2021 Mar 15
Mind, Heart and Body: The Creative Process of Making Theater From a Director’s Perspective
4:30pm to 5:30pm
Location: 
Mind Brain Behavior Interfaculty Initiative at Harvard—Online
How does an actor transform into a character? What is the process that allows this transformation to happen? What is the role of the audience in completing the theatrical event? Join Diane Paulus, Professor of the Practice in Theater, Dance & Media and English, for a behind the scenes look at the creative process of making theater.
Learn more about and register for Mind,...
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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 09
International Womxn’s Week Keynote Address: Ananya Roy, "Undoing Property: Feminist Struggle in the Time of Abolition"
7:30pm to 9:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Graduate School of Design—Online
Renewed uprising against the death-making apparatus of police and prison demands that we attend to the relationship between property and personhood, specifically to how the theft of land is facilitated by the theft of life. This talk, given on the occasion of International Women’s Day and during the week that marks the first anniversary of Breonna Taylor’s killing, focuses on the propertization of the gendered subject in the making of whiteness. The time of abolition, Roy argues, requires the undoing of gender-property logics. What does this entail within the university? Speaking as "...
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2021 Mar 08
"Every Pecan Tree": Trees, Meaning, and Memory in Enslaved People’s Lives
7:00pm
Location: 
Arnold Arboretum—Online
This is the third lecture in the Arnold Arboretum's 2021 Director's Lecture Series. Tiya Miles takes up the pecan tree as inspiration for exploring the meaning of trees in the lives of enslaved African Americans. Using a family heirloom, slave narratives, oral histories, and missionary records, her talk underscores the importance of trees in the Black experience of captivity and resistance, ultimately revealing the centrality of the natural world to Black, and indeed human, survival.
...
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2021 Mar 06
A History of Path-Making at the Arnold Arboretum
2:00pm
Location: 
Arnold Arboretum—Online
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.
...
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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 04
Daniel Urban Kiley Lecture: Julie Bargmann, “Modesty”
7:30pm to 9:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Graduate School of Design—Online
Toxic Beauty. Troubled Allure. Fallow Fairness. Not Vacant, Open. Not Abandoned, Changing.
D.I.R.T. cultivates a perverse attraction and an unapologetic approach to wrecked landscapes.
Not Restorative, Regenerative.
The work holds back. It doesn’t make everything perfectly okay. The work listens. It hears them above trying to make sense, below the ground producing heritage. The work hurts. It flips preconceptions of stuck minds. The work is messy. It’s all about finding. The work emerges.
It doesn’t descend. The work leaves. It lets you in....
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2021 Mar 01
Ilze and Heinrich Wolff, “Homage and Refusal”
12:00pm to 1:30pm
Location: 
Harvard Graduate School of Design—Online
Wolff is a design studio concerned with developing an architectural practice of consequence through the mediums of design, advocacy, research and documentation. The Wolff team is led by Ilze & Heinrich Wolff who work collaboratively with a group of highly skilled, committed and engaged architects, creative practitioners and administrators.
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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 23
Senior Loeb Scholar Lecture: Walter Hood
7:30pm to 9:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Graduate School of Design—Online
The Senior Loeb Scholars program invites prominent individuals whose expertise is outside the typical disciplines of the GSD or whose practice displays a unique focus. Scholars are welcomed for a short-term residency at the School, during which they present a public lecture, workshops, and other engagements. Since its inception, the program has offered the GSD community opportunities to learn from and engage with visionary designers, scholars, and thought leaders.
Walter Hood is the Spring 2021 Senior Loeb Scholar. Hood joins a cohort of previous Senior Loeb Scholars, which...
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2021 Feb 23
Art Talk Live: Picturing the Modern Home—Lucia Moholy’s Bauhaus Living Room
12:30pm to 1:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Art Museums—Online
In 1920s Germany, the progressive Bauhaus school of art, architecture, and design sought to create art, objects, and environments that would revolutionize everyday life. This talk will focus on Lucia Moholy’s carefully constructed photograph of her own living room in one of the newly built Bauhaus faculty residences. In addition to providing housing, the home served as an important publicity tool, showcasing Walter Gropius’s architecture as well as the Bauhaus products with which it was meticulously furnished.
...
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2021 Feb 19
Art Study Center Seminar at Home: The Botany of a Buddhist Sculpture
11:00am to 12:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Art Museums—Online
Angela Chang, Stephen Schneider, and Rachel Saunders will discuss ongoing collaborative research into the sculpture Prince Shōtoku at Age Two.
...
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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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2021 Feb 11
Painting "Playground of the Autocrats"
4:00pm to 5:00pm
Location: 
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...
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2021 Feb 09
Fellows' Presentation: "AHotB," Tonya M. Foster
12:00pm to 1:00pm
Location: 
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard—Online
Tonya M. Foster’s writing and research focus on ideas of place and emplacement, on intersections between the visual and the written, and on mapping the 20th- and 21st-century African Americas. During her Radcliffe year, Foster is completing a book-length manuscript of poetry, “AHotB,” that takes up Fanny Lou Hamer’s idea that “a black women’s body is never hers alone.”
Learn...
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2021 Feb 05
The FAS Division of Science Lecture in Honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
2:00pm to 4:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Faculty of Arts & Sciences—Online
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.
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2021 Feb 02
Art Talk Live: The Abject Object—Decay and Irreverence in Dieter Roth’s Multiples
12:30pm to 1:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Art Museums—Online
Known for his iconoclastic use of nontraditional artistic materials, ranging from chocolate to playing cards to animal excrement, artist Dieter Roth (1930–1998) underscored processes of decomposition in his work. Curatorial fellow Lauren Hanson considers how Roth’s “decay objects” from the 1960s and ’70s harness self-deprecating humor to challenge notions of originality, artistic genius, and the museum as a site of preservation.
...
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2021 Feb 02
Ascent to Glory: How One Hundred Years of Solitude Was Written and Became a Global Classic
12:00pm to 1:30pm
Location: 
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...
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