Featured series 
Tag: Literature
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Campus & Community
J.K. Rowling to speak at Commencement
J.K. Rowling, author of the world-renowned “Harry Potter” novels, will be the principal speaker during the Afternoon Exercises of Harvard University’s 357th Commencement on June 5, 2008.
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Arts & Culture
Chute on graphic narratives — they’re not just comic books anymore
The title of Hillary Chute’s Nov. 29 lecture, “Out of the Gutter: Contemporary Graphic Novels by Women,” has a double meaning. It refers to the elevation of graphic narratives — comics — from the lowest, most disreputable level of artistic expression to a form worthy of New York Times best-sellerdom, literary prizes, and academic attention.
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Campus & Community
Newsmakers
Olupona to accept prestigious Nigerian National Order of Merit Professor of African and African American Studies Jacob Olupona has been awarded the Nigerian National Order of Merit prize for 2007. The president of Nigeria, Umaru Yar’Adua, will confer the award in the nation’s capital city of Abuja today (Dec. 6). The National Order of Merit…
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Campus & Community
Galbreth ’08 named Marshall Scholar
Megan Galbreth, a senior in Lowell House, has been named a 2008 Marshall Scholar. The award entitles Galbreth to two years of study at Oxford University, where she will pursue an M.Phil. in English Language and Literature.
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Campus & Community
White House awards Pipes and Wisse Humanities Medals
President George W. Bush awarded the prestigious National Humanities Medals for 2007 to Harvard faculty members Richard Pipes and Ruth R. Wisse during a Nov. 15 ceremony at the White House. In total, nine distinguished Americans and one cultural foundation were honored for their exemplary contributions to the humanities and were recognized for their scholarship,…
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Arts & Culture
Houghton exhibit features ‘luminous’ historian
While Edward Gibbon was publishing his six-volume opus, “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” a large portion of Britain’s empire was declaring its independence and fighting to break free of the mother country.
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Arts & Culture
Scholar looks at abiding interest in the ‘Great American Novel’
Literary critics tend to discredit the concept of a “Great American Novel” as nothing more than media hype — an arbitrary appellation that has more to do with pipe dreams than merit. And yet, what would-be author hasn’t imagined, when putting pen to paper, what it would feel like to be hailed as the greatest…
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Arts & Culture
Tools for ‘navigating childhood’
The fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen have enchanted children the world over for more than two centuries with their verbal sorcery and expressive intensity. Now their iconic power has drawn the attention of a Harvard professor, who hopes to broaden our understanding of how those eye-widening fairy tales expand the imaginations of children.
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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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Campus & Community
The Committee for the Provostial Fund awards seven new proposals
The Office of the Dean for the Arts and Humanities has announced that the Committee for the Provostial Fund in the Arts and Humanities has recently awarded funds to the following seven proposals (in alphabetical order by title).
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Arts & Culture
Harvey Mansfield on politics, the humanities, and science
Harvey Mansfield wants to reintroduce the concept of thumos into political science. As employed by Plato and Aristotle, thumos refers to the “part of the soul that makes us want to insist on our own importance.” Mansfield believes that modern political science has excluded thumos, and as a result has narrowed its understanding of what…
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Campus & Community
Newsmakers
It was announced Wednesday (Oct. 10) that the prestigious 2007 IZA Prize in Labor Economics goes to Harvard’s Richard B. Freeman. He was praised by the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Germany for “fundamental contributions that have monumentally shaped modern labor economics.”
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Campus & Community
University inaugurates Drew Faust
It’s happened only 28 times in 371 years, so when a new Harvard president is inaugurated, the occasion is bound to be a memorable one. And the installation of Drew Faust, scheduled for Oct. 12, is shaping up to be one of the most memorable ever.
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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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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
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
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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Arts & Culture
Rothenberg praises value of humanities
James Rothenberg is a leading figure in the investment world as well as being Harvard University’s treasurer and a member of the Harvard Corporation and Board of Overseers.
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Campus & Community
Engell wins Ness Book Award
The Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) has awarded its Frederic W. Ness Book Award to James Engell, the Gurney Professor of English Literature and professor of comparative literature, for his book with Anthony Dangerfield, “Saving Higher Education in the Age of Money.”
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Campus & Community
Tian loves poetry – from Plath to Yuanming
Xiaofei Tian, a youthful looking Harvard scholar of Chinese poetry, could easily be mistaken for an undergraduate in the halls of 2 Divinity Ave., where she works in a book-lined office. Last September, at age 34, Tian got word of her tenure in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations. To celebrate, she and…
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Campus & Community
Jerome Hamilton Buckley
Jerome Hamilton Buckley, Gurney Professor of English Literature, Emeritus, was born in Toronto on August 30, 1917, and received his secondary education at Humberside Collegiate Institute where the principal called him “one of the most brilliant pupils” ever to attend the school.
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Arts & Culture
The many lives of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Most of us only get one life. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow – whose 200th birthday bicentennial is this month – has had four. In the first, he arrived in Cambridge in 1837, fresh from a six-year professorship at Bowdoin College. Longfellow, sporting long hair, yellow gloves, and flowered waistcoats, cut quite a romantic, European-style figure in…
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Campus & Community
Modern Language Association honors Gates with Hubbell Medal
The American Literature Section of the Modern Language Association (MLA) last month presented its highest professional award to Henry Louis Gates Jr., the W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities and director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro American Research.