Featured series 
Tag: Culture
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Nation & World
Islam in the contemporary world: Questions of interpretation
“Interpreting the Islamic Tradition in the Contemporary World” was the title of the gathering, the first annual Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Islamic Studies Program Conference.
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Campus & Community
Newsmakers
Swanee Hunt, founding director of the Women and Public Policy Program at the Kennedy School of Government (KSG), accepted the Leadership in Advocacy Award from the Asian Task Force Against Domestic Violence (ATASK) at the group’s 14th annual Silk Road Gala Nov. 3 at the Boston Marriott Copley Plaza Hotel. “The Conquest of Nature” by…
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Arts & Culture
Rehding finds ‘monumental’ works key to German political history
In December 1989, a few weeks after the reunification of Germany, Leonard Bernstein ’39 raised his baton above the ruins of the Berlin Wall and conducted a special arrangement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The central statement of the work — “all men will be brothers” — captured the sentiment of those who saw a brighter…
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Arts & Culture
Darnton looks at the ‘art and politics of libel’ in 18th century France
Government censors in pre-Revolutionary France were so hypervigilant that under their watchful eyes no one with anything significant to say dared publish their works in their own country. The solution was to publish abroad and smuggle the contraband books into France where they were soon snapped up by eager readers.
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Arts & Culture
It takes 200 (or more) to tango
Barefoot and dressed with thrift-shop elegance in a floor-length, taffeta gown with fingerless gloves and a discus-shaped hat, Marta Elena Savigliano read from her paper “Wallflowers and Femmes Fatales: Dancing Gender and Politics at the Milongas” with a tinkling Argentine accent and an air of fey imperturbability.
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Campus & Community
Cultural Survival to bring world’s wares, tastes to Cambridge
Nonprofit organization Cultural Survival will celebrate 28 years of bringing native art and crafts to the University community with an upcoming holiday bazaar Nov. 24 and 25 from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. at Cambridge College, 1000 Massachusetts Ave. The bazaar, which is being co-sponsored by Harvard, will feature unique products by indigenous artisans from…
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Arts & Culture
Title IX talk shows knotty issues are alive and well
More than 30 years after its enactment, Title IX is still a topic of hot debate.
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Arts & Culture
Harvard Foundation honors Andy Garcia
Acclaimed actor, producer, and director Andy Garcia was honored by the Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations on a recent (Oct. 16) visit to the University. The special invited guest was recognized for his work with at-risk youth and people with cancer. Garcia is the director of the feature film “The Lost City,” in…
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Nation & World
Phyllis Schlafly speaks out on judicial activism
The woman credited with defeating the Equal Rights Amendment was on the Radcliffe campus last week to discuss the current target in her crosshairs: judicial activism.
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Arts & Culture
‘Hillary factor’ among topics at leadership and women lunch
Is America on the verge of an explosion of “girl power” — a new level of female leadership in public life?
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Arts & Culture
Maya, Aztec monument casts get the shake-out, dust-off
Plaster reproductions of Maya and Aztec carvings, which preserve precious details now lost on the originals, are leaving dusty, haphazard storage for cleaning, cataloging, and crating that will prepare them for a new era of usefulness and relevance.
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Nation & World
Farmer, Magaziner: Get involved!
Physician and medical anthropologist Paul Farmer and Ira Magaziner, a one-time policy adviser in the Clinton White House, brought humor, counsel, and cautions to a public conversation on student engagement Sept. 20.
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Arts & Culture
Pair of music professors to collaborate on improvisation project
Headed by University of Guelph English professor Ajay Heble, the international “Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice” project recently secured a $2.5 million grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Harvard affiliates Ingrid Monson, Quincy Jones Professor of African-American Music, and Jason Stanyek, visiting associate professor of music, are among the project’s…
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Arts & Culture
New journal casts a critical look at the ‘Swinging Sixties’
From the New Left to the sexual revolution, scholarship on 1960s America has focused primarily on social protest and the counterculture. Now, John McMillian, a lecturer on history and literature, plans to expand how we think about one of the nation’s most complex and colorful eras.
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Arts & Culture
Study abroad program sings
This summer, five Harvard College students exchanged dorm life for West African village life to investigate the role of music and dance in Malian culture. As participants in Harvard’s summer study-abroad program “Music and Dance in Mali — Ethnography in Practice,” the students had the opportunity to live among and learn from some of the…
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Campus & Community
Former staff, prestigious artist Crite dies at 97
Allan Rohan Crite, a renowned painter and Harvard Extension School alumnus, passed away on Sept. 6. He was 97.
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Campus & Community
Bercovitch wins Bode-Pearson Prize
Sacvan Bercovitch, the Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature Emeritus, has won the Bode-Pearson Prize for outstanding contributions to American studies.
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Arts & Culture
El Saadawi explores notion of creativity
Activist, author, psychiatrist, and playwright Nawal El Saadawi delivered the Harvard Committee on African Studies’ annual Distinguished African Studies Lecture on Oct. 9 in the Tsai Auditorium at the Center for Government and International Studies.
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Arts & Culture
Food, sex conference draws SRO crowds
Money. Race. Health. War. That list of potent topics summarizes the first four years of conferences on gender sponsored by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. This year’s gender conference (April 12 and 13) added a fifth topic: food, which by some accounts has elements of all the others combined.
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Arts & Culture
Artists and ‘double consciousness’
The Vietnam War was traumatic for many Americans, but far more so for the Vietnamese, 3 million of whom were driven out of their country and scattered across the globe by the war’s end. The diaspora included many children who grew to maturity with a sense of belonging to two cultures, the one left behind…
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Campus & Community
Upon meeting a scholar of literature, one is likely to ask, “What period do you study?” with the likely answer being a fairly narrow slice of the literary pie — the 19th century novel, say, or nondramatic poetry of the Renaissance. With Panagiotis Roilos, however, the answer is not so straightforward.
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Campus & Community
Through a child’s eye
At first glimpse, the photos don’t seem particularly revealing: a fish on a plate, a television, clean dishes on a rack, a toddler with outstretched arms, a lighted porch. But to Wendy Luttrell, these pictures — and 1,600 others like them in her data base at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) — open…
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Arts & Culture
Harvard researchers head south to preserve ancient inscriptions
Researchers from the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology are preparing to head into the Central American rain forest to begin an ambitious, multiyear project to scan and digitize fading Maya inscriptions and carvings.
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Arts & Culture
The ‘Last Ruskinians’: Detail, detail, detail
Many of the paintings and drawings in the Fogg Museum’s new exhibition “The Last Ruskinians: Charles Eliot Norton, Charles Herbert Moore, and Their Circle” are astounding for their jewel-like detail and trompe l’oeil realism, but to regard them as a higher sort of eye candy would be to miss the point.
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Campus & Community
Harvard Foundation to welcome Esmeralda Santiago
The Harvard Foundation will host a lecture by Esmeralda Santiago ’76, author of the memoirs “When I Was Puerto Rican” and “Almost a Woman,” and the novel “América’s Dream.” The lecture will take place April 10 from 4 to 5 p.m. in Harvard Hall (Room 104).
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Nation & World
Africans is U.S. practice range of religions
In Nigeria, where Jacob Olupona was born, there are more Anglicans than there are in England. There is also a growing Pentecostal movement as well as a large Roman Catholic presence. In 2005 when the College of Cardinals met in Rome to choose a new pope, one of the leading contenders was a Nigerian, Cardinal…
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Arts & Culture
A denarius in hand is worth two in a book
On exhibit at the Harvard University Art Museums are wide and deep collections that range from ancient Greece statuary to Ottoman textiles to Max Beckmann masterpieces to contemporary American graphic arts. As stunning and numerous as are the objects on display, significant portions of the museums’ collections are not always up on the walls but…