Arts & Culture

Clarity and simplicity are frequent themes in the Harvard College Winter Writing Program, a two-week Winter Break seminar where undergraduate nonfiction writers learn from some of the country’s best authors, teachers, and journalists.

Anatoly Smeliansky is the founding director of the American Repertory Theater/Moscow Art Theater School Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard University. As part of the program, he is spending the month at Harvard leading a series of classes on the history of theater and drama.

Rummaging through worm-eaten layers of parchment at a monastery in southern Germany in 1417, the scribe Poggio Bracciolini discovered a poem titled “De Rerum Natura,” or “On the Nature of Things,” by the Roman philosopher Titus Lucretius Carus. On that day, according to Professor Stephen Greenblatt, history swerved and modernity began.

A new online exhibit, the Nicholas V. Artamonoff Collection, presented by the Image Collections and Fieldwork Archive at Dumbarton Oaks, features more than 500 photos that a talented amateur photographer took in Turkey from 1935 through 1945.

The iconic photography of Walker Evans is on exhibit at Mather House’s SNLH Three Columns Gallery through March. John T. Hill, designer and producer of the exhibition, offers special insight into Evans’ life and work.

More than a masterful artist, Albrecht Dürer strongly influenced 16th-century science with cartographic and anatomical work that gets little attention from art historians.

In his new memoir, former Harvard Medical School Dean Joseph Martin recalls a small-town childhood, an attraction to medicine, and the ups and downs of leadership.

Modern dance instructor Liz Lerman uses a Harvard semester to cross disciplines, deepen understanding, promote research, and increase knowledge.

“The Snow Queen,” the classic fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen, has been reworked in an imaginative stage adaptation at the American Repertory Theater. It will be performed through Dec. 31.

A research team at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study is debunking myths surrounding the brutal practice of foot binding young women in China, tying it to handwork and weaving rather than marriage prospects.

Physician and Harvard Medical School Professor Arthur Kleinman delivered Harvard Divinity School’s annual William James Lecture, exploring the philosopher’s importance in the area of moral wisdom.

The dean of American direct cinema, 81-year-old Frederick Wiseman, offers a summary of his documentary shooting and editing techniques.

Smitten as a boy with the wonders of ancient Egypt, archaeologist Peter Der Manuelian deep into excavations but also wedded to the Web.

English Professor Leah Price focuses on leading authors and the titles they love in “Unpacking My Library: Writers and Their Books.”

Rick Burkhardt and his team of collaborators recast the song cycle by Austrian composer Franz Schubert to both deepen and lighten the experience of his somber work “Winterreise.” It is at the A.R.T. from Dec. 7 through Jan. 8.

President Drew Faust paid a visit Nov. 17 to the popular undergraduate course anthropology 1010: “The Fundamentals of Archaeological Methods and Reasoning.” Faust’s attendance was inspired by a special meeting of the course at the Harvard Ceramics Studio, where students learned how pottery is made, and got to try their hands at making their own pieces.

A student research project and a resulting booklet and website bring to light some troubling connections to the College in the 18th and 19th centuries.

The Harvard Writers at Work lecture series, in its third year, offers public conversations on craft, collaboration, and even challenges to writing in the digital age.

Israeli author David Grossman spoke Tuesday about becoming immersed in his writing and his characters during a packed talk in the Science Center.

Three major players in contemporary music reconvened at Harvard, their alma mater, to discuss their groundbreaking opera “Nixon in China,” based on Nixon’s seminal visit in 1972.

Philosopher Paul Tillich once denied there was a gap between religion and culture. Today, he might reach for another convergent ideal: utopia.

On a visit to Harvard, an African architect imparts a Third World lesson: more for less.

Harvard physicist Lisa Randall helped to develop an offbeat new show at the Carpenter Center that explores the concept of size, through scientific and artistic lenses

Happiness — how do we get it, how do we keep it, and where does it come from? Distinguished visiting fellow Sissela Bok plumbs the theories of philosophers, neuroscientists, and other specialists, and synthesizes her research into a comprehensive overview of the subject.

Lawrence Lessig, the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law, presents a road map for how to get the U.S. Congress back on track, and examines the issues of campaign financing, corporate lobbying, and other outside monetary interests that derail the government.

In his latest book, psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker cites data to show that the world is becoming far more peaceful than you might have thought.

Professor of the Practice of International Development at Harvard Kennedy School Calestous Juma presents three opportunities that can transform African agriculture: advances in science and technology; the creation of regional markets; and the emergence of entrepreneurial leaders dedicated to the continent’s economic improvement.

Houghton Library illustrates how the stuff of great literature is conserved, from the first jumbled box to the final neat archive.

Houghton, a template for university literary archives everywhere, also has room for the odd: A Thoreau pencil, a Dickinson teacup, and more.

Leaders in the growing field of artist-endowed foundations discussed the challenges and goals of their work in a panel talk at the Sackler Museum.