Arts & Culture

Michael Canfield, a lecturer on organismic and evolutionary biology, visits an eclectic range of scientific disciplines, offering examples that professional naturalists can emulate to fine-tune their own field methods, along with practical advice that amateur naturalists and students can use to document their adventures.

Harvard students are studying and performing the modern, eclectic works of composer John Adams.

Curt Hugo Reisinger Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Professor of Comparative Literature Svetlana Boym explores the cross-cultural history of the idea of freedom, discusses its limitations, and wonders how it can be newly imagined.

Harvard graduate and award-winning producer Carlton Cuse ’81 returned to campus to offer students a look behind the scenes at his TV show “Lost” and insight into his creative process.

Using personal narratives, several Harvard scholars recall experiences with their faiths with the help of objects in the Harvard Art Museums’ collections.

“The Divine Comedy,” a daring and grand exhibit in three parts, gives a modern spin to Dante’s three realms of the dead, and shows how art can break disciplinary boundaries.

Two Harvard ethnographers directed the prize-winning “Foreign Parts,” a documentary that captures the sights and sounds of Willets Point, a vibrant, vanishing corner of New York City.

Associate Professor of Comparative Literature Christopher Johnson defends the role of Baroque period hyperbole in Spanish and Mexican lyrics, English drama, and French philosophy.

This biography by Niall Ferguson, Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History and Professor of Business Administration, chronicles the life of Siegmund Warburg, a financial wiz, prophet of globalization, and strategic businessman.

Gardiner Professor of Oceanic History and Affairs Sugata Bose parses the life of Indian revolutionary Subhas Chandra Bose, who struggled to liberate his people from British rule and led the Indian National Army against Allied Forces during World War II.

Photographer Susan Meiselas, Ed.M. ’71, will receive the 2011 Harvard Arts Medal, as part of Harvard’s annual Arts First weekend, which runs April 28-May 1.

Far from icons of the past, Bettina Burch’s paintings of the HGSE and CGIS community — from janitors to students to deans — gently upend the concept of the “Harvard portrait.”

Australian native Maria Gough, the Joseph Pulitzer Jr. Professor of Modern Art at Harvard, studies the Russian and Soviet avant-garde periods because they portray “what the function of the artist is in a revolutionary climate.”

In “Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World,” historian Maya Jasanoff reveals the lesser-known history of loyalists after the Revolution.

In four days of festivities, Harvard celebrates four decades of dedication to a great American musical form.

Harvard College Dean Evelynn M. Hammonds and some of Harvard’s leading faculty convened at Harvard Hall on Friday (April 1) to participate in “Teaching with Collections,” a discussion of the University’s treasures and their use in the classroom.

Michael Fosberg learned of his African-American roots as an adult, and will tell his story at Harvard on April 6 in his one-man play “Incognito.”

Jazz great Wynton Marsalis will make several visits to campus over the next two years, lecturing on a variety of topics to illuminate the relationship between American music and the American identity.

Professor works to transform ancient Greek texts and their Arabic translations into an open-access, computerized format that could provide important insights into the development of science.

Offbeat Director John Tiffany, whose company stages productions in unlikely locales, is using a fellowship year at Radcliffe to explore the ways that people communicate, complete with tics.

A traveling exhibition at the Carpenter Center shows off the humble fax as a medium for art, displacing the art of the hand with the foibles of electronic transmission. The exhibition continues to April 10.

Aaron Dworkin, violinist and founder of the Sphinx Organization, spoke at Harvard about his movement to bring diversity to classical music.

Jeffrey Quilter, a senior lecturer on anthropology and deputy director for curatorial affairs and curator at Harvard’s Peabody Museum, introduces the Moche civilization and explores current thinking about Moche politics, history, society, and religion.

Paul Lawrence, a professor emeritus at Harvard Business School, offers an integrated explanation of both human behavior and leadership using a scientific approach — and Darwin, too! — to illustrate how good, bad, and misguided leadership are natural to the human condition.

This selection of essays edited by Ezra F. Vogel, Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences Emeritus, and Byung-Kook Kim recovers and contextualizes many of the ambiguities in South Korea’s trajectory from poverty to a sustainable high rate of economic growth.

Harvard Extension School instructor Sarah Braunstein’s new novel “The Sweet Relief of Missing Children” plumbs the vulnerability of childhood.

In a discussion at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, author and historian Annette Gordon-Reed discussed the next installment of her work on the complicated history involving Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings.

The eccentric diary of Boston recluse Arthur Crew Inman, published in 1985 by Harvard University Press, inspires a Hollywood film project.

In a collaboration with the American Repertory Theater and the Theater of War, members of the military and civilians attended a reading of the ancient Greek drama “Ajax and Philoctetes” and took part in a discussion about the psychological impact of war.

Artist and photographer Atul Bhalla uses his work to explore the cultural and historical contexts of water. His current installation at Harvard Art Museums/Arthur M. Sackler Museum is part art and part performance project involving India’s Yamuna River.