Arts & Culture

Nancy Rappaport reads from “In Her Wake,” a book written about the exploration of her mother’s suicide.

While Harvard the institution is picking up the pace on supporting the arts, Harvard the students — as ever — are busy making the arts their “irreplaceable instruments of knowledge.”

A timeline of the arts at Harvard begins in 1636, when Harvard was founded, the Massachusetts Bay Colony had barely 10,000 settlers, and wolves howled at the edge of the endless forests.

“Street Scene” is performed in Harvard Yard by a group of A.R.T. students.

The Lab, a three-year experiment orchestrated by David Edwards, Gordon McKay Professor of the Practice of Biomedical Engineering, offers a “forum to help catalyze ideas” across many fields. Stemming from his course “Idea Translation” (ES 147), the exhibition of student-based experiments is designed to morph into an ongoing series of events and “idea nights” open to anyone at Harvard with something to show or say.

Philosopher and classicist Jonathan Lear, this year’s Tanner lecturer, begins his two-lecture look at irony and identity.

Students display results from a semester-long dig in Harvard Yard, including a musket ball, a slate pencil, and a piece of print type with the letter “o.”

Radcliffe Fellow and anthropologist Heather Paxson is studying small artisanal cheese operations as “ecologies of production” that are both commercial and moral.

In the fast pace of our daily lives we may overlook the details that, collectively, create a stunning backdrop for all that happens within the University. See the inner workings of Harvard’s pianos up close, while enjoying a melodic feast for the ears.

Who says the government doesn’t need to work better? After Hurricane Katrina, intelligence failures, and security lapses, Bilmes and Gould argue that hiring a capable federal workforce is central to serving the nation properly.

Thornber whisks us to Asia at the turn of the 20th century, where she documents how Japan’s literature interacted with China, Korea, and Taiwan, thus challenging Japan’s cultural authority.

A new teaching model inspired by medical rounds performed by physicians? Check. These authors dissect education and offer up their pioneering and pain-free prescription.

The Memorial Church welcomed opera virtuoso Dominique Labelle last week, who was described as genuine and gracious during her master class, proving that divas can be divas without diva behavior.

Nobel laureate in literature Orhan Pamuk nears the end of his six-lecture Norton series on the novel’s durable attractions.

Cellist Yo-Yo Ma examines the educational value of indigo through a number of disciplines.

Alison Knowles, a pioneering independent artist, takes listeners back to the early days of Fluxus, a group still making art through improvisational performance.

Radcliffe Fellow Godfried Toussaint taps computer science in a search for the evolutionary development of world music’s basic rhythms.

At a Harvard panel, curators of both the fictional and the real explore the museum’s place in culture and literature.

Sunstein breaks down the Constitution by looking at the diverse ways and methods it is interpreted. A heady book on America’s revered — and debated — political blueprint.

Goldin and Katz discuss the U.S. educational and technological meltdown circa 1980, and examine the glory days of the 20th century when the country’s educational system made it the richest in the nation.

Conley translates this French anthropologist’s spellbinding narrative on his love affair with film and how our memories closely connect to the cinematic. Here’s lookin’ at you, kids.

A new permanent art installation in Weld Boathouse is turning heads. Artist Ellen Kennelly ’85 took a crash course in flameworking and began these masterpieces in glass.

A new exhibition at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology explores the mystical dimensions of Islam with a series of photographs and multilayered, mixed-media compositions.

A new exhibit at the Carpenter Center titled “ACT UP New York: Activism, Art, and the AIDS Crisis, 1987–1993” examines the history of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power through a series of powerful graphics created by various artist collectives that were part of the influential group.

“New Muslim Cool” documents an American Muslim’s rise from the tough streets and hip-hop beats to a creed of mercy and forgiveness.

Stacey M. Childress and David A. Thomas are two Harvard Business School professors who wrote a book on how a struggling school system in Maryland turned itself around.

The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study launched a yearlong celebration of its first decade with an interdisciplinary symposium, “Crossing Boundaries.”

One of the most extensive collections of rare Chinese books outside China will be digitized and made freely available to scholars worldwide as part of a six-year cooperative project between the Harvard College Library (HCL) and the National Library of China.

The Music Department honored Thomas Forrest Kelly’s longtime contributions to the study of chant and performance practice with a conference called “City, Chant, and the Topography of Early Music.”

Harvard University has acquired a massive treasure trove of papers from one of its most famous literary graduates, John Updike ’54, the multifaceted novelist, short-story writer, poet, and critic who died last January.