Per Wästberg, a prolific Swedish author, human rights advocate, and a member of the Nobel Prize Committee for Literature, was at Harvard April 4 for a luncheon at the Faculty Club, sponsored by the Harvard Foundation. Wästberg, who earned a Harvard A.B. degree in Comparative Literature in 1955, recalled being accidentally locked overnight in Widener Library. I thought it was paradise, he said. At 7:30 p.m., Wästberg delivered the Inaugural Peter J. Gomes Lecture in the Memorial Church, titled, The Nobel Prize: Who Gets It and Who Does Not?
The Office for the Arts (OFA) has announced its support of 19 student arts projects taking place during Arts First weekend (May 2-5). Sponsored by the OFA grants program and selected by the Council on the Arts, the projects range from music and the visual arts to theater and the cultural arts. The Council on the Arts, a committee of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, responded favorably to 78 percent of the grant requests. Council members include Robert J. Kiely (chair), Elizabeth Bergmann, S. Allen Counter, Deborah Foster, Jorie Graham, Christopher Killip, H. Peik Larsen, Cathleen McCormick, Jack Megan, Robert J. Orchard, Kay Kaufman Shelemay, Marcus Stern, and John Stewart.
After a rough road trip that saw the Harvard womens tennis team (6-7, 2-0 Ivy) drop five of six matches to schools in Florida, South Carolina, and California, the Crimson returned to the Murr Center Courts this past Friday and Saturday (April 5-6) for a two match home sweep. Harvard served up a pair of 5-2 wins against both Cornell and Columbia to open its Ivy League season in style.
Drop a pebble into a still pool and youll see a series of smooth, shallow ripples emanating from it in a tidy concentric progression. Drop a computer-simulated earthquake onto a map of, say, Los Angeles, and youll see the same thing, right? Not anymore, thanks to a team of Harvard and California Institute of Technology researchers led by John Shaw. Now youll see a frantic jumble of jagged peaks and valleys, a bizarre dream of color and motion with no apparent pattern or symmetry. Its like an animated, three-dimensional, rainbow-hued EKG.
The American photographer and ethnographer Josephine Powell spent years in North Africa and the Middle East, documenting local architecture, textiles, nomad life, and village cultures. Traveling on horseback to some of the most isolated parts of these regions, Powell became a legendary figure among the people she encountered and stories were often told about this fearless American woman. This month a gift from Powell, a unique collection of her photo negatives and contact sheets, became a part of the Harvard College Librarys collection and will be housed at the Fine Arts Library.
Close to 200 people, most of them women, gathered in a tastefully appointed meeting room at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies on April 8. They came to hear a talk called From Welfare to Wedlock: Should Social Policy Promote Marriage and Fatherhood? While outside the French doors daylight savings time graced a terrace with muted light, Gwendolyn Mink, professor of Womens Studies from Smith College, delivered troubling news for poor single mothers in 21st century America, and exhorted the crowd to help reverse what she views as an oppressive trend.
Karen Armstrong will deliver the 2002 Francis Greenwood Peabody lecture at the Memorial Church, on Saturday, April 13, at 10:30 a.m. The title of her talk is Faith After Sept. 11th. A prolific writer and well-known commentator on religious matters, Armstrong is the best-selling author of A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, A Short History of Islam, and The Buddha. Last spring, Armstrong delivered the Paul Tillich Lecture on the topic The Search for the Sacred at the Memorial Church.
At the 2002 Harvard Colloquium on International Affairs, panel discussions sponsored by more than a dozen Harvard Schools, centers, and programs will focus on what has changed in world affairs since Sept. 11 and what has not. Participants in this April 12-13 event include world leaders, scholars, journalists, CEOs, and high-level U.S. and foreign officials.
Anita Hamilton put her arm around the shoulders of the boy in the gray sweatshirt and cooed in his ear: Bop, bop, boodily bop, beedily bebop, beedily bop.
John Monro, a former dean of Harvard College whose long career as an administrator and teacher was dedicated to bringing higher education within the reach of poor and minority students, died March 29 at the age of 89.
Sheila Watt-Cloutier traveled by dog sled when she was a girl in Canadas frozen north. Today, 40 years later, the snowmobile has replaced the dog as the main mode of travel for Canadas Inuit.
The Center for Public Leadership at the Kennedy School of Government has announced the availability of one doctoral fellowship for the 2002-03 academic year. The fellowship, designed to provide the successful applicant with the opportunity to complete, or make significant progress toward the completion of his or her dissertation, is open to any student in good standing in a Harvard University doctoral or advanced degree program. Generally, the successful applicant will have advanced to doctoral candidacy. Applicants who have not yet advanced to candidacy, however, may be considered.
In Gut Reflections. Israel. Palestine. 2002, Israeli artist Adi Yekutieli uses diverse artistic media to convey an emotional response to the ongoing conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Subtle yet powerful, Yekutielis work avoids the use of violent images or specific coherent political statements, focusing instead on the human condition.
The Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies is funding three summer internship positions for Harvard undergraduate students interested in working in Berlin as research assistants in the social sciences. Good computer skills, a willingness to work independently, and an interest in foreign cultures and the social sciences are the basic requirements for application. The internship, which runs from June 1 to Aug. 31, includes a $3,500 stipend. Interns will spend June at the Carl Duisberg Society in Cologne, Germany, in an intensive German language course. For the remainder of the summer, interns will work as research assistants at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin (WZB or Science Center Berlin), one of the pre-eminent social science research institutes in Germany.
In the wide world of Harvard club sports, the Radcliffe Rugby Football Club is a rebel state. Established in 1982 for and by women, eons before the extreme in sports (or girl power, for that matter) the club has tapped the imagination of more than a few young women. Led by an all-female coaching staff since day one, this years squad boasts a roster 38 deep.
Political satirist and comedian Al Franken will share his wit and wisdom with this year’s outgoing seniors as the 2002 Class Day speaker, the Harvard College Class of 2002 Senior Class Committee announced Tuesday (April 16).
The fight against terrorism is the most important job undertaken by the military in the past 37 years, a period that includes Desert Storm, the Vietnam War, and the Cold Wars latter decades, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Richard Myers told a Kennedy School audience Thursday (April 4).
The University community has seen a number of events and, recently, even weeklong sessions devoted to the issues of emotional and mental health. But Mental Health Awareness and Advocacy Week is a little different its sponsored by a group made up entirely of students. The week of April 15-19 will feature a number of talks, roundtables, panels, and a film, all designed to educate the Harvard community about the misunderstandings surrounding mental health and illness. All of the events will take place in Emerson 305.
Harvard Medical School, Harvard Medical International (a division of the Medical School), and Key3Media Group Inc. announced that they will jointly present the first global biosecurity conference, Nov. 18-22, in Las Vegas.
Fredric Schiffer has invented glasses that let him look into some peoples minds. Through using them, he has shown that some patients with depression and post-traumatic stress syndrome see the world differently, depending on whether they look at it through the outer half of their left or right eye. The Harvard Medical School psychiatrist has helped many such patients with the aid of goggles that block either the right or left visual field.
Carolyn E. Andrews, honorary associate of Leverett House, and wife of Kenneth R. Andrews, Donald K. David Professor of Business Administration Emeritus, died in her sleep on March 20 during a visit to New York City. She was 85.
On Tuesday, April 2, at 8:05 p.m., the Harvard University Police Department (HUPD) responded to Peabody Terrace on the report of an indecent assault. The graduate student victim reports the assailant alleged he was a tenant of the building but had forgotten his keys. The assailant entered the lobby and the elevator with the victim, then grabbed the inside of the victims thigh. The assailant fled the building in an unknown direction. A thorough search of the area by HUPD and the Cambridge Police Department proved negative.
World leaders, scholars, journalists, and CEOs will join high-level U.S. and foreign officials for the 2002 Harvard Colloquium on International Affairs, April 12-13 at Harvard University. Panel discussions sponsored by over a dozen Harvard Schools, centers, and programs will focus on what has changed in world affairs since Sept. 11 – and what has not.
Jerzy Soltan, the Nelson Robinson Jr. Professor of Architecture and Urban Design Emeritus, has received the Topaz Medallion for Excellence in Architectural Education, awarded jointly by the American Institute of Architects (AIA) and the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA).
Rising carbon dioxide levels associated with global warming could lead to an increase in the incidence of allergies to ragweed and other plants by mid-century, according to a report by Harvard University researchers. The study, appearing in the March Annals of Allergy, Asthma, and Immunology, found that ragweed grown in an atmosphere with double the current carbon dioxide levels produced 61 percent more pollen than normal. Such a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide is expected to occur between 2050 and 2100.
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