Featured series 
Tag: Lecture
-
Nation & World
Self discusses gender, feminism, privacy
Brown University cultural historian Robert O. Self — a Radcliffe Fellow this year — made a name for himself with his book “American Babylon” (Princeton University Press, 2003). He was the first scholar to connect the civil rights struggle with postwar white flight to the suburbs, and the tax incentives that made suburbanization possible.
-
Nation & World
Seminar calls Iraq conflict America’s first ‘credit card war’
The five-year-old Iraq conflict is America’s first “credit card war.” And like anyone who has run up a huge credit card bill knows, a credit card debt can turn into a crushing burden with long-term consequences. This, too, will be a legacy of the Iraq War.
-
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…
-
Nation & World
‘Embracing our own being’
Controversial pop artist Jeff Koons brought his unique perspective to the Carpenter Center Thursday night (April 3), speaking about his work and philosophy to an invited audience of just over 200.
-
Nation & World
In brief
PDK TALK TO EXPLORE LEADERSHIP, LAST CALL FOR ARTISTS, FREE TICKETS FOR YING SWAN SONG, DUMBARTON OAKS SET TO REOPEN
-
Nation & World
Association for Women in Psychology honors Caplan
Paula J. Caplan, lecturer on studies of women, gender, and sexuality at Harvard, has received a distinguished career award from the Association for Women in Psychology at its annual conference in San Diego last month. At the conference, Caplan delivered a lecture titled “Defying Authority: The Liberation and Poignancy of Challenging the Status Quo.”
-
Nation & World
Eating meat led to smaller stomachs, bigger brains
Behind glass cases, Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology displays ancient tools, weapons, clothing, and art — enough to jar you back into the past. But the venerable museum offered a jarring moment of another sort in its Geological Lecture Hall last month (March 20). Paleoanthropologist Leslie Aiello delivered a late-afternoon talk on diet, energy, and…
-
Nation & World
Satcher’s goal: To help ‘people who have been left out’
David Satcher — the 16th U.S. surgeon general and co-author of “Multicultural Medicine and Health Disparities” (McGraw-Hill, 2006), was in Boston (March 13) to deliver the fourth in a 2007-08 series of lectures in Public Health Practice and Leadership sponsored by the HSPH’s Division of Health Practice.
-
Nation & World
‘Baby College’ and beyond
Geoffrey Canada — author, educator, psychologist, motivator, poet, black belt, sometime comedian, and founder of the Harlem Children’s Zone — spoke to an enthusiastic crowd of about 300 in the packed Ames Courtroom in Austin Hall last week (March 12).
-
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…
-
Nation & World
Thriving cities ‘connect smart people’
In a fast-paced lecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design Thursday evening (March 6), Edward Glaeser, the Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics, explained what he called the “central paradox” of cities in the postindustrial age.
-
Nation & World
Of flies and fish
During her schooldays in 1950s Germany, Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard rarely did her homework. In 1995, she won the Nobel Prize for physiology and medicine. Volhard is now director of the prestigious Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen, where, decades before, she had been an undistinguished biochemistry undergraduate. She was at Harvard this week (March…
-
Nation & World
The first civil rights movement
Most of us think of the Civil Rights movement as something that took place in the transitional 1950s and the tumultuous 1960s. It’s seen as a cultural artifact squeezed between the defiance of Rosa Parks (1955) and the demise of Martin Luther King Jr. (1968).
-
Nation & World
Hollywood writer wins kudos at Rosovsky Hall
Irreverence was the theme of the evening (Feb. 21) as one of the sharp satirical minds behind the nation’s quirkiest cartoon family addressed a rapt audience at Harvard Hillel’s Rosovsky Hall. Mike Reiss ’81, a founding writer of the animated series “The Simpsons,” gave the crowd what they came for with an hourlong stand-up routine…
-
Nation & World
Playwright Tony Kushner to deliver Tanner Lectures
Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner will deliver this year’s Tanner Lectures on Human Values, sponsored by the Office of the President and the Department of English at Harvard University. Kushner will speak on the topic “Fiction That’s True! Historical Fiction and Anxiety” on April 9 and 10 at 4:30 p.m. in Lowell Lecture Hall. On…
-
Nation & World
In Brief
SCHLESINGER LIBRARY TO SPONSOR SUMMER SEMINAR ON GENDER HISTORY GRANTS, FELLOWSHIPS AVAILABLE TO HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL MEMBERS
-
Nation & World
E-mail collaboration yields chamber opera
Critics say that composer Elena Ruehr – a Radcliffe Fellow this year – makes music that is challenging, natural, intelligent, and socially aware. She brought all of these qualities to a Feb. 13 presentation on the creative process. “From Novel to Opera,” spliced with musical samples and punctuated by laughter, was a low-key discourse on…
-
Nation & World
Vivian Gornick takes on novelists Bellow, Roth
This year, Vivian Gornick, — a writer who lives in New York City — is a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She updated her observations on the brilliance (literary) and the failings (cultural) of male Jewish American writers of three decades ago on Feb. 4 in the Julia S. Phelps Annual Lecture…
-
Nation & World
Golden to deliver Morris Lecture at Nieman
Tim Golden, senior writer for The New York Times, will present the 2008 Joe Alex Morris Jr. Memorial Lecture at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard on Feb. 21, 2008.
-
Nation & World
Calderón cites nation’s progress
The election that put Felipe Calderón Hinojosa into office as the president of Mexico was a real squeaker — the closest vote in the modern history of his country. It took a couple of months for the federal electoral tribunal to certify him as the winner. Even then his chief opponent wouldn’t concede. An hour…
-
Nation & World
Security chief cautions against complacency
If Michael Chertoff, secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, was politically wounded by his department’s response to Hurricane Katrina, he showed no sign of it during his forceful lecture Feb. 6 at the Kennedy School of Government.
-
Nation & World
‘Where do I come from?’
Harvard graduates often return to the University to let their professors know what they’ve been up to since they finished their degree.
-
Nation & World
Gorbachev calls for new move to eliminate nukes
Former Soviet Union President Mikhail Gorbachev called for a renewed commitment to eliminate the world’s nuclear weapons Tuesday (Dec. 4), saying the current generation of world leaders cannot coast on disarmament treaties of the past.
-
Nation & World
Armstrong: God is hard to get to know
Man’s practical understanding of God, said one religious scholar speaking at Harvard, is “like a goldfish trying to understand a computer. … It will always be beyond us.”
-
Nation & World
Sanders Theatre features talk on building schools for peaceful world
In the remote and mountainous Baltistan region of Pakistan, the beverage of choice is paiyu cha, a mixture of green tea, salt, baking soda, goat’s milk, and a rancid yak butter called mar.
-
Nation & World
Borderless America
Sometimes what we call something changes the way we see it. Steven Hahn wants to call the groups of escaped slaves who found refuge in the northern United States prior to the Civil War “maroon communities.”
-
Nation & World
The hidden resources of ‘the extended piano’
Brian Kane’s composition “Another Cascando” sounds a bit like barking dogs at a construction site; Johannes Kreidler’s “Piano Piece #5” is reminiscent of distant artillery fire; and Hans Tutschku’s “Zellen – Linien” seems to include the sharp, high-pitched sounds of breaking glass.
-
Nation & World
Karen Armstrong will make the ‘Case for God’ in Noble Lectures
Acclaimed author and religious historian Karen Armstrong will present “The Case for God” during the three-day William Belden Noble Lectures at the Memorial Church Nov. 13-15 at 8 p.m. Armstrong, the author of some 20 books, including the best-selling “A History of God” and “The Battle for God,” is renowned for her ideas about the…
-
Nation & World
Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies awards prizes
The Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies and Kodansha Publishers hosted the 13th annual Edwin O. Reischauer/Kodansha Ltd. Commemorative Symposium and the 12th annual awarding of the Noma-Reischauer Prizes in Japanese Studies on Oct. 19. These prizes are given annually by Kodansha Publishers for the best essays written by Harvard University students on Japan-related topics. The…