Tag: Creativity and Meaning

  • Nation & World

    At Du Bois awards, the stars aligned

    The six medalists at the W.E.B. Du Bois awards included a White House adviser Valerie Jarrett, playwright Tony Kushner, U.S. Rep. John Lewis, Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court Sonia Sotomayor, the commissioner of the NBA David Stern, and Hollywood director Steven Spielberg.

    7 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Biography of a bronze

    September marked the 375th anniversary of benefactor John Harvard’s death, and the beginning of a course that uses his statue in Harvard Yard to instruct students about the realities of two vanished eras.

    8 minutes
  • Nation & World

    A professorship and a MacArthur

    Jazz musician and composer Vijay Iyer, who won a MacArthur Foundation grant, in January will become the first Franklin D. and Florence Rosenblatt Professor of the Arts in Harvard’s Department of Music.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    The watchword is innovation

    Innovation, whether it’s large, small, solo, or institutional, is an increasingly important part of Harvard, a university working to maintain its clearly defined sense of self and at the same time evolve to meet future needs.

    9 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Cooperating in educating

    The Harvard Campaign will help support growing advancements in interdisciplinary collaboration and integrated knowledge across the University.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Social justice at the A.R.T.

    From a world premiere musical about U.S. aid work in Africa to a girl struggling to cope with her dysfunctional family, the American Repertory Theater’s lineup for this season revolves around the theme of justice.

    6 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Six luminaries to receive Du Bois Medal

    Harvard University announced Sept. 18 that it will award the W.E.B. Du Bois Medal to six leaders across government, the arts, and athletics during a ceremony on Oct. 2. The ceremony will also mark the launch of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research.

    6 minutes
  • Nation & World

    The modern opens the past

    In the inaugural lecture of a series organized by Harvard’s Digital Futures consortium, data-publishing entrepreneur Eric Kansa lays out a case for archaeology to “get on the map” of disciplines sharing data widely on the Web.

    7 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Harvard’s Indian College poet

    With the discovery of a poem missing for 300 years, two Harvard graduate students have filled in some missing blanks on Benjamin Larnell, the last student of the colonial era associated with Harvard’s Indian College.

    9 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Peering into the Fogg

    Harvard Art Museums officials offered an early look at the progress of the renovation and expansion project that will unite the Fogg, Busch-Reisinger, and Sackler museums under one roof.

    7 minutes
  • Nation & World

    So near, so far, at Harvard

    Freshmen this year come from very close to Harvard Yard and from very far away.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Heaney’s death caught ‘the heart off guard’

    Irish poet Seamus Heaney, the 1995 Nobel laureate in literature with longtime ties to Harvard, died Aug. 30 in Ireland at age 74.

    10 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Food, gender, culture

    Harvard Summer School is big, young, diverse, and challenging — qualities summed up nicely by a course on food, gender, and American culture.

    10 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Oscar winner Matt Damon on his Harvard years

    Actor Matt Damon, former Harvard College student and winner of the 2013 Harvard Arts Medal, talks of his time on campus, his lifelong desire to be an actor, and how a College playwriting course assignment later turned into the Academy Award-winning screenplay for “Good Will Hunting.”

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    Crime-fighting platform wins President’s Challenge

    Today President Drew Faust named Team Nucleik the grand prize winner of the Harvard University President’s Challenge for social entrepreneurship, hosted by the Harvard Innovation Lab (i-lab).

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Making poetry sing

    Radcliffe fellow and classically trained pianist Tsitsi Jaji uses her musical expertise and knowledge of comparative literature to explore how composers of African descent set poetry to music for solo voice and piano.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Jazz as conversation

    Artist and composer Wynton Marsalis returned to Sanders Theatre for his fourth lecture-performance at Harvard, an exploration of the strange alchemy of instinct, expertise, and empathy that jazz musicians need to “play and stay together.”

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Science under the stage lights

    Harvard Medical School’s Jonathan Beckwith has used his course “Social Issues in Biology” to teach students about the societal implications of science, and now he is collaborating with a Harvard alum Calla Videt to bring his message to the stage.

    7 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Humanities in the digital age

    A panel of experts discussed the study of humanities in the digital age, and how humanists’ skill set is well-suited for careers in this advancing world of technology. The discussion was part of a series supported by the FAS Office of Career Services.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Art and cost

    Why should cities support the arts, and how can they do so sustainably? Experts debated those questions at the public launch of a multiyear initiative of the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations that will analyze the role of the arts in strengthening U.S. cities.

    6 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Of art and the Civil War

    Harvard joins with three other universities and five theaters in the National Civil War Project, a multiyear collaboration that will use the arts to re-imagine America’s transformative conflict of 150 years ago.

    3 minutes
  • Nation & World

    26 immortal portals

    A January Arts Intensive in journalism explored the facts, fun, and stories behind Harvard Yard’s 26 gates, including architectural features that are little noticed by those who pass through them.

    8 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Pearls of Persian art

    A generous donation by the late Norma Jean Calderwood — philanthropist, autodidact, and keen-eyed collector — brought a millennium’s worth of Islamic art to Harvard, some of which is now on display for the first time at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Widening the Wheelwright

    Every year since 1935, the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) has awarded one of its graduates the Arthur W. Wheelwright Traveling Fellowship, praised by generations of recipients for enriching careers in most cases already under way.

    6 minutes
  • Nation & World

    He wrote the book of love

    A neurologist who teaches at Harvard Medical School ponders love and its complexities in his latest book, “What to Read on Love, Not Sex: Freud, Fiction, and the Articulation of Truth in Modern Psychological Science.”

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Carolling at Memorial Church

    Each year in December, Harvard’s Memorial Church presents members of the University community and beyond with the gift of song.

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    A musical gift

    Each year, the Memorial Church offers the gift of song to the Harvard and Cambridge communities, with two moving services of carols. The Dec. 17 service is scheduled for 8 p.m.

    3 minutes
  • Nation & World

    For whom Josh Bell tolls

    Poet Josh Bell, the new Briggs-Copeland lecturer, calls on the spirit of rocker Vince Neil in his latest poems.

    7 minutes
  • Nation & World

    The sounds of nature, as music

    The Woodberry Poetry Room hosts an evening of forest recordings and verse about nature, twinning sounds with wordplay.

    3 minutes