at the forefront of ongoing statewide movements for a world without predatory policing and mass human caging. Join us for a virtual panel discussion with Transformative Justice...
New research from Professor Thomas Kane of the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) is bringing the impact of the pandemic into stark relief — and adding fuel to the call for comprehensive, equitable, and effective solutions. Kane’s work — part of an ongoing collaboration with NWEA and AIR — reveals the consequences of remote and hybrid learning for student achievement in high- and low-income schools, using data from 10,000 schools in 49 states plus the District of Columbia.
Join us as we explore the findings and outline state and district strategies to help students...