Arts & Culture

All Arts & Culture

  • Harvard Review contributors receive literary honors

    For the seventh year in its eight-year history, Harvard Review has had contributors selected for inclusion in the highly selective “Best American” series and have been nominated for a prestigious Pushcart Prize.

  • Evolution of a sacred text made visible at Houghton

    When Jane Cheng ’09 arrived at Harvard four years ago, her interest in book conservation led to a job at the Weissman Preservation Center, and it was that job that led her to the medieval text that would become the subject of both her senior thesis and a new exhibition organized by Cheng at Houghton Library.

  • Symposium, exhibition on Conan Doyle at Houghton

    A new exhibition, “‘Ever Westward’: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and American Culture,” opening May 5 at Houghton Library, hopes to paint a fuller picture of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s contributions to world literature, which range from historical fiction to personal memoir to science fiction and beyond.

  • Play space

    The Adams House Pool Theatre sits in the heart of Westmorly Court, one of the several “Gold Coast” dormitories that now make up Adams House. Originally built as a pool, the space has become home to unconventional, spirited productions and has gained a reputation as an alternative venue on campus.

  • ‘What’s so funny ’bout peace, love, and sustainability?’

    Even on Earth Day — an April celebration of the environment since 1970 — humor traditionally has had little place. There’s always more oh-oh than ho-ho.

  • Performance rings old bones with sounds of ‘selection’

    The Harvard Museum of Natural History’s galleries rang with music Tuesday evening (April 28) as the facility’s fossils made room for musicians performing seven original classical pieces written in honor of the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin’s “The Origin of Species.”

  • Locke: More enlightened than we thought

    English political philosopher John Locke died nearly a century before the American Revolution, and in his time parliamentary democracy was in its infancy. But his Enlightenment ideas — including the right to life, liberty, and property — went on to inspire American revolutionaries.

  • GSD students help Netherlands plan for future

    “Arriving this morning we made our way to our home for the next six nights, the floating hotel boat, The Merlijn,” wrote Martin Zogran, assistant professor of urban design in Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (GSD), in his blog that highlighted details of the Harvard-Netherlands Project: Climate Change, Water, Land Development, and Adaptation.

  • Sing a song of praise

    From Puritan psalms to spirituals to Ellington and Coltrain, a Divinity School class explores – and performs – the sacred and musical.

  • Sing a song of praise

    Every Monday a small group of students gathers in Andover Hall for a sacred musical journey.

  • Remembering the ‘American War’ of the ’60s

    How do nations remember? In part, they remember through monuments — public art designed to capture a national memory and carry it through the ages.

  • Paulus reaches beyond boards

    Clad in black and white, her brown hair loose about her shoulders, her green eyes intense, Diane Paulus sits in her office and smiles. Against the window rests a stolen treasure from her days as a Harvard freshman, a poster of the American Repertory Theater’s (A.R.T.) production of Samuel Beckett’s “Endgame.”

  • Handel’s ‘Saul’ to be performed in memory of John Raymond Ferris

    The Harvard University Choir and the Harvard Baroque Chamber Orchestra will present Handel’s magnificent oratorio “Saul” on April 26. The performance is dedicated to the memory of John Raymond Ferris, University organist and choirmaster from 1958-1990, who passed away last summer.

  • Seniors Buzney, Barron win Mellinger Award

    Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra (HRO) members Catherine Buzney ’09 and Christine Barron ’09 have been named recipients of the Rachel Mellinger Memorial Award.

  • Human colonization of Australia and the Americas examined

    A recent symposium about the prehistory of Australia and the Americas brought together scholars from 10,000 miles apart. But that’s nothing compared to the journey early humans made to populate Australia and the Americas tens of thousands of years ago.

  • Chance favored expedition leader in ‘missing link’ discovery

    A graphic in an undergraduate geology textbook serendipitously led to the 2004 discovery of the missing link between fish and land animals far in the Canadian Arctic, one of the creature’s discoverers said during an April 16 lecture at Harvard.

  • Marking a century since North Pole discovered

    The 100th anniversary of the discovery of the North Pole was marked this year on April 6. For more than 20 years, Harvard Foundation Director S. Allen Counter has made it a mission to bring to light the work of Matthew Henson, the African-American Arctic aide of Robert Peary, the sole explorer credited for reaching the North Pole in 1909.

  • Roughing it on Great Brewster

    Four women keep a meticulous diary of their stay on Great Brewster Island in July of 1891. The diary, which is filled with illustrations and photographs, was purchased by the Schlesinger Library in 1999.

  • Inaugural Playwrights’ Festival

    Eleven undergraduate playwrights will present staged readings of their plays as part of the inaugural Harvard Playwrights’ Festival, held April 23-26 in New College Theatre. The plays will be performed with the collaboration of professional directors, graduate actors, and dramaturges from the Institute for Advanced Theatre Training.

  • Playwrights find a venue

    Chris Gummerson ’12 was driving past the headquarters of a scrapple factory in a small town when an idea for a musical came to her. What if the town’s livelihood depended on the factory, and what if a USDA official made a surprise visit that culminated in a product-recall panic, and what if the meat-eating son of the factory’s owner fell in love with the vegan-artist daughter of the USDA official, and they had to set aside their dietary differences to save the town?

  • Roughing it on Great Brewster

    On the hot day of July 15, 1891, four women set off for the adventure of a lifetime in Boston Harbor. For nearly two weeks the quartet — well-educated, upper-class women from the Lowell area — “roughed it” in a quaint yet ramshackle cottage on remote Great Brewster Island, a place they considered “an enchanted isle.”

  • Yannatos retires after 45 years, concert planned

    With music filling his ears, the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra (HRO) Conductor James Yannatos will retire after 45 years by giving his final concert on April 17.

  • Jehn is appointed director of the Harvard College Writing Program

    Thomas R. Jehn, an expert in writing pedagogy, has been appointed Sosland Director in the Harvard College Writing Program, effective immediately.

  • Pros teaching prose

    Clicking keyboards provide a soundtrack to the semester’s end, as students put finishing touches on term papers, theses, dissertations, and the like. But amid the flurry of traditional writing assignments, there are other projects afoot. Short stories, for example. Screenplays. Fiction manuscripts. Personal essays.

  • Radcliffe Fellow tells tale of first woman to play professional baseball

    In 1991 the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., paid homage to players from the Negro Leagues, an artifact of segregated America that had faded away three decades earlier.

  • Uncovering the power of ritual in ‘The Rite of Spring’

    “Art is a coalescing, unifying force,” says Christine Dakin, addressing the students gathered for her weekly seminar at the Harvard Dance Center. A glance around the room confirms her statement — Dakin’s students represent a cross-section of Harvard that could not be more diverse. They are performance artists, neurobiologists, and economists. They come from several of Harvard’s Schools. They range in age, dance experience, and academic background. But all are bound together by a single work of art — Igor Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring,” the famed ballet that has captivated and confounded listeners since it first premiered in 1913.

    Dancers
  • Harvard University Library awarded $5M grant from Arcadia Fund

    Britain’s Arcadia Fund has awarded $5 million to the Harvard University Library. Arcadia’s five-year grant will provide flexible support for the library’s core functions: acquisitions, access, preservation, and dissemination.

  • The pogrom that transformed 20th century Jewry

    On April 8, 1903 — Easter Sunday — a mild disturbance against local Jews rattled Kishinev, a sleepy city on the southwestern border of imperial Russia.

  • Scholar enjoys wrestling ‘the Great Bear’

    Some scholars are hard-pressed to identify what exactly drew them to their field. Others can point to a specific “aha!” moment when they found their academic calling. In Justin Weir’s case, it all began with a bit of bureaucracy.

  • National Endowment for the Humanities supports preservation of Qajar dynasty

    The National Endowment for the Humanities has made a $346,733 grant to a team of Qajar historians. The purpose of this grant, which lasts from May 2009 to June 2011, is to develop a comprehensive digital archive and Web site at Harvard University that will preserve, link, and render accessible primary source materials related to the social and cultural history of women’s worlds during the reign of the Qajar dynasty (1785-1925) in Iran.