Tag: Humanities Center

  • Nation & World

    Mahindra gives $10M for Humanities Center

    Anand Mahindra ’77, M.B.A.’81, has given Harvard $10 million to support the Humanities Center in honor of his mother, Indira Mahindra. The newly renamed Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard is housed in the Barker Center.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    The nature of reality

    Allan Sekula, artist and essayist, discusses the nature of reality and how it’s shown in his work.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Performance as art

    Performance artist Andrea Fraser discussed some of the inspiration behind her work and her current installation on view at Harvard’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, during a discussion at Harvard’s Barker Center.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Still ‘two cultures’ but who’s on top?

    Fifty years ago a simple lecture sparked a global debate with lasting implications. On May 7, 1959, British physicist and novelist C.P. Snow declared that the gap between “two cultures,” that of the sciences and the humanities, was a destructive divide hampering the effort to find solutions to the problems of the world.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Puzzling through Yeats with Helen Vendler

    Helen Vendler knows a thing or two about William Butler Yeats. She has authored three books on the Irish poet’s work, including her most recent volume, “Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form,” published in 2007.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Bhabha, matchmaker of disciplines

    Homi K. Bhabha is a marriage counselor of sorts — a literary scholar with a wide range of intellectual appetites whose role is to bring together a diversity of scholars.

    3 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Bhabha named senior adviser

    Homi K. Bhabha has just been named senior adviser on the humanities to the president and provost. The position, a first for the University, takes effect July 1.

    8 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Ghostly Shakespearean fragment comes to life on stage

    Monday evening (May 5) at Zero Arrow Theatre, an audience of 120 listened in on a discussion of “Cardenio,” a play premiering Saturday (May 10) at the American Repertory Theatre (A.R.T.).

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    ‘Instability and Decomposition’

    Instability is the reign of things erratic and unpredictable. Decomposition is the state of being as it unravels, nicely captured by a common sentiment: Things fall apart. The two words — and the frictive, unstable worlds they imply — were at the heart of a convocation of young scholars last week (April 25-26).

    6 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Wisse explores mutations of Jewish power

    If the Jewish rebellion led to a diaspora that lasted millennia, it also prompted a sea change in the nature of Judaism, said Ruth R. Wisse, Harvard College Professor and Martin Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature. An energetic commentator on Jewish culture, Wisse delivered a Humanities Center lecture this week (March 17) summarizing her new…

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    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.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Humanities Center to welcome postdoctoral fellows

    The Humanities Center at Harvard recently announced the inauguration of a postdoctoral fellowship program. The first class of fellows, who will be in residence for the 2008-09 year, includes two American and two German scholars.

    3 minutes
  • Nation & World

    ‘Who is the human in human rights?’

    What does it mean to be human? Are all people the same, and if so, entitled to an identical set of rights and treatment? Or, in the age of globalization, do wide-ranging cultural, moral, religious, and political beliefs and behaviors make the definition of humans — and therefore human rights — contingent, that is dependent…

    6 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Richardson explores what motivates ‘targeting of noncombatants’

    What do terrorists want? The question has reverberated in the consciousness of the West ever since the dreadful and unexpected events of 9/11. Were these appalling acts of violence perpetrated because “They hate our freedoms,” as President Bush asserted? Are terrorists simply insane, barbaric, nihilistic, as others have theorized?

    5 minutes