In the early 1990s, while still in high school, Anna Schuleit discovered mystery by taking long walks through the deserted grounds of the Northampton State Hospital. This cluster of Victorian buildings — with its iron-bar windows, crumbling red brick, and chest-high grass — touched a deep chord in the young artist.
The Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra’s fourth concert of the season is Friday, April 20, at 8 p.m. in Sanders Theatre. In addition to the world premiere of the Yannatos Cello Concerto, featuring Matt Haimovitz’ 96, the program also features Brahms’ Symphony No. 2 and Mendelssohn’s Overture to a Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Researchers from the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology are preparing to head into the Central American rain forest to begin an ambitious, multiyear project to scan and digitize fading Maya inscriptions and carvings.
Four teenage participants from the Picture Balata workshop made a stop at Harvard this past Wednesday evening (April 11) as part of their two-week tour of the United States. The teenagers, Palestinians from Balata Refugee Camp outside of Nablus, West Bank, visited the Center for Government and International Studies (CGIS), where they displayed their work and spoke about their lives and experiences.
The Harvard Film Archive will host “Reverence: The Films of Owen Land” (formerly known as George Landow) — a touring exhibition celebrating the work of one of the most original and celebrated American filmmakers of the ’60s and ’70s — on April 16. The program, which includes 15 shorts ranging from between 3 and 22 minutes long, will kick off at 7 p.m. General admission is $8 ($6 for students and seniors).
Many of the paintings and drawings in the Fogg Museum’s new exhibition “The Last Ruskinians: Charles Eliot Norton, Charles Herbert Moore, and Their Circle” are astounding for their jewel-like detail and trompe l’oeil realism, but to regard them as a higher sort of eye candy would be to miss the point.
On exhibit at the Harvard University Art Museums are wide and deep collections that range from ancient Greece statuary to Ottoman textiles to Max Beckmann masterpieces to contemporary American graphic arts. As stunning and numerous as are the objects on display, significant portions of the museums’ collections are not always up on the walls but are, nevertheless, available to students and other scholars. Study rooms and curatorial assistance are available to researchers and students to give them a chance to study these original works of art — firsthand.
World War II has been called “The Good War,” often in contrast to later conflicts whose moral justification is seen as more ambivalent. But how did the Good War become good, and what aspects of it had to be suppressed to qualify it for that title? Three scholars attempted to answer that question at a symposium March 9 titled “Cultural Impacts of World War II.” The event was sponsored by the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History and was part of the center’s 2006-07 workshop on “Cultural Reverberations of Modern War.”
When American women won the right to vote in 1919, the logical question was, What next? Suffragists had the answer ready: full enjoyment of civil and domestic life for women, equal to that of men. But suffragists found out that what was next was not much. It would be decades before American women gained anything like gender equality in the home, in the workplace, and in higher education. And they faced another unsettling fact: Flappers were next. To the dismay of early feminists, these unruly daughters of feminism were driven by an apolitical appetite for clothes, boys, and the outward signs of freedom.
Twentieth century American historian Susan Ware will lead another workshop group. She’s an independent scholar who has written several biographies, including one of Earhart. At the Radcliffe Institute from 1997 to 2005, Ware was editor of volume five of the biographical dictionary “Notable American Women.”
One of the more melodic pleasures offered to the Harvard community is the University Hall Recital Series, an intimate, lunchtime treat held in the Faculty Room at University Hall. Under a sky-high ceiling and crystal chandeliers, and surrounded by formal paintings of notable Harvard faculty and busts of notable historical figures, listeners settle themselves in for short but stirring musical recitals.
James Rothenberg is a leading figure in the investment world as well as being Harvard University’s treasurer and a member of the Harvard Corporation and Board of Overseers.
The Harvard Black Men’s Forum (BMF) will present the 2007 Woman of the Year award to acclaimed actress, producer, director, and choreographer Debbie Allen. The presentation of the 2007 award — scheduled for March 10 at the Boston Fairmount Copley Hotel — will be the highlight of the 13th annual “Celebration of Black Women: Honoring Everyday Heroes.”
The Boston Landmarks Orchestra will celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) with a March 25 tribute at Sanders Theatre.
Music lovers will soon have a chance to hear pieces by some of the most influential classical composers working today performed by one of the most honored groups of players specializing in new music. And it’s all free!
An enlarged news photo, flaunting its rough pattern of halftone dots, shows a man in jeans, a military overcoat, and a fedora striding toward the camera. Judging by his wide grin he seems to be enjoying himself hugely, but his downcast eyes convey that it is a private enjoyment, not shared by the uniformed police who stand stiffly on either side. Across the photo, in a black scrawl, are the words “Demokratie ist lustig” — “democracy is merry.” The man is the German artist Joseph Beuys (1921-1986), and the photo records the moment in 1972 when he was escorted from the Art Academy of Düsseldorf after being dismissed from his faculty position for opening his classes to anyone who wanted to attend. It was Beuys himself who transformed the news photo into a work of art, simply by designating it as such.
The Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America invites Harvard undergraduates to make use of the library’s collections with competitive awards (ranging from $100 to $2,500) for relevant research projects.
Mary Gitagno plainly remembers the pain of her traditional Tanzanian tribe’s female circumcision ritual. It is a pain she determined her own daughters would never feel. In the years since, Gitagno went far beyond sparing her daughters from female genital mutilation, beginning a nonprofit organization to lobby the government and educate the public about the dangers of such practices.
Svetlana Boym leads a double life. Her faculty Web page identifies her as the Curt Hugo Reisinger Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Professor of Comparative Literature. She is the author of several scholarly books and teaches courses with titles like “Memory and Modernity” and “Russian Culture from Revolution to Perestroika.”
The phrase “rich ethnic and cultural diversity” seemed like an understatement at last Saturday’s (Feb. 24) Cultural Rhythms extravaganza. This year’s event was energized by the appearance of the Artist of the Year Laurence Fishburne, the mightily accomplished actor, director, producer, and humanitarian.
When Eve Blau speaks of Milan Lenuci, the city surveyor of Zagreb in the late 19th century, a note of reverence enters her voice. “He’s one of our great heroes,” she says. Lenuci’s finest accomplishment was the “Green Horseshoe,” a U-shaped series of parks and promenades surrounding Zagreb’s center and providing a refreshing refuge from urban traffic and noise. But what Blau admires even more than the work itself is the way Lenuci managed to bring it into being.
Paul Oliver, probably the world’s foremost scholar of the blues, first heard African-American vernacular music during World War II when a friend brought him to listen to black servicemen stationed in England singing work songs they had brought with them from the fields and lumber camps of the Deep South. Oliver was enthralled by the rhythm and drive of the music and the spontaneous interweaving of harmonies, and wanted to hear more. His fascination led him on a 60-year quest that has included numerous field trips through the American South interviewing, recording, and photographing blues musicians.
Six years after sweeping across Asia, the Korean wave hit Cambridge with a crash on Friday (Feb. 16) during a panel at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. “Korean wave” – or Hallyu – refers to the sizzling popularity of South Korean popular culture throughout Asia. From the Philippines and Malaysia, to Singapore, Japan, and China, prosperous and democratic South Korea is a benchmark of the hip – in television dramas, movies, pop music, clothes, electronics, and even hairdos.
An early 20th century visitor to Harvard – especially if he or she were a forward-thinking person who believed that science was the best approach to solving society’s problems – would probably be eager to climb to the top floor of Emerson Hall to see the newly installed Social Museum. The museum was the brainchild of Francis Greenwood Peabody, the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and founder of the Department of Social Ethics, which later became the Sociology Department. Peabody believed that just as biology students had the Museum of Comparative Zoology and anthropology students had the Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, students who wanted to study social conditions needed a museum of their own, a place where they could contemplate the ills of modern life and the methods used to ameliorate them.
Tony Award winner Michael Cerveris will conduct two workshops for Harvard undergraduate actors and singers performing audition monologues and songs on Feb. 26 at 3 and 7 p.m.
While Prohibition in America failed to rid the nation of demon rum, it did unleash a wave of change in the American cultural and political sphere whose ripples are still seen today. According to new research by Lisa McGirr, a historian in Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), the fallout from the impossible effort of enforcing the Volstead Act played a key role in creating the political alliances that have endured for the past 70 years.
When Bette Davis called in sick during her time as a contract player with Warner Bros., the studio was known to send their own physician to her house to make sure she wasn’t malingering. Haden Guest mentions this intriguing fact as one of the many insights into the Hollywood studio system he gained while working as curator and acting director of the Warner Bros. Archives at the University of Southern California, the largest and most comprehensive collection of materials from a single Hollywood production company.
Those who loudly refused to let the world turn a blind eye or feign helplessness as genocides ravaged millions of lives this century and last are sometimes dubbed “screamers.” The Harvard community got an earful Monday evening (Feb. 5) from an unlikely quartet of modern screamers – the chart-topping, earsplitting heavy metal band System of a Down – during an advance screening of the new documentary “Screamers” at the John F. Kennedy School of Government’s Starr Auditorium.
Bat Batjargal, an Oxford-trained political scientist and lecturer in social sciences at Harvard, talks a mile a minute – and can do so in five languages. He sprinkles every conversation about his work (on social network theory) with a constant phrase: “Fascinating stuff.” In two talks last week – on the social networks of entrepreneurs – Batjargal used another frequent phrase: “Surprise, surprise.” Preliminary findings in his large-scale, cross-cultural study of 377 entrepreneurs in China and Russia suggest that gender affects the revenues, growth, and profits of new ventures in surprising ways.
Most of us only get one life. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow – whose 200th birthday bicentennial is this month – has had four. In the first, he arrived in Cambridge in 1837, fresh from a six-year professorship at Bowdoin College. Longfellow, sporting long hair, yellow gloves, and flowered waistcoats, cut quite a romantic, European-style figure in what was then a provincial village of 6,000.
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