Arts & Culture

As a liberal arts college, Harvard trains its students broadly so they can adapt nimbly to a rapidly changing world. Increasingly, appreciating and participating in music are integral parts of student life.

One of the many student-led musical groups on campus, The Nostalgics keep a Detroit sound tradition alive as Harvard’s Motown and soul band.

For his new book, Robert Sampson studied the Second City’s ups and downs for 15 years to outline patterns for many modern American cities.

Created in 2001, Mariachi Véritas de Harvard is a student-run group that focuses exclusively on the mariachi musical tradition.

Members of the Harvard community gather regularly in the basement of the Memorial Church for an informal hour of Gregorian chant singing under the guidance of Thomas Kelly, Morton B. Knafel Professor of Music.

Founded as the Pierian Sodality in March 1808 by a handful of students, today the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra is a collection of more than 100 accomplished musicians who present four major concerts each year.

During her time at Harvard, Jazz singer and junior Madison Greer has developed her skills in music theory and music performance and learned how to “front” a band.

Transit Gallery at Harvard Medical School, with a new show up, invites busy walkers to slow down and look. Co-exhibitors Svetlana Boym and Deb Todd Wheeler will discuss their work and attend a reception on Feb. 15.

At Harvard as part of an ongoing lecture and performance series, musician and composer Wynton Marsalis met with the Harvard community for two far-reaching discussions in which music and the arts played seminal roles.

“Queloides,” an art exhibit visiting Harvard, shows how racial stereotypes prevailed even after the Cuban Revolution.

Backed by an all-star band, Wynton Marsalis explored the “mulatto identity of our national music” with a rollicking performance and a thoughtful lecture on America’s porous tuneful genres at Sanders Theatre Feb. 6.

With a new museum wing in Tel Aviv, a Harvard architect offers a middle-ground paradigm for buildings that display art.

Two of Jane Austen’s letters — thousands of which were written but only dozens of which were preserved — undergo careful repairs at Harvard, where they reside at Houghton Library.

In his new book, noted historian Niall Ferguson sees Europe and America as facing a profound crisis of confidence in what the future holds.

The Music Department’s Blodgett Chamber Music Series will continue with a performance by the Chiara Quartet on Feb. 17. Tickets are free and available at the Harvard Box Office beginning Feb. 3.

Wynton Marsalis continues his two-year lecture series at Harvard with an exploration of root styles of American music in Sanders Theatre on Feb. 6.

The Silk Road Ensemble concluded its January Harvard residence with a Learning From Performers concert featuring four newly commissioned works.

Across campus, students participated in a series of arts intensives during January’s Wintersession that let them tap their creative talents.

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.