Tag: Creativity

  • Nation & World

    Prescribing art in medicine

    A Wintersession course studied compassion and suffering through the lenses of dance, music, and science.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    In L.A., the watchword is Harvard

    More than 350 Harvard alumni and friends gathered in Los Angeles earlier this month to network with peers and take part in discussions on why creativity is so essential to living our best lives.

    8 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Slowing the work treadmill

    Harvard Business School Professor Teresa Amabile compares much of work life to running on a treadmill. People try to keep up with the demands of meetings, email, interruptions, deadlines, all while trying to be more productive and creative, she says, yet on many days they seem to make no progress at all, especially in creative…

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Avoiding the digital ‘flock’

    In his new book, “Rewire,” former Berkman Fellow Ethan Zuckerman challenges the digital world to connect with others, using tools to overcome people’s “flocking” instincts.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Harnessing your creative brain

    Shelley Carson, a researcher in the Psychology Department and lecturer at the Extension School, has penned a how-to book on harnessing your untapped abilities.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Innovate, create

    From oddities like breathable chocolate to history-making devices with profound societal effects, like the heart pacemaker, Harvard’s combination of questing minds, restless spirits, and intellectual seekers fosters creativity and innovation that’s finding an outlet in new inventions and companies.

    12 minutes
  • Nation & World

    A master at his craft

    Author and Harvard graduate Tracy Kidder is the first writer in residence at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. For the fall semester, he is sharing his insights about the art of writing with the Harvard community.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Extension School instructor debuts online lit mag

    Talking Writing, a monthly online literary magazine, has released its first issue with Harvard Extension School instructor Martha Nichols as editor in chief.

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    Painting pictures in our minds

    Nobel laureate in literature Orhan Pamuk nears the end of his six-lecture Norton series on the novel’s durable attractions.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Child psychiatrist pens her past

    Psychiatrist Nancy Rappaport uncovers a relationship with the mother she scarcely knew in her powerful familial memoir. Infused with accounts of treating her own teenage patients, Rappaport plumbs the bond between parents and children while closing in on healing.

    2 minutes
  • Nation & World

    The Arsenale

    “Provocative” — one of the most-used words to describe art — may be an understatement for “The Arsenale,” the thesis exhibition for students in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies, held at the Carpenter Center.

    2 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Pros teaching prose

    Clicking keyboards provide a soundtrack to the semester’s end, as students put finishing touches on term papers, theses, dissertations, and the like. But amid the flurry of traditional writing assignments, there are other projects afoot. Short stories, for example. Screenplays. Fiction manuscripts. Personal essays.

    6 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Creativity through cerebration

    Contemporary composer Kay Rhie hasn’t had many watershed musical moments. The romantic ideal of a composer “deeply entrenched in creative epiphanies,” she admitted on a recent damp spring afternoon, is “not my story.”

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Picture this, and you will begin to understand

    It has been almost 20 years since photographer Felice Frankel started working with scientists by helping them illustrate the intricate geometries of physical worlds too tiny to see. From the beginning, she was struck by one thing: To explain their ideas, scientists always start by drawing them. That gave Frankel an idea — “Picturing to…

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    The third chapter can be the best in the book

    There may be something to the adage about growing older and wiser. A lot, in fact, according to the new book by Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, “The Third Chapter: Passion, Risk, and Adventure in the 25 Years After 50,” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009). The work explores the trend of learning and development for adults who are…

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Group looks for creative ways to understand creativity

    What is creativity? Does it depend on more than that red wheelbarrow that William Carlos Williams saw? Is creativity a creature of neuron bundles, brain size, daydreaming? Is it the capacity for metaphor or divergent thinking?

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Office for the Arts announces its spring 2009 grants

    More than 800 students will participate in 40 projects in dance, music, theater, and multidisciplinary genres at Harvard University this spring, sponsored in part by the Office for the Arts (OfA) grant program. Grants are designed to foster creative and innovative artistic initiatives among Harvard undergraduates.

    8 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Briggs-Copeland reading features poets Klink and Richards

    Tonight (Feb. 19) at 7, Houghton Library hosts Harvard’s first Briggs-Copeland Poetry Reading. The event, held in the Edison and Newman Room, will feature readings by Joanna Klink and Peter Richards, two of Harvard’s six Briggs-Copeland Lecturers. Bret Anthony Johnston, director of the creative writing program in the Department of English, will provide an introduction.

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    Prolific poet John Ashbery ’49 will receive 2009 Harvard Arts Medal

    Pulitzer Prize-winning poet John Ashbery ’49 will receive the 2009 Harvard Arts Medal in a ceremony kicking off the Arts First festivities on April 30.

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    Student work lights up Mass Hall corridor

    These days Mass Hall’s ground-floor main corridor looks more like a contemporary art gallery than simply a prestigious passageway — and that’s exactly how University President Drew Faust likes it.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    ‘Passion for the Arts’ translates into action

    Harvard University is taking the first steps recommended in December by its Arts Task Force, including finding more gallery space in existing buildings and creating a Web portal that will ease access to seeing, hearing, and learning the arts in practice.

    8 minutes
  • Nation & World

    ‘The health of poetry’

    As a graduate student at Oxford, Gwyneth Lewis wrote her dissertation on 18th century literary forgery. But as a working poet for three decades — and this year as a Radcliffe Fellow — she is as far from that fraud as conceivable.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Houghton joins with libraries nationwide to celebrate artists’ retreat

    HCL Communications It’s been said great art often grows out of tragedy — in the case of Yaddo, an artists’ retreat in upstate New York founded in 1900, tragedy spurred the creation of hundreds of great works of art.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Maestro Previn guides students with expertise, wit

    Music great Sir André Previn’s motto, listed on his official Web site, reads, “A day without music is a wasted day.” Several Harvard students and two classical master composers put their day with the maestro to good use on Monday (Oct. 6).

    7 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Du Bois fellow makes ‘Little Fugitive,’ take two

    The wonder of Brooklyn’s iconic amusement park Coney Island as seen through the eyes of a young runaway is at the heart of the 1953 classic film “Little Fugitive” by the directing team of Ray Ashley, Morris Engel, and Ruth Orkin. What lies at the heart of Joanna Lipper’s ’94 recent remake is much darker.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Scholar, curator, connoisseur Welch dies at 80

    Stuart Cary Welch Jr., curator emeritus of Islamic and later Indian art at the Harvard Art Museum and former special consultant in charge, Department of Islamic Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, died Aug. 13 while traveling in Hokkaido, Japan. He was 80 and a resident of New Hampshire.

    6 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Harvard News Office writer Ken Gewertz dies at 63

    Longtime writer for the Harvard News Office Ken Gewertz died on Sept. 7 at his home in Watertown, Mass. He was 63.

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    Gates documentary series receives $12M in funding

    The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) recently announced funding in the amount of $12 million for three, new public television documentary series in which Henry Louis “Skip” Gates Jr. will explore the meaning of race, culture, and identity in America. Gates is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard…

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Lucky shot? Photography and chance

    Chance smiled on Joe Rosenthal in late February 1945. The young Associated Press photographer was atop Mount Suribachi to cover the Allied troops’ capture of Iwo Jima when he heard that soldiers were preparing to raise an American flag. It was the second attempt of the day, for authorities had decided the first flag —…

    6 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Cultural creativity in the Ethiopian diaspora

    A Radcliffe Fellow this year, Kaufman Shelemay was co-organizer of “Cultural Creativity in the Ethiopian American Diaspora,” a conference held at Harvard this week (April 13-14).

    7 minutes