Featured series 
Tag: Arts
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Campus & Community
Everett honored with 2008 Vosgerchian Teaching Award
Thomas G. Everett, director of bands at Harvard University and jazz adviser to the Office for the Arts at Harvard (OfA), has been named the recipient of the 2008 Luise Vosgerchian Teaching Award. The award, which offers an honorarium of $10,000 to a nationally recognized educator, is administered by the OfA.
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Arts & Culture
HCL maps set in stone
Three years ago, Big Dig officials approached David Cobb and his staff in the Harvard Map Collection with a request: Help them design a map for the North End parks that would illustrate how Boston had changed in the centuries since its founding. When the parks officially opened in November 2007, not one but seven…
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Arts & Culture
HUL launches extensive ‘Contagion’ collection
The Harvard University Library (HUL) Open Collections Program recently launched http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/contagion. Created with support from Arcadia, the new collection, titled “Contagion: Historical Views of Diseases and Epidemics,” brings carefully selected historical materials from Harvard’s renowned libraries, special collections, and archives to Internet users everywhere.
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Arts & Culture
A new kind of aria from Dershowitz
“Yo-Yo Ma was over the house yesterday … he was begging me to go to the piano and play a few notes and I said I wasn’t ready yet.” While the renowned composer John Williams could have uttered those words, last week they belonged to Harvard’s Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law Alan M. Dershowitz, who…
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Arts & Culture
Loeb Music co-authors issue major report on audio preservation
A new best-practices report co-authored by Loeb Music Library staff is drawing national and international attention for its comprehensive and candid approach to the field of audio preservation at both the curatorial and technological levels. “Sound Directions: Best Practices for Audio Preservation” provides solid grounding for institutions pursuing audio preservation, either in-house or in collaboration…
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Arts & Culture
Vivian Gornick takes on novelists Bellow, Roth
This year, Vivian Gornick, — a writer who lives in New York City — is a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She updated her observations on the brilliance (literary) and the failings (cultural) of male Jewish American writers of three decades ago on Feb. 4 in the Julia S. Phelps Annual Lecture…
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Campus & Community
Composer Lachenmann named Fromm Foundation Visiting Professor
The Harvard University Department of Music has announced the appointment of Helmut Lachenmann as the Fromm Foundation Visiting Professor for spring 2008. Lachenmann is the esteemed German composer of mostly orchestral, chamber, and piano works that have been performed throughout the world.
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Campus & Community
Theron takes roast in stride
A feisty Charlize Theron proved a match for her kidders at this year’s Woman of the Year award ceremony as the tall, slender, striking blonde gave as good as she got during the annual roast by Harvard’s Hasty Pudding Theatricals.
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Arts & Culture
Pauletta Washington honored
There was no debating the glamour of the Harvard Foundation’s black-tie, red-carpet premiere of “The Great Debaters,” starring and directed by Denzel Washington, at the Harvard Film Archive at the Carpenter Center. Close to 200 students, faculty, and staff attended the Dec. 18 premiere, which was followed by a lively question-and-answer session with Washington and…
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Arts & Culture
Exhibition shows a lot of soul
Ever wonder what a soul looks like? You have 30 chances to see a picture of one at the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Gutman Library through Feb. 15. Hundreds more chances if you look at the related book, “Soul” (Reg Vardy Gallery/Satellite Arts, 2007), or if you go to the Web site http://www.drawyoursoul.org.
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Arts & Culture
Gamelanathon!
Stepping carefully in their stocking feet, the musicians thread their way among the array of low-lying gongs, drums, and metallophones and lower themselves cross-legged onto the floor. Lifting their padded mallets, they begin to play. The ringing sound of the metal bars, punctuated by the dry slap of the drum and the gong’s shimmering resonance,…
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Campus & Community
‘I’m ready for my close-up, Professor Kuriyama …’
How do you attract students to a course? With more than 5,400 classes on offer each year, it can be a difficult proposition. Shigehisa Kuriyama, Reischauer Institute Professor of Cultural History in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, borrows a Hollywood technique: offer a movie trailer.
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Campus & Community
Appointments
HUAM appoints Williams first director of education, Lawry appointed senior research fellow at Hauser Center
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Campus & Community
Painting of Kiyo Morimoto is unveiled
The Harvard Foundation unveiled the portrait of Kiyo Morimoto, former director of the Bureau of Study Counsel in the Dunster House Dining Room last week (Feb 1). Morimoto served the bureau from 1958 to 1985 and is remembered as as a widely respected counselor by generations of students. A thoughtful listener, he offered soft-spoken, helpful…
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Campus & Community
Hasty Pudding picks Man and Woman of the Year
This year’s choices for the Hasty Pudding Man and Woman of the Year awards join the stellar company of a constellation of talent that includes Ella Fitzgerald, Katharine Hepburn, Jack Lemmon, and Mikhail Baryshnikov. The 2008 recipients of the coveted honor are Christopher Walken and Charlize Theron.
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Campus & Community
J.K. Rowling to speak at Commencement
J.K. Rowling, author of the world-renowned “Harry Potter” novels, will be the principal speaker during the Afternoon Exercises of Harvard University’s 357th Commencement on June 5, 2008.
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Arts & Culture
Chute on graphic narratives — they’re not just comic books anymore
The title of Hillary Chute’s Nov. 29 lecture, “Out of the Gutter: Contemporary Graphic Novels by Women,” has a double meaning. It refers to the elevation of graphic narratives — comics — from the lowest, most disreputable level of artistic expression to a form worthy of New York Times best-sellerdom, literary prizes, and academic attention.
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Campus & Community
In Brief
PBH launches gift drive for area children The Phillips Brooks House (PBH) launched its annual holiday gift drive on Dec. 3 in an effort to collect hundreds of gifts for children in Boston and Cambridge. Running through Dec. 14, the drive will provide books, games, toys, art supplies, and sports equipment to children whose parents…
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Arts & Culture
‘The diverse ways history can be written’
Relocating to a foreign city for a new job can be stressful in the most congenial circumstances. Trying to depart your home country in the middle of a Communist coup? As Serhii Plokhii, Hrushevs’kyi Professor of Ukrainian History in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, can tell you — that’s downright complicated.
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Arts & Culture
Scholar uses Singer sewing machine to parse cultural, economic development
Harvard historian Andrew D. Gordon ’74, Ph.D. ’81 specializes in modern Japan and has written or edited a handful of breakthrough books on big labor, big steel, and big management.
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Nation & World
Armstrong: God is hard to get to know
Man’s practical understanding of God, said one religious scholar speaking at Harvard, is “like a goldfish trying to understand a computer. … It will always be beyond us.”
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Campus & Community
White House awards Pipes and Wisse Humanities Medals
President George W. Bush awarded the prestigious National Humanities Medals for 2007 to Harvard faculty members Richard Pipes and Ruth R. Wisse during a Nov. 15 ceremony at the White House. In total, nine distinguished Americans and one cultural foundation were honored for their exemplary contributions to the humanities and were recognized for their scholarship,…
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Arts & Culture
A.R.T. announces ‘Family Friday’ for ‘No Child …’ premiere
The American Repertory Theatre (A.R.T.) is offering a special discounted ticket price for its Nov. 23 premiere of “No Child … ” — the Obie Award-winning one-woman show by Nilaja Sun. Tickets for the “Family Friday” performance are $25 for each member of a family with a young adult under 21 years of age. (“No…
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Arts & Culture
Houghton exhibit features ‘luminous’ historian
While Edward Gibbon was publishing his six-volume opus, “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” a large portion of Britain’s empire was declaring its independence and fighting to break free of the mother country.
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Nation & World
Sanders Theatre features talk on building schools for peaceful world
In the remote and mountainous Baltistan region of Pakistan, the beverage of choice is paiyu cha, a mixture of green tea, salt, baking soda, goat’s milk, and a rancid yak butter called mar.
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Arts & Culture
Scholar looks at abiding interest in the ‘Great American Novel’
Literary critics tend to discredit the concept of a “Great American Novel” as nothing more than media hype — an arbitrary appellation that has more to do with pipe dreams than merit. And yet, what would-be author hasn’t imagined, when putting pen to paper, what it would feel like to be hailed as the greatest…
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Arts & Culture
Digging history in Harvard Yard
It was crowded in the hole in Harvard Yard, with sophomore Reyzl Geselowitz and freshman Alison Liewen crouching in the square pit, elbow to elbow and more than a yard deep in Harvard’s dark earth.