Arts & Culture

The Harvard Arts Medal ceremony kicked off this year’s Arts First festival, with Margaret Atwood receiving the award.

Novelist and essayist Jamaica Kincaid was among the participants in a panel on the first day of Harvard LitFest, which continues through Thursday .

Time magazine has named American Repertory Theater Artistic Director Diane Paulus to the 2014 Time 100, its annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world.

Oscar-winning filmmaker Steven Spielberg visited Harvard Tuesday and discussed his long and successful career as part of the Mahindra Humanities Center’s Rita E. Hauser Forum for the Arts.

Writers in the Parlor connects accomplished novelists and story writers with students.

Surekha Davies, assistant professor of history at Western Connecticut State University, spoke Thursday evening at the Harvard Science Center about how scholarly texts and the work of cartographers helped to mold the perceived boundaries between humans, monsters, and animals.

A Cambodian filmmaker, now a Scholar at Risk at Harvard, looks back at “Enemies of the People,” his documentary on Cambodia’s killing fields of 1975-79.

In a book event this week, Werner Sollors talked about the tumult of physical and spiritual survival amid the ruins of post-WWII Germany.

At the Harvard Art Museums, a long-hidden mural is both an example of the true fresco technique and a dramatic reflection of the times. It will be on permanent display when the museums reopen this fall.

Megan Marshall ’77 was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for “Margaret Fuller: A New American Life” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2013), her richly detailed biography of the 19th-century author, journalist, and women’s rights advocate who perished in a shipwreck off New York’s Fire Island.

On Friday, a Harvard religious studies group — the only one to focus on faith traditions from the African diaspora — hosts a conference to investigate the varieties of love: devotion, intimacy, and ecstasy.

A wide range of scientific testing indicates that a papyrus fragment containing the words “Jesus said to them, my wife” is an ancient document, dating between the sixth to ninth centuries C.E. Its contents may originally have been composed as early as the second to fourth centuries.

Empathy, Rowan Williams argued in his first Tanner Lecture, is a tool for seeing the self.

Keynote speaker Professor Giuliana Bruno will launch the Harvard Film and Visual Studies Department’s inaugural graduate conference, April 10-12 at the Carpenter Center, with a discussion of her new book, “Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media.”

Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt addressed the comforts of tragedy at the Cambridge Public Library.

Historians will gather at Harvard on April 11 to mark the 200th anniversary of the Congress of Vienna.

“Breaking Bad” creator Vince Gilligan spoke with Harvard President Drew Faust about the origins and evolution of the show.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and Harvard fellow Ron Suskind talks about connecting with his autistic son through Disney films.

GSAS doctoral students create an exhibit to feature personal albums, photographs, postcards, and maps from Harvard’s rich trove of 20th-century propaganda related to Italy’s late participation in the colonial “scramble for Africa.”

Unbound Visual Arts, a nonprofit based in Allston-Brighton, has organized an exhibit in the Harvard Allston Education Portal.

Emancipation, said scholar of African America Ira Berlin in a Harvard lecture series, was not a moment in history, but a century-long movement that preceded the Civil War.

At an early age, Linda Gordon traded her passion for dance to study history. Today, the accomplished author and historian is spending the year at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study working on a book about social movements in the 20h century.

A new online exhibit sheds light on the creative process of Sir Georg Solti, a giant in 20th-century classical music.

With a show on Broadway, artist-in-residence Jason Robert Brown explains his craft.

In an inaugural exhibition from the Harvard University Archives, staffers bring a few dozen awesome oddities into the light of day.

The Woodberry Poetry Room is sponsoring a series focused on rethinking the possibilities of the creative-writing workshop.

Three Harvard faculty members divulge an influential book in this installment of Harvard Bound.

Christopher E.G. Benfey lectured on “America,” a wall designed by Josef Albers, as part of GSD’s “Then and Now” series.

Scholars, others gathered Tuesday to reflect on the life and legacy of the late Nelson Mandela.

A music professor and director of Harvard’s Studio for Electroacoustic Composition is indulging his fascination with the visual arts as part of a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute. Hans Tutschku is showing a series of photographs created in collaboration with students from Harvard’s Office for the Arts Dance Program.