2021 Jun 10
How We Incarcerate Young People: A Conversation about Policy and Neuroscience
4:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Radcliffe Institute—Online
Across the United States, children under the age of 18 can be tried as adults in criminal court. Although the practice is condemned by international law, we are the only country in the world that sentences young people to life in prison without the possibility of parole. At the same time, recent developments in neuroscience research demonstrate that the human brain is not fully developed until after the age of 25.
This program will consider the ways we punish young people in the American criminal legal system and how our policies could be reformed. We will bring together a...
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2021 Mar 29
Marc Angélil and Charlotte Malterre-Barthes, "Migrant Marseille: Architectures of Social Segregation and Urban Inclusivity"
12:00pm to 1:30pm
Location: 
Harvard Graduate School of Design—Online
On November 5, 2018, a pair of dilapidated buildings in central Marseille collapsed, taking the lives of eight people, many of them from immigrant origin. This toll of urban decay reflects both the diversity of the district and the hardship of living in Marseille, a city marked for centuries by migration, poverty, and social inequality. Divided along ethnic and class lines, with wealthy conservatives dominating the south and an energetic but pauperized community of immigrant origins in the north, Marseille highlights the tensions stemming from discriminatory governance, lack of housing-...
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2021 Mar 25
Black Is Queen: The Divine Feminine in Kush
6:00pm to 7:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East—Online
The prominence of powerful goddesses and queens in the Nubian Kingdom of Kush (now Northern Sudan) highlights the unusually high status of women in this ancient African society and serves as a fitting focus for the study of female power in the ancient world. Using temple inscriptions found in Egypt and Nubia, the rich funerary goods found in royal burials, and temple and tomb imagery, Solange Ashby will discuss how ancient Africans of the Nile Valley understood female power and presence. Songs from Beyoncé’s recent production "Black Is King" will be woven into this presentation on...
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2021 Mar 25
Ana María León and Torsten Lange, "Bodies of Work: Activism, Gender, Architecture"
12:00pm to 1:30pm
Location: 
Harvard Graduate School of Design—Online
In this conversation, architectural historians Ana María León and Torsten Lange consider the labor of organizing around issues of gender in architecture. Based on three precedents, they will reflect on their work and practice and highlight how the present has allowed scholars and practitioners to revise architectural historiography. Building on intersectional feminist theory, the discussion considers architecture and urban space as well as architectural discourse as forums where white heteronormative systems of planning can become subverted by empowered labor and living practices....
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2021 Mar 17
"The Polynesian Problem": Western Studies of Pacific Islander Origins
6:00pm to 7:00pm
Location: 
Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology—Online
"What is a Polynesian?" This is a question with a long and troubling history embedded in settler colonialism. From Europeans’ earliest encounters with the Pacific, White Europeans expressed a fascination and partial identification with the racial origins of Polynesians. Polynesians seemed to represent "natural man" in the purest state. In nineteenth- and early twentieth-century social-scientific studies, Polynesian origins became the subject of intense scrutiny and debate. Physical anthropologists such as Louis R. Sullivan declared Polynesians to be conditionally Caucasian....
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2021 Mar 15
Black and White Thinking: A Conversation with Cord Whitaker
5:00pm to 6:30pm
Location: 
Harvard University Committee on Medieval Studies—Online
Author Cord Whitaker discusses his new book "Black Metaphors: How Modern Racism Emerged from Medieval Race-Thinking" (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019) with Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research.
...
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2021 Mar 11
Catherine Seavitt Nordenson, "The Miasmist: George E. Waring, Jr. and Landscapes of Public Health"
7:30pm to 9:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Graduate School of Design—Online
In 1867, nineteenth-century sanitary engineer George E. Waring, Jr. (1833–1898) published an influential manual entitled “Draining for Profit, Draining for Health,” reflecting the obsessions of his gilded age—wealth, health, and miasma. Even as the germ theory emerged, Waring supported the anti-contagionist miasma theory, positing that disease spread through the air as a poisonous vapor, emerging from damp soil. He applied his knowledge of farm drainage to an urban theory of public health, with a drainage plan for Central Park; a sewerage system for Memphis; a transformation of New York...
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2021 Mar 11
Racially Charged: America’s Misdemeanor Problem (Film Screening and Panel Discussion)
3:30pm to 5:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Law School—Online
Join the Harvard Law School Library for a live screening and panel discussion of “Racially Charged: America’s Misdemeanor Problem,” a new documentary about the racial history and modern discrimination of the American misdemeanor system. The film, produced by Brave New Films and directed by Robert Greenwald, was inspired by HLS Professor Alexandra Natapoff’s book, “Punishment Without Crime: How Our Massive Misdemeanor System Traps the Innocent and Makes America More Unequal.”
...
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2021 Mar 10
Aesthetics of Memory, Narratives of Repair, and Why Remorse Matters
12:00pm
Location: 
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard—Online
Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, a professor and South African National Research Foundation Chair in Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma at Stellenbosch University, focuses her research on trauma in the aftermath of gross human rights violations and on remorse and forgiveness that emerge in victim-perpetrator dialogues. At Radcliffe, Gobodo-Madikizela returns to the archive of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to think through the horrific violence in contemporary South Africa. Is this violence a reflection of “ghosts” from the past, the death of hope in the present, or a...
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2021 Mar 08
Lessons Learned from Anti-Equality Mobilization
12:00pm to 2:00pm
Location: 
Davis Center for Russian & Eurasian Studies—Online
The 21st century Central European illiberal transformation is a process deeply reliant on gender politics. A feminist analysis is central to understanding the current regime changes, both in terms of their ideological underpinnings, and with respect to their modus operandi. Key aspects of this phenomenon are: 1. opposition to the liberal equality paradigm has become a key ideological space where the illiberal alternative to the post-1989 (neo)liberal project is being forged; 2. family mainstreaming and anti-gender policies have been one of the main pillars on which the illiberal state...
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2021 Mar 08
A Celebration of International Women’s Day with Her Majesty Queen Rania Al Abdullah of Jordan
10:00am to 11:00am
Location: 
Harvard Kennedy School—Online
In celebration of International Women’s Day 2021, Her Majesty Queen Rania Al Abdullah of Jordan joins the Center for International Development, Belfer Center’s Middle East Initiative, Women and Public Policy Program, and the Institute of Politics at Harvard Kennedy School to discuss women’s empowerment, cross-cultural dialogue, and innovative solutions to global challenges. The conversation will be moderated by Melani Cammett, Clarence Dillon Professor of International Affairs at Harvard.
...
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2021 Mar 05
The Stories We Tell and the Objects We Keep: Asian American Women and the Archives
1:00pm to 3:30pm
Location: 
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard—Online
The stories of Asian American women extend far beyond the geographic borders of the United States. Inspired by tales and objects from family history, their narratives often reflect the transnational nature of Asian American women’s lives. Despite the importance of these narratives to expanding and complicating our understanding of war, migration, inequity, and difference, the accounts and perspectives of Asian American women have often been overlooked in formal records, and the tangible objects providing critical evidence of their histories have been ignored. This program will bring...
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2021 Mar 05
Think like a Historian, Imagine Like a Designer: A Conversation on Landscape History and Design Education
12:00pm to 1:30pm
Location: 
Harvard Graduate School of Design—Online
History is a manner of thinking about the world, grounded in the places we design, construct, and inhabit. Design offers the opportunity to re-imagine the world around us, today and for the future. We might draw from history, or draw upon it; certainly, it is to be hoped that we are drawn to it, as designers and historians. The purpose of landscape history—not reducible to memory nor timelines nor styles—is to produce and share knowledge of how we have come to be who and where we are. We will gather across studios we collectively inhabit to draw attention to and lessons from the...
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2021 Feb 24
Latinx Modernism and the Spirit of Latinoamericanismo
12:00pm
Location: 
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard—Online
John Alba Cutler, associate professor of English and Latinx studies at Northwestern University, is working on a new book examining the prodigious literary archive of early-20th-century Spanish-language newspapers in the United States. Newspapers in Latinx communities from New York to San Diego published tens of thousands of poems, short stories, chronicles, and serialized novels. These works show how Latinx communities grappled with the collision of Latin American and US modernities long before the advent of what we think of as “modern” Latinx literature.
...
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2021 Feb 18
Kate Thomas, “Lesbian Arcadia: Desire and Design in the Fin-de-Siècle Garden”
7:30pm to 9:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Graduate School of Design—Online
At the end of the nineteenth century, British and American lesbian artists settled around Florence, Italy, renovating neglected Renaissance estates. Contemporary accounts describe the hillside region as colonized by a “cult of women.” These women restored, refashioned and theorized gardens as places of queerly mythic erotic encounter.
In this lecture Professor Thomas will explore how design features such as nymphaeums, water parterres, secret gardens, grottos and boscos provided both refuge and open-air expression for lesbian subjectivity. Remembering that the first documented...
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2021 Feb 17
The Popularization of Doubt: Scientific Literacy & Alternative Forms of Knowledge in the Soviet Union after World War II
12:00pm
Location: 
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard—Online
Alexey Golubev, assistant professor of Russian history and digital humanities at the University of Houston, is working on a new book project: a history of Soviet efforts to produce mass scientific literacy after World War II, when tens and later hundreds of thousands of members of the Soviet intelligentsia were recruited to communicate scientific knowledge to the public through popular science lectures, publications, public experiments and debates, and television shows.
This mass scientific literacy campaign resulted in a diverse and autonomous network of people and ideas in...
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2021 Feb 11
And So On: Reading and Conversation with Kiese Laymon
4:00pm
Location: 
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard—Online
Writer Kiese Laymon will explore whether the actual histories of American colleges and universities should be ripe sites for Black American horror and comedic narratives. Laymon will create a live novella and a live essay during this talk, while questioning the ethics of making art “for” an audience longing for both titillation and innocence from the horrific histories of Black Americans in and around American institutions of higher learning.
...
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2020 Dec 03
2020 Visions
4:00pm to 5:00pm
Location: 
Online Event
Too often, the story of women’s suffrage unfolds in a vacuum, seemingly unconnected from the general contours of American history. This panel discussion looks back from the present, asking experts working in a variety of disciplines and organizations to briefly unfold, TED-talk style, a single “big idea” that captures the significance of the 19th Amendment for voting rights, citizenship, and democracy today.
This event is free and open to the public, but registration is required.
...
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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.
Learn more about and RSVP for Open House Lecture: Nikil Saval, "A Rage in Harlem."
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2020 Oct 29
Voting, Participation, and Why it Matters
5:00pm to 6:00pm
Location: 
Online via Zoom
 
Join Danielle Allen, James Bryant Conant University Professor and Director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University, Cambridge Mayor Sumbul Siddiqui, Tova Wang, a Democracy Visiting Fellow at the Ash Center, Michelle Tassinari, Director and Legal Counsel of the Secretary of the Commonwealth’s Elections Division, and Eneida Tavares the Interim Commissioner for the City of Boston’s Elections Department for a conversation on the importance of local voter participation, education and civic engagement, and to learn more about what’s at stake for our...
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