HBS's iconic Baker Library is the largest business library in the world—and its collection expanded during the COVID-19 pandemic. For the first time in its 95-year history, Baker brought in non-business books, over 170 titles (to date) organized by Cathy Chukwulebe (MBA 2021) as part of her new non-profit, Little Black Library (LBL).
In response to the racial and social unrest of 2020, Cathy launched Little Black Library to promote Black authors and conversations about the Black experience through books and events at libraries and other partners around the U.S.
Camille T. Dungy is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Trophic Cascade (Wesleyan University Press, 2017), winner of the Colorado Book Award, and the essay collection Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood and History (W.W. Norton, 2017), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Dungy has also edited anthologies including Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (University of Georgia Press, 2009) and From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate...
One of the salient characteristics of ancient Egypt undoubtedly is its hieroglyphic script. The "code" to decipher this writing system was cracked precisely two hundred years ago, in 1822, by the brilliant French linguist Jean-François Champollion—the founding father of Egyptology. The complexity of Egyptian hieroglyphs resulted in a low literacy rate among the Pharaonic population.
In this lecture, Dimitri Laboury will address the level(s) of literacy and scholarly education among the makers of the countless hieroglyphic monuments that help make ancient Egypt so famous....
Angela M. Banks is a legal scholar specializing in membership and belonging in democratic societies. She is the Charles J. Merriam Distinguished Professor of law at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She is the author of...
In Benin Bronzes in Context, Sarah Clunis will look at objects currently in the care of Harvard and discuss the way that these objects represent an iconographic and contextual story of trade, contact, and crossroads between cultures. Diana Loren will moderate a discussion after the presentation.
The bronze, ivory, and wooden artworks broadly known as the “Benin Bronzes” were taken from Benin City as part of the British Punitive Expedition of 1897 and dispersed to private collections and museums around the world. The Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology...
W. Ralph Eubanks is a visiting professor and writer-in-residence at the University of Mississippi, where he is affiliated with the Center for the Study of Southern Culture. Join Eubanks as he discusses his upcoming book, which weaves together personal history, archival research, reporting, blues and popular culture, and interviews with current Delta residents to tell the region’s history and explore why many residents of this iconic region of Mississippi persist in trying to transform a place that has been deemed broken and beyond repair.
Harvard Kennedy School, Carr Center for Human Rights Policy—Online
In this talk, Nicholas Opiyo—Carr Center Fellow, Scholar at Risk, and Human Rights Lawyer in Uganda—will analyze and explore the state arguments that have been made for limitations on the civic space in Africa. Throughout the discussion, he will trace relevant trends and examine the role of the international community in Africa’s political spheres. Noting that there are possible ways to push back against the shrinking of civic space, Opiyo will suggest new ways for civil society to organize effectively.
Shadreck Chirikure, Professor of Archaeology, University of Cape Town and British Academy Global Professor, School of Archaeology, Oxford University in conversation with Chakanetsa Mavhunga, Professor of Science, Technology, and Society, MIT.
The after effects of the January 6 insurrection continue to reverberate across America. Since that fateful and disturbing day, pushbacks against the teaching of race in America, abortion rollbacks, and Covid denialism have swept across the country. What has been the role of evangelical Christianity in fueling these issues?
Professor Anthea Butler's lecture will explore the historical antecedents of Evangelical beliefs and political action leading up to today’s troubling times, and the prospects for the future of religion, peace and political action in America.
This installment in the Radcliffe Institute’s winter series of book talks will feature Anita Hill, author of Believing: Our Thirty-Year Journey to End Gender Violence (Viking, 2021). Professor Hill is University Professor of Social Policy, Law, and Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies at Brandeis University.
How can schools, educators, and families navigate the continued politicization and tensions around teaching and talking about race, racism, diversity, and equity? As laws banning critical race theory are passed, and the rhetoric grows intense, we'll discuss what educators and families can do to make sure students are supported, learning, and prepared with the knowledge they need to understand their own histories and the diverse and global society they’ll enter.
In this opening discussion for Radcliffe’s contemporary art exhibition, Precipitation for an Arid Landscape, the artist Gala Porras-Kim will engage in a wide-ranging conversation with art historian Martha Buskirk. The exhibition grows out of Porras-Kim’s 2019–2020 fellowship at Harvard Radcliffe Institute. Her fellowship project centered on items dredged from the Sacred Cenote of Chichén Itzá, a Maya site in the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico, and how they arrived in the collections of Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.
The 2022 Kim and Judy Davis Dean’s Lecture in the Humanities will feature Midori—artist, activist, and educator who explores and builds connections between music and the human experience, which makes her one of the most outstanding violinists of our time. She has performed with many of the world’s most prestigious orchestras and has collaborated with world-renowned musicians, including Leonard Bernstein, Yo-Yo Ma, and many others.
The new genre of interior painting enjoyed great popularity among 17th-century Dutch citizens. Its indoor scenes featuring people involved in mundane activities resemble the domestic settings in which they were hung. Other art forms such as perspective boxes and dollhouses further reinforce the link connecting physical, pictorial, and mental space by relating home to the interiority of the individual.
Double reed pipes, known as auloi, were popular musical instruments in the ancient Mediterranean. In 1921, archaeologists exploring the necropolis of Meroë (northern Sudan)—as part of the Harvard University-Boston Museum of Fine Arts Expedition—found a large collection of auloi in the pyramid of Nubian Queen Amanishakheto. Susanne Gänsicke will discuss the discovery’s importance and what it reveals about the connections between Nubia and the Mediterranean world as well as the significance of far-reaching musical traditions. She will also share recent efforts to conserve...
Scott Manning Stevens is an associate professor and director of Native American and Indigenous Studies at Syracuse University. In this lecture, he will discuss his new project, which focuses on ways Indigenous communities can confront cultural alienation and appropriation in museums, galleries, and archives.
Join us for a one-hour webinar exploring the legacy of Eileen Southern, author of The Music of Black Americans: A History and founder and editor of The Black Perspective in Music. In 1976, Eileen Southern became the first African American woman tenured in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS). Southern played an important institutional role at Harvard. She was central in developing the Department of Afro-American Studies (now African and African American Studies), serving as an early chair, and was on the faculty of the Department of Music, where she taught...
Initiation – In Love Solidarity is a choreographic narrative exploring the embodiment of the Middle Passage, and the resilience and evolving identities of women in the African diaspora. A film component of the work was created at historic sites in New England related to the transatlantic slave trade and emancipation. The imagery of the cowrie shell is present throughout, chosen as an emblem of the transformative identity of the Black female body.