Arts & Culture

This week the George Edward Woodberry Poetry Room reopened after a summerlong renovation, reuniting scholars, poets, and poetry lovers with an unprecedented collection of books, pamphlets, magazines, broadsides, manuscripts, video recordings of poets, rare author photographs, and paintings and sculptures created by poets – in fact anything related to 20th and 21st century poetry.

Pioneering statistician Frederick Mosteller, a retired Harvard professor whose broad-ranging work influenced public health, medicine, education, and even American history, died Sunday (July 23) at age 89.

Students from around the world come together at Harvard to speak the rhythmic language South African miners created during apartheid.

A Harvard Medical School instructor at Brigham and Women’s Hospital is spearheading a pilot project to encourage Brigham employees to gather detailed family health histories to give health care officials an edge fighting inherited diseases.

Since humans learned to speak, they have put their words into two basic categories, nouns and verbs. Nouns denote objects; verbs refer to actions. Dictionaries of specialized words have been added by bankers, lawyers, scientists, and clergy, but this core distinction remains.

Harvard University biologists have identified a molecular pathway active in neurons that interacts with RNA to regulate the formation of long-term memory in fruit flies. The same pathway is also found at mammalian synapses, and could eventually present a target for new therapeutics to treat human memory loss.

The Harvard University Library (HUL) has received a grant of $600,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the development of a registry of authoritative information about digital formats. Detailed information about the format of digital resources is fundamental to their preservation. The two-year project will result in a new Global Digital Format Registry (GDFR), which will become a key international infrastructure component for the digital preservation programs of libraries, archives, and other institutions with the responsibility for keeping digital resources viable over time.

The Harvard University Art Museums (HUAM) recently announced the appointment of Susanne Ebbinghaus as the George M.A. Hanfmann Curator of Ancient Art. Ebbinghaus has been serving as a curatorial research associate in the Department of Ancient and Byzantine Art and Numismatics at Harvard University Art Museums and recently spent a year at the University of Toronto, investigating cultural exchanges between Greece and the Near East on a fellowship from the Gerda Henkel Foundation. The appointment will become official in early February.

Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble perform during Learning From Performers, sponsored by Office for the Arts, September 2005.

Norton Dodge is an economist, a Harvard alumnus, and a savior of smuggled Soviet art. Smuggler is not usually a moniker that one would choose, but for Norton Dodge it is a badge of honor. Concerned with the plight of artists living under Soviet rule, many of whom found their work prohibited by the regime, Dodge smuggled almost 20,000 works of art out of the Soviet Union during the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s.

Some years ago, before Stephen Greenblatt made the move from Berkeley to Harvard, a screenwriter named Marc Norman came to see him. Norman wanted to write a screenplay about William Shakespeare and had come to interview Greenblatt about the playwrights life.