Events

    2021 Nov 04

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

    8:00pm to 8:30pm

    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...

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    2021 Oct 27

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

    12:00pm

    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...

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    2021 Oct 26

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

    6:30pm to 8:00pm

    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...

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    2021 Oct 25

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

    12:00pm to 1:30pm

    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...

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    2021 Oct 20

    The Art of Making Day of the Dead Altars

    6:00pm to 7:15pm

    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,...

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    2021 Oct 06

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

    12:00pm

    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...

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    2021 Sep 22

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

    7:00pm to 8:15pm

    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...

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    2021 Sep 22

    Muchos Méxicos: Virtual Exhibition Preview and Conversation

    6:00pm to 7:15pm

    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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    2021 Sep 20

    Artist Discussion for Brown II Exhibition

    4:00pm

    Location: 

    Harvard Radcliffe Institute—Online

    The artist Tomashi Jackson and Tomiko Brown-Nagin, dean of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, will engage in a wide-ranging conversation to mark the opening of Jackson’s new Radcliffe exhibition, Brown II, which explores the challenges of implementing the landmark 1954 US Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. Her work centers on the subsequent 1955 case (referred to as Brown II), which stated that the effort to desegregate schools in the United States was to be undertaken with “all deliberate speed.”

    Jackson and Brown-Nagin will consider the Brown II...

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    2021 Aug 17

    Our Bodies, Ourselves Book Talk

    4:00pm to 5:00pm

    Location: 

    Harvard Radcliffe Institute—Online

    The final installment in the summer series of Virtual Radcliffe Book Talks will feature a discussion of Our Bodies, Ourselves, first published in 1971. This event is organized in recognition of the 50th anniversary of the book’s first edition and in connection with the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective Records housed in the Schlesinger Library. The event will also include audience Q&A.

    ...

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    2021 Jul 27

    Book Talk with Daniel Carpenter

    4:00pm

    Location: 

    Harvard Radcliffe Institute—Online

    The third installment of the Virtual Radcliffe Book Talks will feature Daniel Carpenter, author of Democracy by Petition: Popular Politics in Transformation, 1790–1870 (Harvard University Press, 2021). Carpenter is the faculty director of the social sciences at Harvard Radcliffe Institute and the Allie S. Freed Professor of Government in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

    Carpenter's reading will be followed by a discussion with Nikki M. Taylor, professor of history and chair of the Department of History at Howard University. The event will also include an...

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    2021 Jul 20

    Book Talk with Tiya Miles

    4:00pm

    Location: 

    Harvard Radcliffe Institute—Online

    The second installment of the Virtual Radcliffe Book Talks will feature Tiya Miles, author of All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake (Random House, 2021). Miles is a Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at Harvard Radcliffe Institute and a professor of history in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

    Miles's reading will be followed by a discussion with Tomiko Brown-Nagin, dean of Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Daniel P.S. Paul Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School, professor of history in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and...

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    2021 Jul 13

    Book Talk with Clint Smith

    4:00pm

    Location: 

    Harvard Radcliffe Institute—Online

    The first installment in the summer series of Virtual Radcliffe Book Talks will feature Clint Smith, author of How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America (Little, Brown and Company, 2021) and staff writer at The Atlantic. Smith's reading will be followed by a discussion with Kyera Singleton, executive director of the Royall House and Slave Quarters, in Medford, Massachusetts. The event will also include audience Q and A.

    ...

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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 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 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 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 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 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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