Juliette Kayyem, undersecretary of homeland security for the commonwealth of Massachusetts, has been named assistant secretary of intergovernmental programs of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Kayyem, who is a former executive director at Harvard Kennedy School’s (HKS) Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, is also a current member (on leave) of the Belfer Center’s board of directors, and previously served as executive director for research at the center and taught courses in public policy at HKS.
Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, has announced a collaboration with the Educational Testing Service (ETS) on a study of the experience of undergraduate members of racial and ethnic minorities on predominantly white college campuses.
In May 1997, Britain’s Labor Party won an election that ended nearly two decades of Conservative Party rule. The new liberal government, promising radical reform, took over a booming economy. But it also inherited an increase in poverty that had been rising steeply since the 1970s.
Jim Yong Kim, tireless advocate for bringing Western standards of health care to the world’s poor and a professor of medicine and of public health at Harvard, has been named the 17th president of Dartmouth College.
President Barack Obama announced March 2 that he has nominated Ashton B. Carter to serve as undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics. Carter’s nomination was announced in a press release along with several other key nominees.
The president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas delivered a somber economic message Monday night (Feb. 23) during the annual Albert H. Gordon Lecture at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum. But while Richard Fisher admitted that policymakers should have heeded the signs of financial stress long ago, he expressed hope that central bankers can play a key role in bringing the global economy back to health.
A group from the worlds of politics, business, and the academy gathered at the Harvard Faculty Club for a look at “Germany in the Modern World: Division and Unity,” a student-organized conference.
A capacity crowd at the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) this week (Feb. 11) got to see a scaled-down, toned-down version of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Instead of stones and rockets, words flew. Instead of despair, there was at least a glimmer of hope.
With his historic inauguration history itself, President Barack Obama has lost no time putting his stamp on the presidency, pushing an economic stimulus package, making overtures to the Islamic world, and ordering the closing of the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
A panel discussion at the Harvard Kennedy School’s (HKS) John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum Wednesday (Jan. 14) addressed the question “Will President-elect Obama’s Security Policy Be Inclusive?” — that is, how can women’s global leadership help to shape the new administration’s security goals?
When Barack Obama is sworn in on Tuesday (Jan. 20), Harvard will celebrate its eighth alumnus to serve as president of the United States with campus-wide coverage of the inauguration.
In 1215, Pope Innocent III convened the Fourth Council of the Lateran, a religious convocation that laid out to hundreds of bishops, abbots, priors, and Christian patriarchs 70 new decrees. One enjoined the clergy to stop frequenting taverns, engaging in trials by combat, hunting, and practicing what might be called noncelibate habits.
The government of India has given Harvard University $4.5 million to support fellowships for graduate students from India. The gift recognizes the accomplishments of Harvard Professor of Economics and Philosophy and Thomas W. Lamont University Professor Amartya Sen and his work for social and economic justice across the globe. It also recognizes the work of Harvard’s South Asia Initiative toward establishing Harvard as a locus for the study of South Asia.
Sixty years ago this month, the United Nations released to a war-shocked world the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), a catalog of norms understood to apply to all human beings.
No one will ever confuse the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum at the Harvard Kennedy School with Gillette Stadium. But the forum was host Thursday evening (Dec. 11) to two of the undisputed rock stars of American political campaigns: David Axelrod and David Plouffe, chief strategist and manager, respectively, for Barack Obama’s successful campaign for the presidency.
In October 2007, the Kansas Department of Health and Environment made the unprecedented decision to deny a permit application for three new coal-fired generating units that together would emit 11 million tons of carbon dioxide into the air each year, citing greenhouse gas emissions and climate change as the reason for the denial.
On Dec. 9, 1948, the United Nations adopted a convention that for the first time in history provided a legal definition for genocide. Organized mass murder with the intention of destroying an ethnic or national group, a legacy of World War II, was still a fresh world memory — just as it is fresh today, in the shadow of Rwanda and, some say, Darfur.
At a panel discussion Monday at the Harvard Kennedy School, Maleeha Lodhi evoked Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat to describe the situation on the ground in Afghanistan.
For months now, the pirates operating off the coast of Somalia have been making trouble for the world’s maritime shipping network. Now it appears their grappling hooks may have gotten entangled in another, very different web: the complicated question of revision of the Japanese constitution, specifically of Article 9, which contains the “renunciation of war” clause.
Through their generous support, the Carr Center’s Initiative to Stop Human Trafficking at the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) will fund student research projects on human trafficking issues through the Sunny Dupree Policy Analysis Exercise (PAE) award.
In 2002, a young Nigerian woman by the name of Amina Lawal — pregnant and unmarried — was tried for adultery under Shariah, Islam’s traditional law. She was sentenced to be stoned to death, a fate that briefly riveted the attention of media worldwide.
The undergraduates who gather around the seminar table at 61 Kirkland St. have a lot on their minds. Not just final papers, athletic matches, and music performances, but a range of issues that run far beyond the daily stresses of college: Refugee resettlement. Human trafficking. Child soldiers. These human rights issues — along with many others — are the challenges that have inspired this group of passionate students to add another course to their jam-packed schedules.
Basma was 8 when Janjaweed fighters on horseback swept into her village in the Darfur region of Sudan. Above them, helicopter gunships joined in the attack.
The chief federal housing official in New England told a Harvard University audience that his department is poised to help foreclosure-imperiled homeowners navigate the nation’s economic crisis, but he called on President-elect Barack Obama to empower that effort by expanding the nation’s commitment to fair and affordable housing.
Prior to delivering the first of this year’s Tanner Lectures, political activist Sari Nusseibeh gave the audience a laugh — and a cheat sheet. “My normal attitude in lectures is to doze off when someone is reading them,” he quipped, “so if you do doze off I just want to tell you that my message in these two lectures is very simple, very straightforward: it’s that we — people, human beings — are in charge of our lives.”
Barack Obama will enter the White House in January with the strongest mandate of any Democratic president at least since Lyndon Johnson in 1965, and arguably since Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1933. Signs of a generational alignment, like the ones that made “Roosevelt Democrat” or “Reagan Republicans” household words are apparent.
On May 4, 1493 — less than a year after Columbus set foot in the New World — Pope Alexander VI issued “Inter Caetera,” a papal bull that still resonates more than five centuries later.
In human rights terms, Richard J. Goldstone, the 70-year-old veteran of South Africa’s highest courts and a visiting professor at Harvard Law School, has walked the walk and talked the talk — chiefly by having a role in a number of this generation’s most important humanitarian events.
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