Arts & Culture

The Harvard Summer Pops Band celebrated its 40th anniversary with a performance in Sanders Theatre on July 26. They will perform at 3 p.m. July 29 at Boston’s Hatch Shell.

Harvard’s Audio Preservation Studio, tucked away in a few rooms on Story Street, does the heavy lifting (and listening) required to make “loss-less” digital copies of archived sound artifacts in collections University-wide.

This summer, the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research is offering tours of its art collection. Led at noon on Thursdays by Sheldon Cheek, senior curatorial associate for the Image of the Black in Western Art Project and Photo Archive, at the Rudenstine Gallery.

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.

Harvard-Radcliffe Summer Theatre (HRST) welcomes Harvard undergraduates of all ages and majors to participate in its summer repertory company. The 30 Harvard students participating in the 2012 HRST program and have been collaborating on three plays since mid-May.

Free-market thinking now pervades most facets of everyday life. In “What Money Can’t Buy,” rock-star lecturer and philosopher Michael Sandel asks readers to consider what they really value — and whether some things shouldn’t come with a price.

Harvard curator Elizabeth Rudy discussed “highlights of how portraiture was pushed in different directions by different artists at key moments” in a talk at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum.

A summer-long festival at the Harvard Film Archive tells the story, in 40 movies, of Paramount Pictures — a legendary cinema enterprise that turned 100 this year.

A new master’s concentration at the Harvard Graduate School of Design invites artists and others out of the studio and into the world.

The War of 1812 touched Harvard only lightly, a new exhibit shows, but the end of the conflict was much welcomed in Anglophile New England.

Edward Lear, a master of nonsense verse and travel writing, was at a young age one of the most accomplished natural history painters of his time.

A Harvard professor leads a team of editors to create a third edition of an erudite, Earth-circling “Norton Anthology of World Literature.”

“Early Photography of Japan,” a virtual collection of more than 2,000 images from three Harvard University libraries, documents the early history of Japanese commercial photography, and reflects the Western image of traditional Japanese culture before modernization.

Harvard’s Houghton Library offers a glimpse of a coming treasure trove for scholars, the John Updike Archive.

“The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess” and “Once” — two shows with pre-Broadway origins at the American Repertory Theater — had a boffo night at Sunday’s Tony Awards, taking home the prizes for best musical revival and best musical, respectively.

A new exhibition at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum profiling the print-inspired works of contemporary artist Jasper Johns was put together with the help of four Harvard undergraduates.

The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (Villa I Tatti) in Florence, Italy, has announced a new online exhibition, “Berenson and Harvard: Bernard and Mary as Students,” opening June 4.

Diane Paulus, artistic director of the American Repertory Theater (A.R.T.), and her reimagined production of “Porgy and Bess” nabbed 10 Tony Award nominations, and another musical with ties to the A.R.T. grabbed 11.

We asked several Harvard authors to talk about something different, not what’s in their books but where and how they write them. Here’s what they said.

An intimate exhibition at the Harvard Art Museums/Arthur M. Sackler Museum offers viewers a look at a body of largely unknown photographic work by one of the most versatile talents of the modern art movement in Germany.

Four speakers recalled the spiritual and intellectual ambition of theologian Paul Tillich in an event marking the 50th anniversary of his retirement from Harvard.

HBS professor’s experiments and book show the advantages of workplace teams getting together to share responsibility for down time, while keeping productivity high.

“Attached” is this year’s display of senior theses in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies. Their work is on display through May 24.

Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory Jorie Graham celebrated the legacy of Harvard poets such as T.S. Eliot, E. E. Cummings, and Wallace Stevens, with a student performance of their verse in “Over the Centuries: Poetry at Harvard (A Love Story).”

“Breaking Boundaries: Arts, Creativity and the Harvard Curriculum” was featured at Arts @ 29 Garden, which is an interdisciplinary space where Harvard faculty, students, and visiting artists come together to make art that enhances, embodies, and re-imagines learning.

The Harvard University Native American Program sponsored the annual Harvard Powwow celebration that brought together Native American singers, dancers, and drummers at the Radcliffe Yard on Aprl 28.

Actor John Lithgow ’67 hosted the annual Harvard Arts Medal ceremony, which recognizes a Harvard or Radcliffe graduate or faculty member who has achieved excellence in the arts and has made a contribution through the arts to education or the public good. The medal recipient was actor Tommy Lee Jones ’69.

Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, professor emerita of history and American studies at Smith College, examined the shifting gender landscape at Harvard during a talk at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Artist David Michalek, creator of “Slow Dancing,” a temporary installation on the façade of Widener Library, discussed the evolution of his work during a talk at Boylston Hall.

In his new book, “Revolt: An Archaeological History of Pueblo Resistance and Revitalization in 17th Century New Mexico,” Assistant Professor of Anthropology Matthew Liebmann offers a first-of-its-kind look at how the Pueblo people lived during their brief independence from Spain.