In the week before the U.S. general election, Harvard and MIT will share a public discussion on the role of architecture in a representative democracy. Colleagues and students from across both institutions will join in dialogue on the profession’s role in supporting democratic society, now and in the future.
Panelists participating in this event will be announced in the coming weeks.
Everett L. Fly believes that African American legacies are embedded in the physical and cultural substance of many of America’s built and vernacular places. Formal education in architecture introduced him to the positive potential of planning and design in respecting and expressing the cultures of people wherever they live, work and play. He believes that American planning and design should be more deliberate in reflecting and respecting a broader cultural diversity, including Black and Indigenous people.
Fly will discuss research, discovery, interpretation and applications of...
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard—Online
The Next in Science series provides an opportunity for early-career scientists whose creative, cross-disciplinary research is thematically linked to introduce their work to one another, to fellow scientists, and to nonspecialists from Harvard and the greater Boston area. The speakers in this program will discuss water’s vital role across four areas of modern inquiry: biology, earth science, public health, and the search for extraterrestrial life.
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard—Online
By the early 1980s, a new political landscape was taking shape that would fundamentally influence American society and politics in the decades to come. That year, the long-standing effort to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment—championed by suffragist Alice Paul and introduced to Congress in 1923—ran aground, owing in significant measure to the activism of women who pioneered a new brand of conservatism.
This panel will draw together strands and stories that are often kept separate: the ideas and growing influence of conservative women, the political activism of gay communities...
Celebrate National Fossil Day—a celebration organized by the National Park Service—by taking a closer look at museum fossils with Harvard paleontologists. What can we see on ancient seafloors? How do modern animals help us understand extinct animals? What fossils still amaze scientists? What is it like to be a practicing paleontologist? Bring your curiosity and questions to this online event for all ages!
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard—Online
Robert F. Reid-Pharr is a professor of studies of women, gender, and sexuality and of African and African American studies at Harvard University. During his Radcliffe fellowship year, Reid-Pharr is completing a draft of "James Baldwin: The Making of an American Icon." Drawing heavily on archival materials housed at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the Houghton and Beinecke Libraries of Harvard and Yale Universities, the book follows the story of Baldwin’s life from birth to death. Join Reid-Pharr as he explores how Baldwin achieved his celebrity status and why...
The lectures pair Harvard professors with celebrated food experts and renowned chefs to showcase the science behind different culinary techniques. The series is based on the Harvard course “Science and Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to the Science of Soft Matter,” but public lectures do not replicate course content.
Each presentation will begin with a 15-minute lecture about the scientific topics from that week’s class by a faculty member from the Harvard course. This week's topic is "Honorary Book Celebration Lecture."
The lectures pair Harvard professors with celebrated food experts and renowned chefs to showcase the science behind different culinary techniques. The series is based on the Harvard course “Science and Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to the Science of Soft Matter,” but public lectures do not replicate course content.
Each presentation will begin with a 15-minute lecture about the scientific topics from that week’s class by a faculty member from the Harvard course. This week's topic is "Honorary Book Celebration Lecture."
Celebrated chef Marcus Samuelsson will share reflections on race, class, place and equity in the American food landscape, drawing from his forthcoming book The Rise: Black Cooks and the Soul of American Food. He will then be joined by Professor in practice, Toni L. Griffin together with Thelma Golden and Mark Raymond for a conversation exploring the deep and intertwining relationships between memory, identity and authorship that exist for black creatives who reference, make and keep place through there work.
Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian—Online
The first person who will set foot on Mars is alive right now. We believe this, but even if we're wrong we know the first crew to arrive there will look nothing like the ones that landed on the Moon fifty years ago.
Our world has changed for the better, and ASTRONAUTS tells the story of the women who built this better world. The main character and narrator is Mary Cleave, an astronaut you may not have heard of. It's not because so many people have been to space; only a few hundred have! It’s because this graphic novel isn’t about fame. No astronaut you'll ever meet took the...
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard—Online
Although Massachusetts formally abolished slavery in 1783, the visible and invisible presence of slavery continued in the Commonwealth and throughout New England well into the 19th century. Harvard professor Louis Agassiz’s theory about human origins is but one example of the continued presence and institutionalization of racism in the North.
Taking as a starting point the new book To Make Their Own Way in the World: The Enduring Legacy of the Zealy Daguerreotypes, this panel of experts will examine the role and impact of slavery in the North and discuss the influence...
African cities are confronted by large youthful labour markets with limited prospects of formal industrial employment, on the one hand, and rapid physical expansion without the resources to address the massive infrastructural requirements to support people and economies, on the other. These daunting challenges are compounded by the impacts of the climate crisis and other forms of acute environmental risk. This confluence calls for situated innovations to reimagine and redesign investments in sustainable infrastructures that are simultaneously low-carbon, labour-intensive and geared...
How can we respond to the imperative of being in the now, of inhabiting the present? Can a work absorb the moment in time of its making without becoming like the news?
Inhabitant is about this question and how it has informed our work in filmmaking, art, and design. Referring to processes of sensing and inhabiting as practiced by non-human-species such as mushrooms and lichens, we will reference the work of Anna Tsing and Jennifer Gabrys, among others. In doing so, Inhabitant will explore affinities between sensing and cinematic capture.
Celebrate the glamour, labor, humor, and discoveries of archaeology at Harvard. Join student archaeologists as they share their experience with an Irish castle, a shaft tomb in western Mexico, monuments on the Giza plateau in Egypt and drones used to study El-Kurru in ancient Nubia, among other locations. Place a friendly wager on an atlatl (spear throwing) demonstration, observe chew marks on bones from the Zooarchaeology Lab and experience a virtual-reality view of the Great Sphinx.
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard—Online
The passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920 did not "give" women the vote. Rather, it established a negative: that the right to vote could not be abridged on account of sex alone. This session brings together diverse participants who will each illuminate one facet of women’s political history at this key transitional moment. Together, participants will emphasize the radical achievement of the amendment, exploring the full implications of what it meant to remove sex as a barrier to voting, which resulted in the largest-ever one-time expansion of the electorate and mobilized a...
Capture the beauty and variety of plant forms with pencil and paper in this online workshop with artist and educator Erica Beade. Participants will explore botanical drawing techniques through close observation and practice with contour, gesture, foreshortening and shading. Groups will be limited to 10, allowing ample time for individual feedback. All skill levels are welcome.
Join the Harvard Graduate School of design for a virtual lecture with Michael Murphy, Danielle Allen, and Sarah Whiting.
Michael Murphy is the Founding Principal and Executive Director of MASS Design Group, an architecture and design collective with offices in Boston, Kigali, Poughkeepsie, Santa Fe, Cape Town, and London. As a designer, writer, and teacher, his work investigates the social and political consequences of the built world. Michael’s research and writing advocates for a new empowerment that calls on architects to consider the power relationships of...
Capture the beauty and variety of plant forms with pencil and paper in this online workshop with artist and educator Erica Beade. Participants will explore botanical drawing techniques through close observation and practice with contour, gesture, foreshortening and shading. Groups will be limited to 10, allowing ample time for individual feedback. All skill levels are welcome.
In this half-day virtual symposium, leading practitioners and scholars from three cities, Washington, DC, Detroit, and Boston, will explore efforts to bring equitable development to their communities and outline how they are responding to current challenges. The presentations and discussions will help students, scholars, community leaders, public officials, and others identify innovative strategies and successful approaches to advancing social justice in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color.
Online—Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard
As the Beatrice Shepherd Blane Fellow, Leslie M. Harris is completing “Leaving New Orleans: A Personal Urban History.” She uses memoir and family, urban, and environmental histories to explore the multiple meanings of New Orleans in the nation, from its founding through its uncertain future amid climate change.