Online or at Geological Lecture Hall, 24 Oxford St., Cambridge
In ancient Egypt, iron harvested from meteorites was used to create ritual objects associated with royalty and power. An iron dagger from the tomb of King Tutankhamun is one of the oldest Egyptian objects verified to be of meteoritic origin.
In this lecture, Almansa-Villatoro will discuss Egyptian texts, iconography, and religious writings that associate iron with the sky and stars, indicating that ancient Egyptians were aware that meteorites came from space. This knowledge—most likely shared with other ancient civilizations that connected iron and sky in their texts—was lost...
On March 6, Tracey Hucks, Victor S. Thomas Professor of Africana Religious Studies and Suzanne Young Murray Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, will interview Dain Perry, a direct descendant of the DeWolfs of New England, the largest single slave-trading family in the United States, and his wife, Constance Perry, to discuss the reparative and healing work that they engage in as they tour and present throughout the United States.
Crimea was the major wine-producing region in Ukraine until Russia annexed it in 2014. The country lost more than half its bottled wines, mostly semi-sweet and dessert wines. But the loss of Crimea and the armed conflict in the east ironically gave a giant push to Western-style dry wines, especially in Transcarpathia and the southern Odesa and Kherson regions.
The director and the crew wanted to learn more about these regions when they started filming in the Fall of 2021. But after Russia’s full-scale invasion, Wounded Land’s focus shifted quickly. They circled back to the...
Davis Center for Russian & Eurasian Studies—Online
Joseph Stalin's long reign as leader of the Soviet Union was marked by ruthless tyranny and the deaths of millions. The demise of Stalin on 5 March 1953 brought an end to his brutal rule, but the Soviet Union remained a repressive dictatorship. Stalin left such a decisive imprint on the Soviet political system that his legacy outlived him for decades. Even now, some seventy years after Stalin's death, the Russian army's invasion of Ukraine has underscored the persistence of Stalin's legacy in the Kremlin.
A presentation from 2022–2023 Hrdy Fellow Omar Dewachi
Trained in medicine and anthropology, Dewachi works at the intersections of global health, history of medicine, and political anthropology. At Radcliffe, he will conduct a critical historical and ethnographic exploration of the biopolitical unravelings following the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq and its reverberations across the region, focusing on the individual, collective, and institutional struggles to cope with, and care for, war-related afflictions.
Memorial Church at Harvard University, 1 Harvard Yard, Cambridge
Join members of the Harvard Chaplains and other Harvard religious leaders to honor Dr. King and Coretta Scott King and reflect on how their legacy remains relevant today.
On February 27, Terrence L. Johnson, Professor of African American Religious Studies, will examine how the writings of W.E.B. Du Bois and Toni Morrison establish a framework for exploring the role of religion and ethics in grappling with the memory and history of African enslavement.
Harvard Business School celebrates Black History Month with a conversation with Bonnie Boswell (Harvard University 1972), the niece of Whitney Young, award winning journalist and executive producer of The Powerbroker: Whitney Young’s Fight for Civil Rights.
Boswell will discuss the leadership lessons of Whitney Young, one of the most celebrated and controversial Black leaders of the civil rights era. Young took the fight directly to the powerful white elite, gaining allies in business and government, including three presidents. His work helped erase stereotypes, opened...
Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East, 6 Divinity Ave., Cambridge
Professor Chajes will introduce the genre of “ilanot” (trees), the striking parchment rolls devoted to visualizations of kabbalistic lore that have been created and used by kabbalists since the fourteenth century for study and contemplation. Though nearly unknown today, these divinity maps were made wherever there were kabbalists throughout the Jewish world. Each has a unique story; individually and collectively they offer new perspectives on the ways in which Jews visualized knowledge, assimilated diverse traditions, and interacted with contemporary cultures.
Building beyond the work of the 2022 Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery Report, Harvard Divinity School will host a series of online conversations with members of the HDS faculty to engage these vital questions from their expertise within the study of religion. Expand your understanding of the history and continuing implications of slavery in service of advancing racial justice in our own time and context.
On February 13, Dan McKanan, Ralph Waldo Emerson Unitarian Universalist Association Senior Lecturer in Divinity, will consider the stories of many of Harvard Divinity School’...
Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology, 11 Divinity Ave., Cambridge
Teen Saturdays! is designed for Latino teens interested in culture and community. High school students of Hispanic heritage are invited to monthly workshops to explore notions of culture and identity through bilingual discussions, hands-on activities, and exploring their reactions to exhibits. Sign up for one session or more. Meet people, munch on snacks, learn something new, and help make the museums more accessible to Latino audiences. February–May sessions will focus on Indigenous cultures. ...
Infinite Possibilities Part 2 is a continuation of a two-day free event series, presented by Harvard Dance Center, on the history, culture, and concepts behind freestyle dance. Both days feature Boston-based dancer, educator, curator, and community organizer Ashton Lites, aka Stiggity Stackz, founding creative director of Stiggity Stackz Worldwide, and curated into three parts: panel discussion, workshop, and mini battle.
Infinite Possibilities Part 2 will be held at Lowell Lecture Hall and begin with a conversation with Stiggity Stackz, Chad Shabazz, and...
In this tour, associate curator Horace D. Ballard will explore the complicated history of 19th-century portraits of Indigenous delegates to Washington, D.C., by painter Henry Inman, and the recurring display of a selection of the paintings at the Harvard Art Museums.
The 2023 TCUP Conference looks to the future. After victory, what will rebuilding Ukraine look like? Panels will focus on truth, justice, and accountability, as well as the economic and physical challenges of reconstruction. The conference will combine virtual and in-person panels for a hybrid discussion about how Ukraine can move forward when the war is over.
Keynote Address by Oleksandra Matviichuk, human rights lawyer and Nobel Peace Prize-winning activist.
Harvard Graduate School of Design, Gund Hall, Piper Auditorium (48 Quincy St., Cambridge)
Situated Objects, published in 2020, is a book of buildings, drawings and projects realized by Stan Allen since 2012. Well known for his essay "Field Conditions," and for work at the scale of the city, these projects represent a complementary approach that addresses nature, the ex-urban landscape, design process and construction through a series of small-scale works on rural sites.
The book—and the lecture—argue that buildings are best understood as "situated" objects: object-like in that they have fixed limits and stand free; situated, in that buildings always...
This conversation is the first of the six-part series Religion and the Legacies of Slavery | A Series of Public Online Conversations. The featured speakers are David F. Holland, John A. Bartlett Professor of New England Church History at HDS, and Kathryn Gin Lum, Associate Professor in Religious Studies at Stanford University.
It has long been a historical truism that, in the early modern West, pseudoscientific racial hierarchies replaced religious hierarchies as the...
Online or at Center for African Studies, 1280 Massachusetts Ave., 3rd Floor, Cambridge
On Monday February 6 from 4:00pm to 6:00pm the Center for African Studies will host their African Studies Workshop. The workshop is open to the public and focuses broadly on the general theme of Reflections on Africa's Political Economies and Cultures and their Global Implications. South African scholar and curator, Khanyisile Mbongwa, will present a paper and Peabody curator, Sarah Clunis, will moderate a discussion drawing on Mbongwa's current work.