Tag: Humanities

  • Nation & World

    Bill Gates on the humanities

    Bill Gates speaks about the how the humanities impact global issues.

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    Of men, women, and space

    A Radcliffe conference tackles the tangle of how men and women handle matters of personal and public space.

    7 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Seventeen faculty honored

    Seventeen Harvard University faculty members are among the 229 leaders in the sciences, the humanities and the arts, business, public affairs, and the nonprofit sector who have been elected members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

    6 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Battling climate change on all fronts

    Harvard’s research spans the gamut from the sciences to the humanities, examining key questions about this critical challenge facing humanity.

    9 minutes
  • Nation & World

    The Haitian apocalypse

    A Harvard panel looks at the Haitian crisis through the lens of both history and medicine.

    7 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Ashford Fellowship Program thrives

    The Theodore H. Ashford Graduate Fellowships in the Sciences and the Theodore H. Ashford Dissertation Fellowships in the Humanities and Social Sciences have supported 26 students in fields ranging from biophysics to film and visual studies.

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    Sevcenko named professor of Romance languages and literatures

    Nicolau Sevcenko, widely regarded as one of the world’s leading authorities on the cultural history of Brazil, was appointed professor of Romance languages and literatures in Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) Jan. 1, 2009.

    2 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

    Bhabha to receive honorary degree, jury Biennale

    Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities and Director of the Humanities Center Homi K. Bhabha will receive an honorary degree from the University of Paris VIII-Vincennes-Saint Denis on May 28.

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    National Endowment for the Humanities supports preservation of Qajar dynasty

    The National Endowment for the Humanities has made a $346,733 grant to a team of Qajar historians. The purpose of this grant, which lasts from May 2009 to June 2011, is to develop a comprehensive digital archive and Web site at Harvard University that will preserve, link, and render accessible primary source materials related to…

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    Five awarded membership to Royal Irish Academy

    Five Harvard faculty members were awarded honorary membership to the Royal Irish Academy on March 16. The honorary members include Harvard President Drew Faust, Lincoln Professor of History; Arthur Jaffe, Landon T. Clay Professor of Mathematics and Theoretical Science; Michael B. McElroy, Gilbert Butler Professor of Environmental Studies; Lisa Randall, professor of physics; and Amartya…

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    Dance, music, literature celebrate human rights

    Human rights are all about history, politics, and the law — right? Not entirely. The arts have a role to play. Literature, music, dance, and other forms of creative expression often convey oblique stories of injustice and trauma. They also inspire humans to embrace the human rights implicit in every act of creation.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Carpenter Center hosts its architect(s)

    The Carpenter Center for the Arts is currently presenting a daring exhibition of the work of artist William Pope.L titled “Corbu Pops.” The Carpenter Center is the only building in North America designed by the modernist genius Le Corbusier (“Corbu” to his friends).

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    Beauvoir as intellectual, politico, sexual theorist

    Simone de Beauvoir would likely have had a lot to say at a slightly belated 100th anniversary of her birth on Feb. 20 at the Barker Center as a collection of great minds gathered to discuss her great ideas.

    4 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

    Vivid scrolls from Japan tell timeless stories

    For nearly a decade, Melissa McCormick, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities, has been absorbed in the study of elaborate works of fiction. The themes she encounters — love, temptation, even family drama — are timeless. The format — narrow horizontal scrolls of mulberry paper, with hand-painted images and columns of calligraphy —…

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Semester’s series ends with daylong panels

    Sixty years ago this month, the United Nations released to a war-shocked world the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), a catalog of norms understood to apply to all human beings.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Zeph Stewart

    At a Meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on November 18, 2008, the Minute honoring the life and service of the late Zeph Stewart, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities, Emeritus, was placed upon the records. Stewart was an effective and beloved teacher.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Task Force Releases Report on the Arts

    A concerted effort should be made to put the arts at Harvard University on par with the study of the humanities and sciences, according to a report released today (Dec. 10) by a University-wide task force that examined the role the arts play in campus life.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Are boundaries between ‘the arts’ irrelevant?

    What does Harpo Marx’s bicycle horn have to do with Richard Wagner’s epic opera “The Ring of the Nibelung”? Everything, if you ask Daniel Albright, Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature. Albright, who studies the intellectual history of comparative arts, is currently at work on a book about the boundaries and overlaps between different artistic media.

    3 minutes
  • Nation & World

    ‘Grace in the Dark’

    In her one-woman shows, Tony- and Pulitzer-nominated writer and actress Anna Deavere Smith spins interviews into a theatrical performance. Weaving the words she has collected into an evocative tapestry, she brings to life characters ranging from a photographer in Iraq to a Harvard theologian to a Kentucky Derby jockey to a Rwanda genocide survivor.

    5 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

    Radcliffe Fellows include scholars, artists to work on range of projects

    The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University has announced the names of 34 women and 18 men selected to be Radcliffe Fellows during the 2008–09 academic year. These 52 fellows include 16 humanists, 14 scientists, 12 creative artists, and 10 social scientists.

    13 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Yearlong search for the ‘human’ concludes with Bhabha address

    The series “Rethinking the Human,” a yearlong exploration of the very nature of what it means to be human, sponsored by the Harvard Divinity School’s Center for the Study of World Religions, concluded last week (May 12-13) with a two-day symposium.

    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

    Humanities: From deconstruction to digitization

    Malcolm Hyman, a research associate at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, addressed a group of 20 listeners at the Barker Center about the theoretical challenges ahead for humanities computing — a fast-growing corner of scholarship in the classics, modern literature, and the arts that looks to computer science for…

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Shapiro offers guidance on humanities, career path

    First-year students joined Robert Shapiro ’72, member of the Board of Overseers at Harvard and president of the Peabody Essex Museum, for a career conference in the Humanities Center on April 2. The event was the third in a series of conferences titled “Humanities: A Way in the World” that explore how concentrating in the…

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    Ancient text has long and dangerous reach

    Ask a well-read individual to list the most dangerous books in history, and a few familiar titles would most likely make the cut: Hitler’s “Mein Kampf,” Marx and Engels’ “The Communist Manifesto,” Chairman Mao’s “Little Red Book.”

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    ‘For the Bible Tells Me So’

    The plight of families who struggle to reconcile their religious beliefs with their children’s sexuality is the focus of the film “For the Bible Tells Me So,” which was screened recently (Feb. 12) in the Thompson Room at the Barker Center for the Humanities.

    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