Arts & Culture

In a question-and-answer interview, New York Times film critic and Harvard alumnus A.O. Scott explains his craft, and how he came to it.

Historian Richard Dunn talks about his new book, a sweeping historical analysis of life on two plantations in Jamaica and Virginia across the final decades of slavery.

Experts on World War I gathered for a conference on the “great seminal catastrophe” of the 20th century.

A new exhibition at Harvard’s Loeb Music Library, containing items from the Harvard Theatre Collection in Houghton Library, offers visitors a disturbing look at the racist history and enduring legacy of blackface minstrelsy.

A new Harvard-wide seminar program, slated for three years, takes on a constellation of interdisciplinary issues around violence and nonviolence.

The Harvard Film Archive is launching a retrospective of the work of Robert J. Flaherty, a pioneer in documentary film. “Folklore and Flaherty: A Symposium on the First Irish-Language Film” will be held on Feb. 19 from 1:30 to 4 p.m. at the Harvard Film Archive.

In 1944, the young and gifted creators of ‘On the Town’ quietly stirred diversity into their groundbreaking musical, Professor Carol Oja recounts in her new book.

Pulitzer Prize-winner Suzan-Lori Parks returns to the American Repertory Theater with her new play, “Father Comes Home From the Wars.”

“Selma” director Ava DuVernay discussed the film with Henry Louis Gates in an event sponsored by Harvard’s Hutchins Center.

Drawn from a series of family correspondence, letters, diaries, and journals, a new exhibit at the Schlesinger Library offers firsthand accounts of men, women, soldiers, and slaves caught up in the Civil War.

The Harvard Semitic Museum, hosting a retrospective exhibit on its long history and founder David Gordon Lyon, is refurbished, reordered, and increasingly ready for the future.

Humanities 10, a new two-semester offering, is a big class on the big books, with time out for small seminars.

Visual artist Kara Walker talks about “A Subtlety,” her provocative public art project staged at a defunct Domino sugar factory in Brooklyn last summer.

Poet and memoirist Meghan O’Rourke is using her time as a Radcliffe Fellow to write “What’s Wrong With Me,” a chronicle of her struggles with autoimmune disease.

The new American Repertory Theater play “O.P.C.” examines the culture of consumerism while the production team takes the message to heart.

From the 7-year-old terrified by “King Kong” to the 89-year-old still bravely stepping out on stage, Angela Lansbury reflects on her 70 years in show business.

A comprehensive collection of material at Houghton Library shines a light on the life and work of Tennessee Williams.

Stage, screen, and television icon Angela Lansbury, at 89, makes her second visit to Harvard, for a screening of a film at the Harvard Film Archive.

In 20 years as the director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Malcolm Rogers has often courted controversy with his enthusiastic embrace not only of new media, but new definitions of art itself. Rogers gave the Lowell Lecture at Emerson Hall on Thursday evening.

James Robson, professor of East Asian languages and civilizations, has edited the Daoism volume of “The Norton Anthology of World Religions.”

A select group of Harvard students witnessed the installation of a kinetic sculpture in the Harvard Art Museums by contemporary German artist Rebecca Horn on Nov. 5.

Harvard Library is sponsoring a series of films by Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa in conjunction with its exhibit “Lives of the Great Patriotic War.” The film series continues Nov. 15 and 17. The exhibit is open through Nov. 26 at the Pusey Library.

Organizing and canvassing for anti-slavery petitions by women from 1833 to 1845 was a transformational training ground for suffragettes and other social activists following the Civil War.

Harvard historian discusses the topic of her latest book, “The Secret History of Wonder Woman.”

The renovated and expanded Harvard Art Museums reopen on Nov. 16 with a new building designed by Italian architect Renzo Piano that unites the Fogg Museum, the Busch-Reisinger Museum, and the Arthur M. Sackler Museum under one shining glass roof.

After six years, the Harvard Art Museums will reopen to the public on Nov. 16. The renovation and restoration has united the Fogg Museum, the Busch-Reisinger Museum, and the Arthur M. Sackler Museum under a spectacular glass roof. Get an inside look at the Harvard Art Museums’ transformation in Monday’s daily Gazette, which will feature a special edition dedicated exclusively to the renovation and reopening.

This month John Berryman’s longtime publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, is marking his 100th birthday by reissuing some of his best-known work.

Author Russell Banks talks about the search for spiritual meaning, in life and fiction, ahead of delivering the Divinity School’s 2014 Ingersoll Lecture on Immortality. The lecture will be held Nov. 5 at Sanders Theatre.

Pusey Library exhibit “Lives of the Great Patriotic War” is a multimedia glimpse at surviving Jewish veterans whose presence in the Red Army is a little-known story.

A gift to the Harvard Library from William Friedkin, the Academy Award-winning director/producer of such films as “The Exorcist” and “The French Connection,” will mark a new kind of collection for Harvard — cinema memoir.