In January 2020, reports began to circulate internationally of a pneumonia-like illness spreading in China. Little was known about the novel pathogen, SARS-CoV-2, at that time.
As scientists and public health experts worked to understand the virus, reporters worked to communicate to the public the state of the knowledge — an ever-shifting ground.
From the transmission debate, to the origins investigation, to changes in mask guidance, to vaccine safety...
Self-described populist leaders around the world are dismantling their nation’s constitutions. This has led to a widespread view that populism as such is inconsistent with constitutionalism. We disagree. Some forms of populism are inconsistent with constitutionalism, others aren’t. Context and detail matter.
Join us for a discussion with co-authors Mark Tushnet (HLS) and Bojan Bugarič (University of Sheffield) and panelists Tom Ginsburg (University of Chicago), Lawrence Lessig (HLS), and Sanford V. Levinson (University of Texas) followed by an audience Q&A session.
Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard—Online
Join the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research for a virtual W.E.B. Du Bois Lecture, "Trayvon Martin: No Chance Encounter," with Tricia Rose, Chancellor’s Professor of Africana Studies and the Director of the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America, Brown University.
You are invited to a virtual book talk with Ash Center Senior Fellow and HKS Executive Education instructor Joe Pfeifer (MC/MPA 2008), author of the recently published New York Times Bestseller, Ordinary Heroes: A Memoir of 9/11. The book serves as an intimate memoir by Pfeifer, the first FDNY chief to respond to the 9/11 attacks, and a tribute to those who died that others might live. Juliette Kayyem, Belfer Senior Lecturer in International Security at HKS, will moderate the...
Before the development of synthetic dyes in the second half of the 1800s, natural dyes were some of the most prized and sought-after commodities in the global economy. This talk uses historical images and texts to excavate changing approaches to indigenous environmental knowledge in colonial Mexico and early modern Europe through the study of cochineal.
This insect, native to the Americas, produced the world's best quality and most valuable red dye from the 1520s until the rise of the modern chemical dye industry. Long used by indigenous people in the Americas, under Spanish...
In Texas’ freedom colonies — African American settlements founded 1866-1930 — descendants of community founders engage in heritage conservation by keeping folklife, sacred rituals, and other cultural expressions that sustain communities’ Black sense of place. However, rural, vernacular African American placekeeping strategies are rarely framed in planning and architectural history as transgressive or expressions of Black liberation.
Presenting an excerpt from her forthcoming book, Never Sell the Land, Dr. Roberts shares case studies in which descendants of Deep East...
David Cheng Chang is an associate professor of humanities and the associate director of Global China Center at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. While at Radcliffe, he is using interdisciplinary source materials to write a book that will weave together the personal histories of more than 3,000 Chinese interpreters for the American and British allied forces during World War II with the larger military, political, diplomatic, and social history of World War II, the Chinese Civil War, the Korean War, and the Cold War. Join Chang as he discusses this project and the...
Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) is a Mexican tradition that seeks to commemorate and celebrate the lives of loved ones who have passed away. The creation of an altar is a key component of this celebration, which is both bittersweet and joyful. In this program, Los Angeles-based artist, educator, and altarista Ofelia Esparza will share her philosophy and approach to making altars and to keeping Día de los Muertos alive in the U.S. She will be joined by her daughter,...
The remains of a 5000-year-old brewery found in the ancient Egyptian city of Abydos are providing insights into the relationship between large-scale beer production and the development of kingship in Egypt. Archaeological evidence indicates that the Abydos brewery produced beer on a truly industrial scale—something unparalleled in early Egypt. Matthew Adams will share findings from recent excavations at the brewery and will consider it in context as part of a broad pattern of royal activity at the site that served to define the very nature of kingship at the beginning of Egypt’s history...
A presentation from 2021–2022 Walter Jackson Bate Fellow Uri McMillan.
Uri McMillan, an associate professor in the Department of African American Studies and Department of English at UCLA, is a cultural historian who researches and writes in the interstices between black cultural studies, performance studies, queer theory, and contemporary art. He is writing a book about the effervescent artistic practices and networks of affiliation of three artists living and working in 1970s New York City: the Jamaican American visual artist Grace Jones, the Nuyorican illustrator Antonio...
Western scholarship has focused on the monumental sculptures in Afghanistan’s Bamiyan Valley as Buddhas created in the late sixth and early seventh centuries. This lecture tells an alternative story based on Islamic sources from the tenth to the twentieth century, which saw these sculptures not as Buddhas but as legendary heroes representing the mythic conversion of the Bamiyan Valley to Islam.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the Taliban destroyed the sculptures—as Buddhas. After the fall of the Taliban, the sculptures’ entangled histories and the viewpoints of...
David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard—Online
Mexico's July 2021 mid-term elections were seen as a key test of strength between the government of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) and its opponents. What are the election’s consequences, both for the AMLO government’s agenda and for Mexican democracy?
David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard—Online
Latin America has been buffeted by economic crisis, soaring crime rates, major corruption scandals, and a devastating pandemic. These crises have threatened democracies across much of the region. DRCLAS has assembled four prominent scholars of Latin American politics to evaluate the state of democracy in the region. How serious are contemporary threats to Latin American democracies? What are the prospects for their survival?
FXB Center for Health & Human Rights at Harvard University—Online
On Tuesday, September 21, the FXB Center will host "Anti-Racism in Public Health Policies, Practice, and Research," a virtual symposium. One of the FXB Center’s latest core initiatives focuses on unpacking and addressing structural racism and health in the U.S. and other parts of the globe. The goal of the FXB Center is to deepen the knowledge base and fill gaps in content and methodology, while ensuring that research and evidence is responsive to community needs and informs policymaking.
The symposium aims to launch this initiative and start a series of conversations and...
David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard—Online
In the months prior to the 2021 presidential election, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega arrested or barred all his main rivals, establishing a level of autocracy not seen since the 1970s. How did Nicaragua plunge this far into dictatorship? What are the prospects for re-democratization?
