Events

Wonderful Cambrian Beasts

Location:

Harvard Museum of Natural History—Online

Earth is home to a vast diversity of organisms that collectively define the modern biosphere. How did this diversity come to be? Javier Ortega-Hernández will discuss his approach to answering this question by studying organisms that lived more than half a billion years ago in the Cambrian Period (485–541 million years ago). By focusing on the earliest-known animals—some of the most versatile to ever exist—Ortega-Hernández aims to reconstruct the early evolutionary history of major animal groups and contribute to our understanding of Earth’s biodiversity.

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Listening to Wampanoag Voices: Beyond 1620

Location:

Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology—Online

Four hundred years have passed since the Wampanoag Nation encountered English immigrants who settled on the shores of their land at Patuxet—now called Plymouth. Harvard University has had a relationship with the Wampanoag and other local tribal communities for nearly as long, establishing the Harvard Indian College on campus in 1655. In acknowledgment of this early history, the Peabody Museum has asked Wampanoag tribal members to reflect on collections spanning...

The Enduring Legacy of Slavery and Racism in the North

Location:

Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard—Online

Although Massachusetts formally abolished slavery in 1783, the visible and invisible presence of slavery continued in the Commonwealth and throughout New England well into the 19th century. Harvard professor Louis Agassiz’s theory about human origins is but one example of the continued presence and institutionalization of racism in the North.

Taking as a starting point the new book To Make Their Own Way in the World: The Enduring Legacy of the Zealy Daguerreotypes, this panel of experts will examine the role and impact of slavery in the North and discuss the influence...

Art Talk Live: Precious Deception: The Illegal Use of Gold Leaf in an 18th-Century Color Print

Location:

Harvard Art Museums—Online

This handsome engraving, with its printed gold-leaf frame, was made by Louis-Marin Bonnet, one of the most gifted and innovative producers of full-color prints in 18th-century France. However, the inclusion of gold leaf in the print was illegal. In this talk, visiting senior scholar Margaret Morgan Grasselli will discuss Bonnet’s elaborate efforts to conceal his authorship, pretending that the print had originated in England and had been made by a mysterious artist named “L. Marin.”

Led by:
Margaret Morgan Grasselli, Visiting Senior Scholar for Drawings,...

Loeb Lecture: Edgar Pieterse

Location:

Harvard Graduate School of Design—Online

African cities are confronted by large youthful labour markets with limited prospects of formal industrial employment, on the one hand, and rapid physical expansion without the resources to address the massive infrastructural requirements to support people and economies, on the other. These daunting challenges are compounded by the impacts of the climate crisis and other forms of acute environmental risk. This confluence calls for situated innovations to reimagine and redesign investments in sustainable infrastructures that are simultaneously low-carbon, labour-intensive and geared...

From the Hands of the Makers

Location:

Harvard Museum of Natural History—Online

From 1886 to 1936, Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka applied their artistic talents and knowledge of natural history to create an exquisite collection of glass models of plants to support the botanical education of Harvard students and the public. This program will explore the history, conservation, and relevance of the Glass Flowers in the twenty-first century and introduce the publication Glass Flowers: Marvels of Art and Science at Harvard, a compendium of new photographs that captures the beauty and magnificent detail of the models.

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Lecture: Cannon Fodder: Debating the Racial Politics of Canonicity in Modern Architectural History

Location:

Harvard Graduate School of Design—Online

This talk introduces audiences to the antiracist framework for architectural history that guided the formulation of the recent monograph Building Character: The Racial Politics of Modern Architectural Style (2020). This revisionist intellectual history recovers the ways that architectural organicism provided a rationalist model of design to consciously relate the perceived racial and architectural “characters” of a nation to the people they served.

From the ethnographic histories of style penned by Eugene Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc and Gottfried Semper, to Louis Sullivan...

Will COVID-19 Curtail European-Eurasian Integration?

Location:

Davis Center for Russian & Eurasian Studies—Online

A panel of scholars from China, Germany, Kazakhstan, and the US will explore the impact of COVID-19 on transcontinental connectivity from the perspective of key countries and regions in the Belt and Road Initiative: Germany, Hungary, Greece, Belarus, Russia and Central Asia. Will the pandemic curtail European-Eurasian integration and Chinese influence? Or will it represent a critical juncture that relaxes political constraints and hastens economic interdependence?

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Amazing Virtual Archaeology Fair at Harvard

Location:

Online—Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East

Celebrate the glamour, labor, humor, and discoveries of archaeology at Harvard. Join student archaeologists as they share their experience with an Irish castle, a shaft tomb in western Mexico, monuments on the Giza plateau in Egypt and drones used to study El-Kurru in ancient Nubia, among other locations. Place a friendly wager on an atlatl (spear throwing) demonstration, observe chew marks on bones from the Zooarchaeology Lab and experience a virtual-reality view of the Great Sphinx.

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On Account of Sex (1920)

Location:

Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard—Online

The passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920 did not "give" women the vote. Rather, it established a negative: that the right to vote could not be abridged on account of sex alone. This session brings together diverse participants who will each illuminate one facet of women’s political history at this key transitional moment. Together, participants will emphasize the radical achievement of the amendment, exploring the full implications of what it meant to remove sex as a barrier to voting, which resulted in the largest-ever one-time expansion of the electorate and mobilized a...

Race and Economic Justice

Location:

Harvard Kennedy School, Carr Center—Online via YouTube Live

Please join the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy for its signature weekly series this fall, The Fierce Urgency of Now, featuring Black, Indigenous, People of Color scholars, activists, and community leaders, and experts from the Global South. Hosted and facilitated by Sushma Raman and Mathias Risse, the series also aligns with a course they will co-teach this fall at the Harvard Kennedy School on Economic Justice: Theory and Practice.

Panelists: Brandon M. Terry | Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies and Social Studies,...

What Studying Putin’s Russia Can Teach Us about the United States: Masculinity, Misogyny, and U.S. Elections in the Trump Era

Location:

Davis Center for Russian & Eurasian Studies—Online

Vladimir Putin has long been known for his macho displays, and Donald Trump for his misogynist pronouncements. In both the U.S. and Russia, machismo and misogyny play fundamental roles in politics; the former is used to legitimize particular politicians as strong leaders, and the latter to undermine opponents as weak. In their lecture, while drawing parallels to Russia, Professors Robert Boatright and Valerie Sperling will focus on their new book about masculinity and misogyny in the U.S. political context, exploring how Donald Trump’s misogyny in the 2016 presidential race changed the...

The Geography of Lethal Force

Location:

Online—Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard

The use of deadly force by US law enforcement is extremely high by international standards and involves significant racial disparities. Rajiv Sethi RI ’21, professor of economics at Barnard College, Columbia University, will discuss his project to understand why geographic variations in scale and racial disparities exist and potential policy remedies.

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50th Anniversary of Urban Design Lecture: Alex Krieger, “The American City Prior and (Possibly) Following the Pandemic”

Location:

Online Event, Graduate School of Design

American instincts oscillate between the allure of the city and that of life free of city stress; between the temptations of the metropolis, and bucolic retreat from those very centers of civic life. Such oscillation, occurring across American history, have on the one hand enabled the building of Manhattan, the ‘Capital of Capitalism’ (and culture, too) and the invention of the ‘garden suburb’ where family grace was to dwell, prior to metastasizing into sprawl.

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Understanding the Role of Race in Health

Location:

Online—Harvard Law School, The Petrie-Flom Center

Structural racism pervades all facets of society, from education, to housing, to law enforcement. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the health disparities that result from this systemic and structural racism.

The Petrie-Flom Center has asked leading scholars in law, public health, history, sociology, and other fields to explore these issues for a digital symposium on the Bill of Health blog. The focus of the symposium is to unpack how critical race theories and other strands of racial justice scholarship can inform health care, public health, and other areas of law to...

Observatory Night: What Stars Are Made Of

Location:

Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian—Online

Join the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian for a virtual Public Observatory Night with guest lecturer Donavan Moore, author of "What Stars Are Made Of: The Life of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin."

It was not easy being a woman of ambition in early twentieth-century England, much less one who wished to be a scientist. Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin overcame prodigious obstacles to become a woman of many firsts: the first to receive a PhD in astronomy from Radcliffe College, the first promoted to full professor at Harvard, the first to head a department there. And, in what...

Reconstructing the Polity (1870)

Location:

Online—Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard

The reconstruction of the American polity after the Civil War—in particular, the adoption of the 15th Amendment in 1870—marked a key moment in the long history of the 19th Amendment, women’s political mobilization, and the contested boundaries of United States citizenship.

During the campaign for the 15th Amendment, and the campaign of racial terror that accompanied its passage, Black women mobilized to defend themselves and their communities, innovating ideas and strategies that would reshape the women’s suffrage movement. As federal troops moved from the South to the West,...

COVID-19 and the Stakes for Democracy in South America

Location:

Online—Harvard Law School, The Petrie-Flom Center

The COVID-19 pandemic is not just a health crisis, or even an economic crisis, but also a critical inflection point for democracy and the rule of law. The pandemic has presented a test for the legitimacy of democratic governance, and perhaps nowhere are the stakes higher than in Latin America, which as of August 5, as a region had the world’s highest death toll per population.

Even before the pandemic, the region as a whole faced staggering levels of social inequality...

Lecture: Apprenticeship in Ancient Egypt

Location:

Online—Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East

Presenter: Willeke Wendrich, Joan Silsbee Chair of African Cultural Archaeology; Professor of Egyptian Archaeology and Digital Humanities, University of California, Los Angeles

Archaeologists study stylistic and technological changes in excavated materials—especially pottery—to better understand developments in ancient Egyptian society. However, little attention has focused on using the archaeological record to understand the transfer of cultural knowledge. How did people learn the arts and crafts of potters, basket makers, metalworkers, and scribes?...

Mesopotamian Monuments Tour

Location:

Online—Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East

Mesopotamian Monuments is a 60-minute live-streamed museum visit to investigate monuments from Sumer, Babylonia and Assyria exhibited at Harvard University. Guided by a museum educator, visitors at home observe sculptures in the gallery to understand the characteristics of these ancient river civilizations. The tour introduces the Sumerian ruler Gudea, Hammurabi of Babylon and the Assyrian Kings Ashurnasirpal II and his son Shalmaneser III. The experience includes the monument of Hammurabis' code and some ancient music with time for questions and discussion.

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Cambridge, MA 02138
T (617) 495-1585 | F (617) 495-0754