Events

Monuments Reimagined: Public Art in Our Communities

Location:

Harvard Ed Portal—Online

Join policy makers, urban designers, and artists in Boston and Cambridge for a discussion about the future of public art!

Public art has the potential to make a community a more vibrant and welcoming place. Free and accessible to all, it also has the power to provoke debate about our shared cultural experience. As engaged citizens call for the removal of certain public monuments that evoke harmful systems, the conversation about the role of public art in our communities gains momentum.

On October 5, join City of Boston Chief of Arts & Culture Kara Elliott-Ortega...

Our Bodies, Ourselves Book Talk

Location:

Harvard Radcliffe Institute—Online

The final installment in the summer series of Virtual Radcliffe Book Talks will feature a discussion of Our Bodies, Ourselves, first published in 1971. This event is organized in recognition of the 50th anniversary of the book’s first edition and in connection with the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective Records housed in the Schlesinger Library. The event will also include audience Q&A.

...

Book Talk with Daniel Carpenter

Location:

Harvard Radcliffe Institute—Online

The third installment of the Virtual Radcliffe Book Talks will feature Daniel Carpenter, author of Democracy by Petition: Popular Politics in Transformation, 1790–1870 (Harvard University Press, 2021). Carpenter is the faculty director of the social sciences at Harvard Radcliffe Institute and the Allie S. Freed Professor of Government in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

Carpenter's reading will be followed by a discussion with Nikki M. Taylor, professor of history and chair of the Department of History at Howard University. The event will also include an...

Book Talk with Tiya Miles

Location:

Harvard Radcliffe Institute—Online

The second installment of the Virtual Radcliffe Book Talks will feature Tiya Miles, author of All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake (Random House, 2021). Miles is a Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at Harvard Radcliffe Institute and a professor of history in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

Miles's reading will be followed by a discussion with Tomiko Brown-Nagin, dean of Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Daniel P.S. Paul Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School, professor of history in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and...

Book Talk with Clint Smith

Location:

Harvard Radcliffe Institute—Online

The first installment in the summer series of Virtual Radcliffe Book Talks will feature Clint Smith, author of How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America (Little, Brown and Company, 2021) and staff writer at The Atlantic. Smith's reading will be followed by a discussion with Kyera Singleton, executive director of the Royall House and Slave Quarters, in Medford, Massachusetts. The event will also include audience Q and A.

...

Racial Inequity and Housing Instability in Boston: Past, Present, and Future

Location:

Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard—Online

Millions of Americans have long struggled to pay for housing, with communities of color additionally burdened by housing discrimination and historical race-based policies, such as legalized segregation, redlining, and mortgage discrimination. In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent economic crisis, the federal government instituted a moratorium on evictions that is currently set to expire on March 31, 2021. Despite this, the continuing public health emergency has exacerbated the national housing affordability crisis for people of color, who are more likely to have lost...

Resetting the Table: A Virtual Talk and Tour with the Curators

Location:

Food Literacy Project—Online

The "Resetting the Table: Food and Our Changing Tastes" exhibition at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology explores food choices and eating habits in the United States, including the sometimes hidden but always important ways in which our tables are shaped by cultural, historical, political, and technological influences.

Join us on this special virtual talk and tour at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology with Joyce Chapli, guest curator and Harvard University James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History; Janis Sacco, Director...

Reading and Conversation with Ocean Vuong

Location:

Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard—Online

Ocean Vuong, author of the New York Times best-selling novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, will be joined in conversation with Ju Yon Kim, Harvard professor of English. The program will begin with an introduction by Tomiko Brown-Nagin, dean of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Daniel P.S. Paul Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School, professor of history in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and chair of the Presidential Committee on Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery. It will conclude with remarks from Durba Mitra RI ’19, assistant professor of...

Recovering the Histories of Seven Enslaved Americans

Location:

Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology—Online

For seven seasons, award-winning Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. has uncovered the ancestral stories of celebrity guests on his hit-television series, Finding Your Roots. In this program, Gates will be joined by Dr. Gregg Hecimovich to discuss the process of unearthing the histories of formerly enslaved people. The focus will be on  Alfred, Delia, Drana, Fassena, Jack, Jim, and Renty, seven Black men and women who were photographed against their will in Columbia, South Carolina in 1850. These controversial photographs are the subject of a new book, To Make Their Own...

Black Radical Space: The Black School and Bryan C. Lee Jr in conversation

Location:

Harvard Graduate School of Design—Online

Designer and activist Bryan C. Lee, Jr will convene with the founders of The Black School for a conversation about Black radical pedagogical experiments, past, present, and future. GSD community members Toshiko Mori and Tara Oluwafemi will join for the second half of the program.

Learn more about and RSVP for this virtual event.

Small Town Urbanism in the 21st Century

Location:

Harvard Graduate School of Design—Online

This program brings together three unique perspectives on the idea of “Small Town Urbanism”: Andrew Freear, Director of Rural Studio at Auburn University; Faranak Miraftab, Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; and Todd Okolichany, Director of Planning and Urban Design for the City of Asheville, North Carolina.

Climate change, the pandemic, telecommuting, and accelerating land costs in large cities have fueled a slow but noticeable relocation of people and services to ex-urban locales. The retreat from large cities...

Race, Representation, and Agassiz’s Brazilian Fantasy

Location:

Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology—Online

How do we confront the history and legacy of Louis Agassiz’s extensive archive of images of African and Indigenous Brazilians made in Manaus, Brazil in 1865 and housed at Harvard’s Peabody Museum?

Four distinguished panelists reflect on the historical moment when these pictures were taken, discuss racist displays of Indigenous people in Brazil and elsewhere, and, by bringing to light respect for different epistemologies, explore ways to contend with them today. Panelists will be writer and historian Christoph Irmscher (contributor to the recent Peabody Museum Press book about...

Marc Angélil and Charlotte Malterre-Barthes, "Migrant Marseille: Architectures of Social Segregation and Urban Inclusivity"

Location:

Harvard Graduate School of Design—Online

On November 5, 2018, a pair of dilapidated buildings in central Marseille collapsed, taking the lives of eight people, many of them from immigrant origin. This toll of urban decay reflects both the diversity of the district and the hardship of living in Marseille, a city marked for centuries by migration, poverty, and social inequality. Divided along ethnic and class lines, with wealthy conservatives dominating the south and an energetic but pauperized community of immigrant origins in the north, Marseille highlights the tensions stemming from discriminatory governance, lack of housing-...

Ana María León and Torsten Lange, "Bodies of Work: Activism, Gender, Architecture"

Location:

Harvard Graduate School of Design—Online

In this conversation, architectural historians Ana María León and Torsten Lange consider the labor of organizing around issues of gender in architecture. Based on three precedents, they will reflect on their work and practice and highlight how the present has allowed scholars and practitioners to revise architectural historiography. Building on intersectional feminist theory, the discussion considers architecture and urban space as well as architectural discourse as forums where white heteronormative systems of planning can become subverted by empowered labor and living practices....

Harvard Design Magazine reveals "Harvard Design Magazine #48: America"

Location:

Harvard Graduate School of Design—Online

"A terrible mechanism [is] on the march, its gears multiplying." So begins the first essay of the 48th issue of Harvard Design Magazine, guest edited by Mark Lee, chair of the department of architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and Florencia Rodriguez, editorial director of -Ness Magazine. The issue takes as its theme the slippery and ambiguous figure of "America," seen through the lens of the built and unbuilt environment. Americanization—once the "terrible mechanism" bent on pressing capitalist values on emerging economies everywhere—is now in...

Mayors Imagining the Just City

Location:

Harvard Graduate School of Design—Online

Following the inaugural MICD Just City Mayoral Fellowship–a collaboration between the Mayors’ Institute on City Design (MICD) and Harvard GSD's Just City Lab–the seven inaugural MICD Just City Mayoral Fellows discuss how to tackle racial injustices in each of their cities through planning and design interventions.

Learn more about and register for Mayors Imagining the Just City.

Racially Charged: America’s Misdemeanor Problem (Film Screening and Panel Discussion)

Location:

Harvard Law School—Online

Join the Harvard Law School Library for a live screening and panel discussion of “Racially Charged: America’s Misdemeanor Problem,” a new documentary about the racial history and modern discrimination of the American misdemeanor system. The film, produced by Brave New Films and directed by Robert Greenwald, was inspired by HLS Professor Alexandra Natapoff’s book, “Punishment Without Crime: How Our Massive Misdemeanor System Traps the Innocent and Makes America More Unequal.”

...

Think like a Historian, Imagine Like a Designer: A Conversation on Landscape History and Design Education

Location:

Harvard Graduate School of Design—Online

History is a manner of thinking about the world, grounded in the places we design, construct, and inhabit. Design offers the opportunity to re-imagine the world around us, today and for the future. We might draw from history, or draw upon it; certainly, it is to be hoped that we are drawn to it, as designers and historians. The purpose of landscape history—not reducible to memory nor timelines nor styles—is to produce and share knowledge of how we have come to be who and where we are. We will gather across studios we collectively inhabit to draw attention to and lessons from the...

Introducing Pairs 01: Giovanna Borasi in Conversation with the Founding Editors

Location:

Harvard Graduate School of Design—Online

Join us to celebrate the launch of Pairs, a new student-led journal at the GSD. The founding editors will introduce the inaugural issue, which will be followed by a conversation with Giovanna Borasi, Director of the Canadian Centre for Architecture, on beginnings in curation and publishing.

Pairs is a journal dedicated to conversations about design that are down to earth and unguarded. Each issue is conceptualized by an editorial team that proposes guests and objects to be in dialogue with one another. Pairs is non-thematic, meant instead for provisional thoughts and ideas in...

Author Discussion: Black And Buddhist: What Buddhism Can Teach Us about Race, Resilience, Transformation, and Freedom

Location:

Online Event

Buddhism is a way of life, a philosophy, a psychology, a set of ethics, a religion, or a combination thereof. Central to the many ways Buddhism is understood is the achievement of emotional, mental, and psychological wellness. African Americans are at perpetual risk of psychological imbalance and trauma due to the social realities of racism in the United States. The authors engage the question, What can Buddhism offer African Americans who want to be emotionally resilient in a context they cannot...

Location:

Location:

Location:

Location:

Location:

Location:

Location:

Location:

Location:

Location:

Location:

Location:

Location:

Location:

Location:

Location:

Location:

Location:

Location:

Location:

Pages

Filter by:

Admission Fee

Event Type

Interest Area

Location

Upcoming Events

114 Mount Auburn Street6th FloorCambridge, MA 02138T (617) 495-1585 | F (617) 495-0754

Connect with @HarvardLocal

114 Mount Auburn Street
6th Floor
Cambridge, MA 02138
T (617) 495-1585 | F (617) 495-0754