Events

    2022 Sep 22

    The History and Politics of Georgian Wine

    12:30pm to 2:00pm

    Location: 

    Davis Center for Russian & Eurasian Studies, 1730 Cambridge St., Room S354, Cambridge

    Georgia is the world's oldest wine producer, and the history of Georgian wine is woven together with the country's culture, politics, and economics. Join Mamuka Tsereteli for a lecture on the significance of Georgian wine, followed by a Q&A—and stick around for a tasting to find out for yourself why Georgian wine is so special!

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    2022 Sep 20

    Introduction to the History of Georgian Cinema

    4:00pm to 5:30pm

    Location: 

    1737 Cambridge St., Room K262, Cambridge or Zoom Webinar

    In recent years, Georgian cinema has been witnessing an astonishing period of revival, a new generation of filmmakers has emerged, and today a new wave of Georgian filmmakers has managed to find a new and strong language of cinema, in order to speak with international audience about contemporary issues of Georgian society. Levan Lomjaria will explore these and other aspects of the history of Georgian cinema in his lecture.

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    2022 Jun 21

    Gallery Talk: A Sweeping Panorama—Simon de Vlieger’s View of Weesp

    12:00pm to 12:30pm

    Location: 

    Harvard Art Museums, 32 Quincy St., Cambridge

    Seventeenth-century artist Simon de Vlieger was one of many Dutch draftsmen who captured panoramas of the cities and towns that surrounded them. In his observed and accurate drawing of Weesp, a municipality located outside Amsterdam on the river Vecht, aspects of this recognizable view speak to larger questions of commerce and the environment. Join curatorial research associate Susan Anderson to discover these details within the broader artistic and cultural milieu of landscape drawing in the Dutch Republic.

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    2022 Jun 14

    Gallery Talk: Unpacking a 120-Year-Old Zeiss Photographic Microscope

    12:30pm to 1:00pm

    Location: 

    Harvard Art Museums, 32 Quincy St., Cambridge

    Curator Sara Schechner, from Harvard’s Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, and Lynette Roth, curator of the Busch-Reisinger Museum, will team up to explore a 120-year-old Zeiss photographic microscope. The curators will look at the assemblage of its various parts and share with visitors what they tell us about how scientists work with such a microscope. Its diverse components, housed in a wooden case, reveal not only the technical challenges of taking photographs through a microscope lens, but also the instrument’s inherent social, cultural, and aesthetic connections....

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    2022 Jun 08

    Gallery Talk: Drawing the Dutch Landscape, in Color

    12:30pm to 1:00pm

    Location: 

    Harvard Art Museums, 32 Quincy St., Cambridge

    Seventeenth-century Dutch artists, such as Abraham Bloemaert, Hendrick Avercamp, and Albert Cuyp, achieved coloristic effects through a variety of means. Join curator Joachim Homann in an exploration of colorful papers, inks, and washes from artists of the Dutch Republic.

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    2022 Apr 27

    In-Person Gallery Talk: Ella Hurd’s Botanical Cyanotypes—Camera-less Photography and Scientific Discovery in the 19th Century

    12:30pm to 1:00pm

    Location: 

    Harvard Art Museums, 32 Quincy St., Cambridge

    The talk will highlight amateur botanist Ella Hurd and the process she used to make her cyanotypes. It will also explore the importance of camera-less photography to scientific research and documentation in the 19th century.

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    2022 Apr 27

    The Descendants (A Novel)

    12:00pm

    Location: 

    Harvard Radcliffe Institute—Online

    Ladee Hubbard is a writer whose most recent novel is “The Rib King” (Amistad, 2021). In this lecture, she will discuss her current project, a novel that examines the implications of the ways in which Black people in the United States have historically been represented as an internal threat to both public health and safety, placing the 1980s War on Drugs in dialogue with the larger history of African Americans being used in drug trials and medical experiments.

    ...

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    2022 Apr 21

    The Power of Antiquity in the Making of Modern Egypt

    6:00pm to 7:00pm

    Location: 

    Harvard Museums of Science & Culture—Online

    Ancient Egypt conjures images of pharaonic temples, tombs, and pyramids, and perhaps, even the familiar illustrations from children’s books and magazines showing kilted workers on the Nile toiling away on their kings’ great monuments. But what is the relationship between these images—along with the deep history they evoke and the processes of discovery that made them visible—and the history of modern Egypt?

    In this talk, Wendy Doyon will discuss the relationship between state, archaeology, and labor in Mehmed (or Muhammad) Ali’s Egypt—an autonomous khedival, or viceregal,...

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    2022 Apr 21

    In-Person Gallery Talk: Washington and the Power of Clothes

    12:30pm to 1:00pm

    Location: 

    Harvard Art Museums, 32 Quincy St., Cambridge

    Join curator Horace D. Ballard for fresh perspective on two of the museums’ iconic portraits of George Washington through the meaning of gesture and the materialities of fashion. Inspired by Ballard’s recent research on Washington and his rewriting of the portraits’ gallery labels, the talk will explore the important role artists played in shaping the nation’s sense of self after the partisan politics of the Revolutionary War.

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    2022 Apr 20

    Mexican Red: The Perfect Color that Changed the World

    6:00pm to 7:00pm

    Location: 

    Harvard Museums of Science & Culture—Online

    Cochineal (Dactylopius coccus) is a small insect that produces a brilliant red pigment. Found in textiles, paintings, cosmetics, and many other objects that span the globe, cochineal is an integral part of world history. Cochineal pigment was used by Mesoamerican peoples long before the Spanish arrived in the sixteenth century. After being introduced to Europe, it quickly became a precious commodity and control over its global trade was a source of conflict and competition for over three centuries. In this lecture, Gabriela Soto Laveaga will trace the fascinating history of cochineal...

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    2022 Apr 20

    Making Race: Policy, Sex, and Social Order in the French Atlantic and Indian Oceans, 1608–1756

    12:00pm

    Location: 

    Harvard Radcliffe Institute—Online

    Mélanie Lamotte is an assistant professor of French at Tulane University. After completing her first book, under contract with Harvard University Press, she is undertaking a research project that examines the material life of the enslaved across the early modern French empire, thereby reconstructing the cultural, social, economic, and political experiences of slave communities. Join her to learn more about her work.

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    2022 Apr 14

    The Trouble with Tragedy: Imagining the Native American Past, Present, and Future

    6:00pm to 7:30pm

    Location: 

    Harvard Art Museums, 32 Quincy St., Cambridge

    The Harvard University Native American Program (HUNAP) and the Harvard Art Museums present a lecture by author David Treuer.

    David Treuer, an Ojibwe Indian, will offer a fresh and in-depth perspective on the current state of affairs for Native and Indigenous peoples in the Americas. Drawing from his experience growing up on the Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota and as an accomplished academic, Treuer’s work includes both nonfiction and fiction.

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    2022 Apr 11

    Joan Nogué, "A Journey through Landscape: From Theory to Practice"

    12:30pm to 2:00pm

    Location: 

    Harvard Graduate School of Design—Online

    Drawing from experience accumulated over 40 years of academic and professional trajectory on the question of landscape, as a university professor, director of the Landscape Observatory of Catalonia and ‘militant’ for landscape, Joan Nogué will reflect on the theory and practice of landscape today and into the future.

    Professor Nogué defends an integral conception of landscape that considers both the tangible and intangible elements. Such conception highlights the geohistorical singularity of landscape –every landscape belongs to a specific space and time– while acknowledging...

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    2022 Apr 09

    In-Person Gallery Talk: Art and Human Health—An Evolutionary Perspective

    12:30pm to 1:00pm

    Location: 

    Harvard Art Museums, 32 Quincy St., Cambridge

    Join Ben Sibson, a graduate student at Harvard in human evolutionary biology, for a conversation about how art can enhance our understanding of the evolution of human health. Looking at works of art installed in the University Study Gallery this semester for the undergraduate course Human Evolution and Human Health, Sibson will show how the objects provide useful information about the physical activities performed by people across time and space, as well as the foods they ate, the clothes they wore, and the spaces where they lived.

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    2022 Apr 07

    Manifest: Thirteen Colonies

    6:00pm to 7:00pm

    Location: 

    Harvard Museums of Science & Culture—Online

    Manifest: Thirteen Colonies is a photographic project and journey through the repositories of African American material culture found in libraries, museums, and archives of the original thirteen English colonies. Conceived by photographer Wendel White, this project is a personal, selective reliquary of the remarkable evidence of Black agency and racial oppression stored in public and private collections.

    In this program, White will discuss his approach to finding, selecting, and photographing artifacts—from rare singular objects, to more quotidian materials—and highlight their...

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    2022 Apr 06

    Exploring Humanity's Technological Origins

    6:00pm to 7:00pm

    Location: 

    Harvard Museums of Science & Culture—Online

    Human evolutionary scholars have long assumed that the earliest stone tools were made by members of the genus Homo, approximately 2.4–2.3 million years ago, and that this technological development was directly linked to climate change and the spread of savannah grasslands. In the last decade, fieldwork in West Turkana, Kenya, has revealed evidence of much earlier technological behavior.

    Sonia Harmand will discuss the discovery of stone tools in a 3.3-million-year-old archaeological site in Kenya known as Lomekwi 3. She will show how this discovery is reshaping our...

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    2022 Apr 05

    Art Talk Live: The Secret Life of Ptahshepses Impy

    12:30pm to 1:00pm

    Location: 

    Harvard Art Museums—Online

    Join Egyptologist Jen Thum for an engaging look at the results of new research on the tomb relief of Ptahshepses Impy, an Egyptian official. Thum will explore the implications of this research, including possible changes to the display of the relief to indicate missing portions.

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    2022 Mar 31

    Exploring Egypt’s Middle Kingdom at the Site of Ancient Thebes

    6:00pm to 7:00pm

    Location: 

    Harvard Museums of Science & Culture—Online

    One of ancient Egypt's high points of cultural, intellectual, and social life was the period referred to as the Middle Kingdom (2030–1650 BCE). The ancient city of Thebes (modern Luxor) was the Egyptian capital during the early stage of this period and the site of multiple funerary temples and tombs. In this lecture, Egyptologist Antonio Morales will discuss an international and multidisciplinary project that is conducting archaeological, historical, and cultural research, as well as conservation work, in Deir el-Bahari and Asasif—two funerary areas at Thebes—to better understand the...

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    2022 Mar 23

    Women on the Frontlines of Revolution

    12:00pm

    Location: 

    Harvard Radcliffe Institute—Online

    Erica Chenoweth is a Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at Harvard Radcliffe Institute and the Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment at Harvard Kennedy School. In this lecture, Chenoweth will present their ongoing research for their next book, written with Zoe Marks. Titled, “Rebel XX: Women on the Frontlines of Revolution,” the book is about the impact of women’s participation on revolutionary outcomes.

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