Events

Black Women and the American University: Eileen Southern’s Story

Location:

Harvard Graduate School of Education—Online

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 (1920–2002) became the first African American woman tenured in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS). She was central in developing...

Harvard Dance Center Showing: Initiation – In Love Solidarity

Location:

Harvard Dance Center—Online or in-person

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.

Saturday, November 13, 4pm & 7pm: ...

Art and Thought in the Dutch Republic: Erasmus Lectures on the History and Civilization of the Netherlands and Flanders (Part 2)

Location:

Harvard Art Museums—Online

Arts and sciences flourished in the Dutch Republic during the 17th century. Women such as Anna Maria van Schurman, Margareta van Godewick, and Anna Roemer Visscher excelled in scholarly pursuits and art practice. They were greatly admired, but they were nonetheless categorized as exceptional cases and never possessed the freedom to voice ideas enjoyed by their male counterparts. Working in a variety of art forms, including miniature painting, drawing, embroidery, and paper cutting, these women often meant to address no other audience than the artist herself.

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Tell the truth but tell it slant—Behind the Scenes of Apple TV+’s Dickinson

Location:

Houghton Library—Online

Join Houghton Library for a peek behind the scenes of Apple TV+’s Dickinson, a biographical comedy about poet Emily Dickinson. Show creator Alena Smith, Set Decorator Marina Parker, and Costume Designer Jennifer Moeller will be joined by Ernest Bernbaum Professor of English Deidre Lynch to delve into the research and creativity driving the show. The show’s archive—scripts, set and costume designs, tone books, and more—are now housed at Houghton Library as part of its Emily Dickinson Collection.

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Gutman Library Book Talk: 100 Days in Vietnam: A Memoir of Love, War, and Survival

Location:

Harvard Graduate School of Education—Online

Painstakingly recreated from wartime letters and remembrances and contextualized by contemporary news accounts, 100 Days in Vietnam is a collaboration between Joe and his son Matthew A. Tallon, Ed.M.'09, Administrative Director of Faculty Support Services at HGSE, also an Army veteran.

Here we experience the war through the emotions of the man who survived it: the drudgery and monotony of airfield life, the heartache of a newlywed missing his wife, the terror of combat missions, the agony of injury and rehabilitation, and the bittersweet relief from the completion of...

Michael Twitty, "Beyond 'Slave Food': Re-Organizing the Perceptions and Potential of African American Foodways"

Location:

Harvard Graduate School of Design—Online

Culinary historian Michael Twitty, author of the James Beard-winning book, The Cooking Gene, discusses the impact of the collective perceptions of African American foodways on how we experience a broader vision of healing. With such foodways often stigmatized as a continuation of socio-cultural trauma or defended with a mark of "authentic" racial identity, Twitty offers alternative ways to see how the revitalization of ancestral foodways and culinary justice is a necessary part of our collective national experience.

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Art and Thought in the Dutch Republic: Erasmus Lectures on the History and Civilization of the Netherlands and Flanders (Part 1)

Location:

Harvard Art Museums—Online

In the 17th century, the Dutch Republic was a fast-paced, successful, modern society—economically, politically, and artistically. The work ethic of its citizens amazed foreign visitors, who compared the Dutch to crawling ants. Its flourishing art production showed the bustle of everyday life with almost scientific precision. Yet many artworks amassed by Dutch citizens in their homes portray scenes of silence and serenity. Such works, including genre pieces by Johannes Vermeer and still lifes featuring fruit, nuts or bread by Willem Heda and Adriaen Coorte, suggest a deep engagement with...

Virtual Student Guide Tour: This Land Is Whose Land?, with Jacqueline Zoeller

Location:

Harvard Art Museums—Online

On this tour commemorating Native American Heritage Month, Jacqueline Zoeller ’23 will contrast colonial visions of the Western U.S. landscape, such as Albert Bierstadt’s Rocky Mountains, “Lander’s Peak” (1863), with the realities lived and portrayed by Native American artists. Stops on the tour will include Diné artist Will Wilson’s Mexican Hat Disposal Cell (2020), a landscape photograph of Halchita, Utah, the Navajo...

Between Worlds: China’s WWII Interpreters and Their Divergent Fates in China, Taiwan, and the United States

Location:

Harvard Radcliffe Institute—Online

David Cheng Chang is an associate professor of humanities and the associate director of Global China Center at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. While at Radcliffe, he is using interdisciplinary source materials to write a book that will weave together the personal histories of more than 3,000 Chinese interpreters for the American and British allied forces during World War II with the larger military, political, diplomatic, and social history of World War II, the Chinese Civil War, the Korean War, and the Cold War. Join Chang as he discusses this project and the...

Daniela Bleichmar, “The history of cochineal and the changing value of Mexican indigenous environmental knowledge, ca. 1500–1800”

Location:

Harvard Graduate School of Design—Online

Before the development of synthetic dyes in the second half of the 1800s, natural dyes were some of the most prized and sought-after commodities in the global economy. This talk uses historical images and texts to excavate changing approaches to indigenous environmental knowledge in colonial Mexico and early modern Europe through the study of cochineal.

This insect, native to the Americas, produced the world's best quality and most valuable red dye from the 1520s until the rise of the modern chemical dye industry. Long used by indigenous people in the Americas, under Spanish...

Rachel Dorothy Tanur Memorial Lecture: Andrea Roberts, “The Community Core: Making and Keeping Place Heritage in Texas’s Freedom Colonies”

Location:

Harvard Graduate School of Design—Online

In Texas’ freedom colonies — African American settlements founded 1866-1930 — descendants of community founders engage in heritage conservation by keeping folklife, sacred rituals, and other cultural expressions that sustain communities’ Black sense of place. However, rural, vernacular African American placekeeping strategies are rarely framed in planning and architectural history as transgressive or expressions of Black liberation.

Presenting an excerpt from her forthcoming book, Never Sell the Land, Dr. Roberts shares case studies in which descendants of Deep East...

The Art of Making Day of the Dead Altars

Location:

Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology—Online

Live interpretation in English and Spanish

Interpretación en vivo en inglés y español

Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) is a Mexican tradition that seeks to commemorate and celebrate the lives of loved ones who have passed away. The creation of an altar is a key component of this celebration, which is both bittersweet and joyful. In this program, Los Angeles-based artist, educator, and altarista Ofelia Esparza will share her philosophy and approach to making altars and to keeping Día de los Muertos alive in the U.S. She will be joined by her daughter,...

How Beer Made Kings in Early Egypt

Location:

Harvard Museums of Science & Culture—Online

The remains of a 5000-year-old brewery found in the ancient Egyptian city of Abydos are providing insights into the relationship between large-scale beer production and the development of kingship in Egypt. Archaeological evidence indicates that the Abydos brewery produced beer on a truly industrial scale—something unparalleled in early Egypt. Matthew Adams will share findings from recent excavations at the brewery and will consider it in context as part of a broad pattern of royal activity at the site that served to define the very nature of kingship at the beginning of Egypt’s history...

Tricia Rose, 'Trayvon Martin: No Chance Encounter'

Location:

Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard—Online

Join the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research for a virtual W.E.B. Du Bois Lecture, "Trayvon Martin: No Chance Encounter," with Tricia Rose, Chancellor’s Professor of Africana Studies and the Director of the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America, Brown University.

Learn more about and RSVP for this virtual event.

Airbrush, Instamatics, and Funk: Art, Pop, and New York City’s Long 1970s

Location:

Harvard Radcliffe Institute—Online

A presentation from 2021–2022 Walter Jackson Bate Fellow Uri McMillan.

Uri McMillan, an associate professor in the Department of African American Studies and Department of English at UCLA, is a cultural historian who researches and writes in the interstices between black cultural studies, performance studies, queer theory, and contemporary art. He is writing a book about the effervescent artistic practices and networks of affiliation of three artists living and working in 1970s New York City: the Jamaican American visual artist Grace Jones, the Nuyorican illustrator Antonio...

HLS Library Book Talk: Power to the People

Location:

Harvard Law School—Online

Self-described populist leaders around the world are dismantling their nation’s constitutions. This has led to a widespread view that populism as such is inconsistent with constitutionalism. We disagree. Some forms of populism are inconsistent with constitutionalism, others aren’t. Context and detail matter.

Join us for a discussion with co-authors Mark Tushnet (HLS) and Bojan Bugarič (University of Sheffield) and panelists Tom Ginsburg (University of Chicago), Lawrence Lessig (HLS), and Sanford V. Levinson (University of Texas) followed by an audience Q&A session.

Book Talk – Ordinary Heroes: A Memoir of 9/11

Location:

Harvard Kennedy School, Ash Center—Online

You are invited to a virtual book talk with Ash Center Senior Fellow and HKS Executive Education instructor Joe Pfeifer (MC/MPA 2008), author of the recently published New York Times Bestseller, Ordinary Heroes: A Memoir of 9/11. The book serves as an intimate memoir by Pfeifer, the first FDNY chief to respond to the 9/11 attacks, and a tribute to those who died that others might live. Juliette Kayyem, Belfer Senior Lecturer in International Security at HKS, will moderate the...

Mexico's Mid-term Elections & New Balances of Power

Location:

David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard—Online

Mexico's July 2021 mid-term elections were seen as a key test of strength between the government of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) and its opponents. What are the election’s consequences, both for the AMLO government’s agenda and for Mexican democracy?

Learn more about and RSVP for this virtual event.

Entangled Histories: The Bamiyan Buddhas—Past, Present, and Future

Location:

Harvard Art Museums—Online

Western scholarship has focused on the monumental sculptures in Afghanistan’s Bamiyan Valley as Buddhas created in the late sixth and early seventh centuries. This lecture tells an alternative story based on Islamic sources from the tenth to the twentieth century, which saw these sculptures not as Buddhas but as legendary heroes representing the mythic conversion of the Bamiyan Valley to Islam.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the Taliban destroyed the sculptures—as Buddhas. After the fall of the Taliban, the sculptures’ entangled histories and the viewpoints of...

Muchos Méxicos: Virtual Exhibition Preview and Conversation

Location:

Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology—Online

Join us for a virtual preview and conversation about the Muchos Méxicos exhibition! Three scholars who contributed to the making of the show will discuss their favorite objects, and how they each tell stories of exchange and innovation—as well as loss and perseverance—across time and space.

Live interpretation available in English and Spanish.

Learn more about and RSVP for this virtual event.

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