2020 Dec 03
Violence After Victory: Explaining Human Rights Outcomes After Conflict Termination
12:15pm to 2:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Kennedy School—Online
What stops human rights abuse? Christopher Shay explores this question in the context of conflict terminations, moments when leaders can plausibly turn away from repressive tactics. Many leaders fail to seize this opportunity, however, even in cases of democratization. Drawing on cross-national quantitative findings and qualitative research conducted in Nepal, Shay argues that these leaders' options are often constrained by powerful security institutions—and that civil-military relations are critical to understanding human rights outcomes.
...
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2020 Dec 02
White Whales, White Males, Whitehead with Lisa Jarnot
5:00pm to 6:30pm
Location: 
Online Event
This lecture, which is part of the Bagley Wright Lecture Series on Poetry, explores the doctrine of discovery that haunts American poetry. Lisa Jarnot engages in an autobiographical interrogation of what it means to be a woman in a male-centered experimental tradition, and what it means to have white privilege and write poetry. Several questions arise: What do we keep and what do we reject as we acknowledge the systemic racism and American exceptionalism that pervade even the most benign of bohemian writing communities? Is there something transcendent and healing in the poet’s...
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2020 Dec 02
“Imperfectly Known”: Nicholas Said and the Routes of African American Narrative
12:00pm to 1:00pm
Location: 
Online Event
In this lecture, author Ira Dworkin will talk about his book in-progress “’Imperfectly Known’: Nicholas Said and the Routes of African American Narrative,” which examines the ways that the intellectual and political culture of Borno, in northeast Nigeria, shaped Black literary culture in the United States during the 18th and 19th centuries. Focusing on the writings of Said, who came to the United States after his manumission in Europe and who soon thereafter fought in the Civil War, Dworkin’s book broadly considers the relationship of African and Islamic intellectual networks to Black...
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2020 Dec 01
Washington, Moscow, and the Beginning of the End of the Cold War
12:30pm to 2:00pm
Location: 
Online Event
Simon Miles tracks key events in US-Soviet relations in the first half of the 1980s. He argues that covert engagement gave way to overt conversation as both superpowers determined that open diplomacy was the best means of furthering their own, primarily competitive, goals. Miles narrates the history of these dramatic years, as President Ronald Reagan consistently applied a disciplined carrot-and-stick approach, reaching out to Moscow while at the same time excoriating the...
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2020 Nov 20
HMSC Connects! Celebrating Women
Fri Nov 20 (All day) to Thu Dec 31 (All day)
Location: 
Online Event
Virtual experiences connect the collections of the four Harvard Museums of Science & Culture. In HMSC Connects! Celebrating Women, go behind the scenes with women in academia while listening to the HMSC Connects! Podcast, discovering women’s work, Story Time videos, and coloring pages.
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2020 Nov 19
Make Us Great Again: The Causes and Consequences of Declinism in Great Powers
12:15pm to 2:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Kennedy School, Belfer Center—Online
This seminar explores the causes and consequences of declinism in great powers. Why does the topic of the nation's international decline emerge in the political discourse of great powers? Why do leaders choose to focus on the nation's decline during some periods and not others? What are the foreign policy consequences of such declinist discourse?
After outlining a theory of declinism's emergence and its consequences, this seminar focuses on 1970s Britain, the emergence of the New Right, and the declinist narratives of politicians like Margaret Thatcher and Keith Joseph....
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2020 Nov 19
Opportunities and Backlash: Reforms in Women’s Military Service in Israel
12:00pm to 12:45pm
Location: 
Harvard Kennedy School—Online
Establishing mandatory service for women in Israel in 1948 could signify gender equality; however, the military has maintained a rigid hierarchic gender division of labor for several decades. In the mid-1990s’, following Supreme Court rulings, several combat roles (including pilot course) were opened to women; the Women’s Corps was dismantled; and many courses were gender integrated.
Professor Orna Sasson-Levy argues that these reforms had a dual effect: they broadened military opportunities for women, but at the same time led to a backlash of resistance that threatens these...
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2020 Nov 18
Reimagining Museums: Disruption and Change
6:00pm to 7:00pm
Location: 
Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology—Online
As museums have acknowledged their legacy as colonial institutions, many have reimagined their mission as agents of decolonization and social justice. The pandemic disruption, the Black Lives Matter movement, and other community issues are driving still more rapid and drastic changes and providing opportunities for reflection and growth.
How can American museums—especially those that have strong relationships with Indigenous communities—respond to current national conditions of social unrest and political turmoil? How have New England museums fared and what is likely to happen...
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2020 Nov 17
Carl M. Sapers Ethics in Practice Lecture: Black Reconstruction
7:30pm to 9:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Graduate School of Design—Online
Ten Responses to One Question: What does it mean to imagine Black Reconstruction today?
Join the Black Reconstruction Collective (BRC) for this lecture. The BRC provides funding, design, and intellectual support to the ongoing and incomplete project of emancipation for the African Diaspora. The BRC is committed to multi-scalar and multi-disciplinary work dedicated to dismantling systemic white supremacy and hegemonic whiteness within art, design, and academia. Founded by a group of Black architects, artists, designers, and scholars, the BRC aims to amplify knowledge...
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2020 Nov 05
Election 2020: What Just Happened?
6:00pm to 7:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Kennedy School—Online
The Institute of Politics hosts a panel of top political strategists to breakdown and analyze the results of the 2020 election. The conversation will be moderated by IOP Director Mark D. Gearan ’78, and feature former and current IOP Fellows Karen Finney, Senior Advisor for Communications and Political Outreach for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, Scott Jennings, Senior Advisor to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Robby Mook, Campaign Manager for Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign, and Alice Stewart, IOP Fall 2020 Fellow and Republican Communications...
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2020 Nov 05
Post-Election Round-Up
4:00pm to 6:30pm
Location: 
Center for American Political Studies at Harvard—Online
Bill Kristol and William Galston will be meeting for their fifteenth much-anticipated biennial debate following the U.S. election, offering the perspectives of two reflective political participants and shrewd observers, both of them experts at providing what might be called partisan objectivity. This year, they will be joined by Jim Ceaser of the University of Virginia, a seasoned expert in American party politics. Moderated by Harvey Mansfield, Harvard University.
...
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2020 Oct 29
Open House Lecture: Nikil Saval, “A Rage in Harlem”
7:30pm to 9:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Graduate School of Design—Online
This talk will consider the moment when June Jordan and Buckminster Fuller attempted to reimagine Harlem in the wake of the 1964 riots, considered against a larger context of experiments in social housing, environmental planning, urban rebellion, and Afro-futurism.
Learn more about and RSVP for Open House Lecture: Nikil Saval, "A Rage in Harlem."
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2020 Oct 29
Voting, Participation, and Why it Matters
5:00pm to 6:00pm
Location: 
Online via Zoom
 
Join Danielle Allen, James Bryant Conant University Professor and Director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University, Cambridge Mayor Sumbul Siddiqui, Tova Wang, a Democracy Visiting Fellow at the Ash Center, Michelle Tassinari, Director and Legal Counsel of the Secretary of the Commonwealth’s Elections Division, and Eneida Tavares the Interim Commissioner for the City of Boston’s Elections Department for a conversation on the importance of local voter participation, education and civic engagement, and to learn more about what’s at stake for our...
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2020 Oct 29
Education Justice: Why Prison Classrooms Matter
4:00pm
Location: 
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard—Online
“What college does, it helps us learn about the nation,” said Rodney Spivey-Jones, a 2017 Bard College graduate currently incarcerated at Fishkill Correctional Facility in New York, in the docuseries College behind Bars. “It helps us become civic beings. It helps us understand that we have an interest in our community, that our community is a part of us and we are a part of it.”
The Bard Prison Initiative and programs at other institutions of higher learning across the country have brought together teachers and learners in incarcerated spaces for years. This panel will gather...
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2020 Oct 28
The Architecture of Democracy
7:30pm to 9:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Graduate School of Design—Online
In the week before the U.S. general election, Harvard and MIT will share a public discussion on the role of architecture in a representative democracy. Colleagues and students from across both institutions will join in dialogue on the profession’s role in supporting democratic society, now and in the future.
Panelists participating in this event will be announced in the coming weeks.
Learn more about and RSVP...
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2020 Oct 27
American Cultural Landscapes: Black Roots and Treasures
7:30pm to 9:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Graduate School of Design—Online
Everett L. Fly believes that African American legacies are embedded in the physical and cultural substance of many of America’s built and vernacular places. Formal education in architecture introduced him to the positive potential of planning and design in respecting and expressing the cultures of people wherever they live, work and play. He believes that American planning and design should be more deliberate in reflecting and respecting a broader cultural diversity, including Black and Indigenous people.
Fly will discuss research, discovery, interpretation and applications of...
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2020 Oct 22
History’s Currency: The Afterlife of al-Maqrizi’s Khitat
6:30pm to 8:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Graduate School of Design—Online
This lecture offers a reading of the stages of modernity in Egypt through a medieval lens. It explores how a leading urban history book, al-Maqrizi’s Khitat (written 1415-42), came to absorb and articulate the country’s encounters with colonialism, modernization, Orientalism, historical academicism, nationalism, pan-Arabism, and authoritarian capitalism.
...
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2020 Oct 22
Diving with a Purpose: A Fifteen-Year Odyssey
6:00pm to 7:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Museums of Science & Culture—Online
Diving with a Purpose is an organization dedicated to the documentation and protection of African slave-trade shipwrecks and the maritime history and culture of African Americans. Jay Haigler and Albert José Jones will share a documentary on the organization’s work and recent discoveries. They will discuss the importance of submerged heritage resources in advancing the fields of maritime archaeology and ocean conservation and the need for a better understanding of the transatlantic slave trade and its global, cultural, and social-economic impact on society.
...
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2020 Oct 22
New Blocs, New Maps, New Power
4:00pm to 5:00pm
Location: 
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard—Online
By the early 1980s, a new political landscape was taking shape that would fundamentally influence American society and politics in the decades to come. That year, the long-standing effort to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment—championed by suffragist Alice Paul and introduced to Congress in 1923—ran aground, owing in significant measure to the activism of women who pioneered a new brand of conservatism.
This panel will draw together strands and stories that are often kept separate: the ideas and growing influence of conservative women, the political activism of gay communities...
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2020 Oct 22
National Fossil Day
9:00am to 2:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Museum of Natural History—Online
Celebrate National Fossil Day—a celebration organized by the National Park Service—by taking a closer look at museum fossils with Harvard paleontologists. What can we see on ancient seafloors? How do modern animals help us understand extinct animals? What fossils still amaze scientists? What is it like to be a practicing paleontologist? Bring your curiosity and questions to this online event for all ages!
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