At the time of its founding in 1872, the land on which the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University is sighted was a patchwork of farmland and forest. As the Arboretum was planted, pathways were developed to lead people through the picturesque landscape. As the landscape developed, economies shifted, wars took place, and directors changed. Each of these factors subtly influenced shifts in the park’s path system. Join the Arnold Arboretum on Zoom with Jared Rubinstein as he reveals the layers of change in this beloved landscape.
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...
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...
Using Charlottesville as a case study, Dayna Bowen Matthew, JD, PhD, Dean and Harold H. Greene Professor of Law at the George Washington University Law School, explores the theory, mechanisms, and impact on health of legally-mandated residential segregation and how we can identify and redress historical inequities.
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.
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...
What are political determinants of health? How have they driven inequities in the U.S. health care system? Daniel Dawes, JD, director of the Satcher Health Leadership Institute Morehouse School of Medicine, shares an inclusive approach to addressing health issues impacting the most vulnerable populations in an increasingly complex...
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...
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.
Davis Center for Russian & Eurasian Studies—Online
Artist Anne Bobroff-Hajal, a PhD in Russian history, seeks to understand what underlies Russian autocracy across centuries, and to paint hundreds of individual people struggling to achieve their life goals within it: a comical yet deadly-serious human tapestry of raw ambition, pain, and joy. In conversation with Dr. Alexandra Vacroux, Bobroff-Hajal will discuss her large scale polyptychs, where viewers are led across...
The FAS Division of Science will host their 2nd annual lecture in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. via Zoom. Special guest speaker Dr. Freeman Hrabowski, III, President of The University of Maryland, Baltimore County, will share remarks.
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard—Online
During these unprecedented times, we have watched young people—a great many of them African Americans—taking to the streets in all 50 states in support of justice for George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, while also seeking to address the current failures of policing, criminal justice, and the economy; as well as the existence of white supremacy and anti-Blackness. How does the precarious position of African American young adults facilitate a reimagining of democracy? What does this reimagining mean for American politics?
Davis Center for Russian & Eurasian Studies—Online
After World War II, the escalating tensions of the Cold War shaped the international system. Fearing the Worst explains how the Korean War fundamentally changed postwar competition between the United States and the Soviet Union into a militarized confrontation that would last decades.
Samuel F. Wells Jr. examines how military and political events interacted to escalate the conflict. Decisions made by the Truman administration in the first six months of the...
Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard—Online
Book Panel on Ascent to Glory: How One Hundred Years of Solitude Was Written and Became a Global Classic by Álvaro Santana-Acuña
Gabriel García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude seemed destined for obscurity upon its publication in 1967. The little-known author, small publisher, magical style, and setting in a remote Caribbean village were hardly the usual ingredients for success in the literary marketplace. Yet today it ranks among the best-selling books of all time. Translated into dozens of languages, it continues to enter the lives...
Harvard University Committee on Medieval Studies—Online
A Playground for Poets: author Maria Dahvana Headley discusses her new translation of Beowulf (Farrar Strauss Giroux, 2019) with Daniel Donoghue, John P. Marquand Professor of English and Chair of the Standing Committee on Medieval Studies. Co-sponsored by the Mahindra Humanities Center Rethinking Translation Seminar and the Harvard...
Addressing the theme of Ukraine’s democracy in the past, present, and future, this conference is distinct from typical academic conferences. Rather than presenting papers, panelists will respond to a set of questions provided in advance by the moderator. Each panelist will discuss the same questions based on his or her expertise, followed by an open discussion with participants. All panels feature a combination of scholars and policy practitioners, creating a space for dialogue that extends beyond academia.
Dr. Francis Fukuyama will give the keynote address on Wednesday,...
The issue of human rights presents a special challenge for any effort to construct a workable world order. Can democracies and their publics remain true to their stated values within a world where human rights abuses are still widespread, without meddling into other nations' domestic political affairs or presuming to know exactly how to achieve these ends globally? To what extent will differences over basic notions of human rights undermine efforts to cooperate on trade, climate, arms control, or other pressing global problems?
In the mid-second millennium BCE, sculptors, painters, potters, and glass- and metalworkers were busy in the northern Mesopotamian town of Nuzi (Iraq). Some of their products are in the collection of the Harvard Art Museums, which supported excavations at the site between 1925 and 1931. In this online talk, conservation scientist Katherine Eremin and curator Susanne Ebbinghaus will discuss the discovery of these objects and how technical study over decades has revealed the secrets of their making, as well as plans for future display.