2020 Nov 17
Carl M. Sapers Ethics in Practice Lecture: Black Reconstruction
7:30pm to 9:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Graduate School of Design—Online
Ten Responses to One Question: What does it mean to imagine Black Reconstruction today?
Join the Black Reconstruction Collective (BRC) for this lecture. The BRC provides funding, design, and intellectual support to the ongoing and incomplete project of emancipation for the African Diaspora. The BRC is committed to multi-scalar and multi-disciplinary work dedicated to dismantling systemic white supremacy and hegemonic whiteness within art, design, and academia. Founded by a group of Black architects, artists, designers, and scholars, the BRC aims to amplify knowledge...
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2020 Oct 29
Open House Lecture: Nikil Saval, “A Rage in Harlem”
7:30pm to 9:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Graduate School of Design—Online
This talk will consider the moment when June Jordan and Buckminster Fuller attempted to reimagine Harlem in the wake of the 1964 riots, considered against a larger context of experiments in social housing, environmental planning, urban rebellion, and Afro-futurism.
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2020 Oct 29
Education Justice: Why Prison Classrooms Matter
4:00pm
Location: 
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard—Online
“What college does, it helps us learn about the nation,” said Rodney Spivey-Jones, a 2017 Bard College graduate currently incarcerated at Fishkill Correctional Facility in New York, in the docuseries College behind Bars. “It helps us become civic beings. It helps us understand that we have an interest in our community, that our community is a part of us and we are a part of it.”
The Bard Prison Initiative and programs at other institutions of higher learning across the country have brought together teachers and learners in incarcerated spaces for years. This panel will gather...
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2020 Oct 28
The Architecture of Democracy
7:30pm to 9:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Graduate School of Design—Online
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.
Learn more about and RSVP...
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2020 Oct 22
History’s Currency: The Afterlife of al-Maqrizi’s Khitat
6:30pm to 8:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Graduate School of Design—Online
This lecture offers a reading of the stages of modernity in Egypt through a medieval lens. It explores how a leading urban history book, al-Maqrizi’s Khitat (written 1415-42), came to absorb and articulate the country’s encounters with colonialism, modernization, Orientalism, historical academicism, nationalism, pan-Arabism, and authoritarian capitalism.
...
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2020 Oct 22
New Blocs, New Maps, New Power
4:00pm to 5:00pm
Location: 
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...
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2020 Oct 21
Immigration Speaker Series: ‘Holding Fast: Resilience and Civic Engagement Among Latino Immigrants’
12:00pm to 1:30pm
Location: 
Online Event
Michael Jones-Correa is President’s Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Director, Center for the Study of Ethnicity, Race and Immigration (CSERI). He is author of Holding Fast: Resilience and Civic Engagement Among Latino Immigrants (Russell Sage Foundation). His research centers on the topics of immigrant political incorporation and ethnic and racial relations in the United States, often writing about political behavior in the context of institutional structures. Our...
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2020 Oct 16
Emerging Scholars of Color Abroad
2:00pm to 3:30pm
Location: 
Online Event
Race in Focus: From Critical Pedagogies to Research Practice and Public Engagement in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies Among the first African Americans to join the American Communist Party and an important architect of communist approaches to race, racism, and African American equality, Lovett Fort- Whiteman (1889-1939) was one of the US citizens convinced (naively, to be sure) that Soviet society showed the way for overcoming racism in the United States. While visiting...
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2020 Oct 15
The Obsidian Mirror: Literature and Archaeology in Mexico
6:00pm to 7:00pm
Location: 
Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology—Online
Mexican authors Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes, José Emilio Pacheco, Salvador Novo, Rubén Bonifaz Nuño, and Rosario Castellanos, among others, have sought to use language to explore and recover the links between Mexico’s Indigenous peoples and its contemporary society. Focusing on Mexico’s pre-Hispanic past, Juan Villoro will explore the intimate and evocative relationships among literature, archaeology, and culture.
Learn more about and RSVP for The Obsidian...
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2020 Oct 12
Listening to Wampanoag Voices: Beyond 1620
Mon Oct 12 (All day) to Sat Oct 31 (All day)
Location: 
Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology—Online
Four hundred years have passed since the Wampanoag Nation encountered English immigrants who settled on the shores of their land at Patuxet—now called Plymouth. Harvard University has had a relationship with the Wampanoag and other local tribal communities for nearly as long, establishing the Harvard Indian College on campus in 1655. In acknowledgment of this early history, the Peabody Museum has asked Wampanoag tribal members to reflect on collections spanning...
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2020 Oct 08
The Enduring Legacy of Slavery and Racism in the North
4:00pm
Location: 
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...
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2020 Oct 08
Art Talk Live: Precious Deception: The Illegal Use of Gold Leaf in an 18th-Century Color Print
2:00pm to 2:30pm
Location: 
Harvard Art Museums—Online
This handsome engraving, with its printed gold-leaf frame, was made by Louis-Marin Bonnet, one of the most gifted and innovative producers of full-color prints in 18th-century France. However, the inclusion of gold leaf in the print was illegal. In this talk, visiting senior scholar Margaret Morgan Grasselli will discuss Bonnet’s elaborate efforts to conceal his authorship, pretending that the print had originated in England and had been made by a mysterious artist named “L. Marin.”
Led by:
Margaret Morgan Grasselli, Visiting Senior Scholar for Drawings,...
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2020 Oct 08
Loeb Lecture: Edgar Pieterse
12:00pm to 1:30pm
Location: 
Harvard Graduate School of Design—Online
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...
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2020 Oct 07
From the Hands of the Makers
6:00pm to 7:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Museum of Natural History—Online
From 1886 to 1936, Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka applied their artistic talents and knowledge of natural history to create an exquisite collection of glass models of plants to support the botanical education of Harvard students and the public. This program will explore the history, conservation, and relevance of the Glass Flowers in the twenty-first century and introduce the publication Glass Flowers: Marvels of Art and Science at Harvard, a compendium of new photographs that captures the beauty and magnificent detail of the models.
...
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2020 Oct 06
Lecture: Cannon Fodder: Debating the Racial Politics of Canonicity in Modern Architectural History
7:30pm to 9:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Graduate School of Design—Online
This talk introduces audiences to the antiracist framework for architectural history that guided the formulation of the recent monograph Building Character: The Racial Politics of Modern Architectural Style (2020). This revisionist intellectual history recovers the ways that architectural organicism provided a rationalist model of design to consciously relate the perceived racial and architectural “characters” of a nation to the people they served.
From the ethnographic histories of style penned by Eugene Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc and Gottfried Semper, to Louis Sullivan...
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2020 Oct 03
Amazing Virtual Archaeology Fair at Harvard
1:00pm to 3:00pm
Location: 
Online—Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East
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.
...
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2020 Oct 01
On Account of Sex (1920)
4:00pm
Location: 
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...
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2020 Sep 22
50th Anniversary of Urban Design Lecture: Alex Krieger, “The American City Prior and (Possibly) Following the Pandemic”
7:30pm to 9:00pm
Location: 
Online Event, Graduate School of Design
 
American instincts oscillate between the allure of the city and that of life free of city stress; between the temptations of the metropolis, and bucolic retreat from those very centers of civic life. Such oscillation, occurring across American history, have on the one hand enabled the building of Manhattan, the ‘Capital of Capitalism’ (and culture, too) and the invention of the ‘garden suburb’ where family grace was to dwell, prior to metastasizing into sprawl.
...
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2020 Sep 17
Observatory Night: What Stars Are Made Of
7:00pm
Location: 
Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian—Online
Join the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian for a virtual Public Observatory Night with guest lecturer Donavan Moore, author of "What Stars Are Made Of: The Life of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin."
It was not easy being a woman of ambition in early twentieth-century England, much less one who wished to be a scientist. Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin overcame prodigious obstacles to become a woman of many firsts: the first to receive a PhD in astronomy from Radcliffe College, the first promoted to full professor at Harvard, the first to head a department there. And, in what...
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2020 Sep 16
Lecture: Apprenticeship in Ancient Egypt
6:00pm to 7:00pm
Location: 
Online—Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East
Presenter: Willeke Wendrich, Joan Silsbee Chair of African Cultural Archaeology; Professor of Egyptian Archaeology and Digital Humanities, University of California, Los Angeles
Archaeologists study stylistic and technological changes in excavated materials—especially pottery—to better understand developments in ancient Egyptian society. However, little attention has focused on using the archaeological record to understand the transfer of cultural knowledge. How did people learn the arts and crafts of potters, basket makers, metalworkers, and scribes?...
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