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Literature & Poetry
Boldly going to Houghton
Arts & Culture
By: Colleen Walsh/
May 10, 2013
Radcliffe fellow and classically trained pianist Tsitsi Jaji uses her musical expertise and knowledge of comparative literature to explore how composers of African descent set poetry to music for solo voice and piano.
Confronting evil, embracing life
Two Harvard conferences, each trimmed from two days to one by the Boston Marathon bombing and resulting manhunt, provided surprisingly appropriate lessons of comfort and perspective.
Professor Jill Lepore delivered the third and final presentation in Harvard College Dean Evelynn M. Hammonds’ book talks in the Widener Library rotunda. The series was designed to bring students and faculty together outside of the classroom.
Borders, books, and the Balkans
Albanian novelist Gazmend Kapllani, a Radcliffe Fellow this year, draws inspiration for his writing from his nation’s ink-dark past under harsh Communist rule.
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Isaacson to deliver Rothschild Lecture
Best-selling author and journalist Walter Isaacson will present the 2013 Maurine and Robert Rothschild Lecture, “The Genius of Jobs, Einstein, and Franklin,” on April 8 at the Radcliffe Gymnasium.
A Woodberry Poetry Room exhibition features the “Phone-a-Poem” archive, a Cambridge-based service that for 25 years allowed callers to dial in and listen to a famous poet recite his or her work as it was played back on an answering machine.
100 years of Harvard University Press
This year marks the 100th anniversary of Harvard University Press (HUP), and as part of a yearlong celebration Houghton Library is hosting an exhibition of HUP publications, correspondence, and other materials.
D.T. Max, author of a new biography of David Foster Wallace, sat down with professor and critic James Wood to discuss the writer’s legacy and his brief time at Harvard, a catalyst for the breakdown and recovery that inspired much of Wallace’s masterpiece, “Infinite Jest.”
In a question-and-answer session, Stephen Mitchell, Harvard professor of Scandinavian and folklore, explores the lasting appeal and the inspirations behind author J.R.R. Tolkien’s classic tale “The Hobbit.” Director Peter Jackson’s adaptation of the book for the big screen opens in the United States mid-December.
Delivering Harvard Divinity School’s Ingersoll Lecture at Sanders Theatre, Nobel laureate Toni Morrison discussed concepts of good and evil in her work and that of her contemporaries.
David McCann, the Korea Foundation Professor of Korean Literature, is spreading his love of sijo, a poetic form.
Josh Bell, Briggs-Copeland Lecturer on English, reads his poem "Hidden Lake."
Josh Bell, Briggs-Copeland Lecturer on English, reads his poem "While Josh Sleeps."
Poet Josh Bell, the new Briggs-Copeland lecturer, calls on the spirit of rocker Vince Neil in his latest poems.
The sounds of nature, as music
The Woodberry Poetry Room hosts an evening of forest recordings and verse about nature, twinning sounds with wordplay.
Historian Diane McWhorter, a Harvard fellow, finds a surprising nexus between the racial segregation of Birmingham, Ala., in the early 1960s and some of the attitudes of the Third Reich.
Five of Harvard’s regional centers are teaming up on an outreach program to teachers that takes them on a literary world tour, through an online book club featuring readings that illuminate ordinary life in Libya, Morocco, the Dominican Republic, Russia, and Nigeria.
Sponsored by the Woodberry Poetry Room, the Literary Homecoming drew representatives from the English Department, the Harvard Review, the Harvard Advocate, Speak Out Loud, Tuesday magazine, among others.
The Harvard Divinity School has organized a series of working groups to explore the religious dimensions of the work of author Toni Morrison in the lead-up to her Ingersoll Lecture on Immortality.
Author Rajesh Parameswaran kicked off this year’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study’s series of fellow presentations with a discussion that included readings from his well-received debut work, as well as a passage from his novel in progress.
Works from Amy Lowell’s collection are showcased in “From Austen to Zola: Amy Lowell as a Collector,” Houghton Library’s fall exhibition. This exhibit opens on Sept. 4 and will run through Jan. 12, 2013.
From cradle to grave, through history
In “The Mansion of Happiness: A History of Life and Death,” Professor Jill Lepore shows, with wit and wisdom, that our existential anxieties are anything but new.
Fantasy, fairy tales, happy endings
Sixteen teachers were selected to attend the National Endowment for the Humanities seminar course on fairy tales and fantasy literature at Harvard University. Maria Tatar, chair of the program in Folklore and Mythology, led the seminars.
A Harvard professor leads a team of editors to create a third edition of an erudite, Earth-circling “Norton Anthology of World Literature.”
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