Tag: Radcliffe

  • Nation & World

    The pogrom that transformed 20th century Jewry

    On April 8, 1903 — Easter Sunday — a mild disturbance against local Jews rattled Kishinev, a sleepy city on the southwestern border of imperial Russia.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Gail Mazur reads at Radcliffe

    After removing her soaked red sneakers, Radcliffe Fellow Gail Mazur read aloud from new poems Monday (April 6) in dry black socks. The poet was undeterred by the onslaught of gray rain that thrashed Radcliffe Gymnasium’s windows — a fitting backdrop for Mazur’s charged, emotional poems.

    3 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Creativity through cerebration

    Contemporary composer Kay Rhie hasn’t had many watershed musical moments. The romantic ideal of a composer “deeply entrenched in creative epiphanies,” she admitted on a recent damp spring afternoon, is “not my story.”

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Skin biology illuminates how stem cells operate

    As a girl, Elaine Fuchs borrowed her mother’s old strainers and mixing bowls to collect polliwogs, an activity she credits for her present-day career as a biologist.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    History of a ‘scribal machine’

    Starting in the 1920s, Chinese writer Lin Yutang earned a reputation as an urbane essayist and translator who moved easily between the literary cultures of the East and West.

    6 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Lightweight crew win two weekend races

    On Sunday (March 29), the Radcliffe lightweight crew opened things off right, taking home two first-place finishes at Holy Cross. The varsity eight finished with a time of 6:35 — four seconds ahead of the Holy Cross Crusaders and eight seconds ahead of the Smith Pioneers. The Black and White also captured the novice eight,…

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    Playwright plumbs texts, ancient and modern

    You know Noh, no? Chiori Miyagawa does. The Bard College playwright-in-residence, a Radcliffe Fellow this year, has steeped herself in Noh theater, a measured style of Japanese drama that dates back to the 14th century. It’s one of the many literary echoes — some old, some ancient — that she brings to her work. “I…

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Fijian girls succumb to Western dysmorphia

    In 1982, Harvard Medical School psychiatrist Anne E. Becker was still an undergraduate at Radcliffe when she traveled to Fiji for a summer of anthropology fieldwork. What struck her about this South Pacific island nation — and has in many research trips since — was “the absolute preoccupation with food and eating,” she said. “Family…

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Harvard conference on gender and law looks at past, present, future

    It was a homecoming of sorts when Ruth Bader Ginsburg, associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, spoke at a conference on gender and the law today (March 12) at a conference at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

    3 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Krook looks at how women fare in international political arena

    This past Sunday (March 8) was International Women’s Day, now in its 99th year. And March is National Women’s History Month. So what better time for a scholarly look at how women are faring in the political arena? Mona Lena Krook did just that, outlining in a March 4 lecture at Radcliffe Gymnasium her years…

    6 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Scholar plucks composers out of the dark

    Wielding a viola da gamba almost as tall as she, Laury Gutiérrez plays with the assurance and animation of a rock star. She is, after all, one in a select club of artists who hold a National Interest Waiver from the U.S. government, granted to noncitizens “who because of their exceptional ability in the sciences,…

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    U.K. anti-poverty strategy working, almost

    In May 1997, Britain’s Labor Party won an election that ended nearly two decades of Conservative Party rule. The new liberal government, promising radical reform, took over a booming economy. But it also inherited an increase in poverty that had been rising steeply since the 1970s.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Bacteria have more to say than previously thought

    Bacteria are the oldest living organisms, dating back 4 billion years. So it is only logical that they have evolved ways to communicate.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    ‘Passing’ in colonial Colombia

    Radcliffe Fellow Joanne Rappaport gave a glimpse of her work last week (Feb. 4) during a talk at the Radcliffe Gymnasium, where 80 listeners were drawn in by her intriguing title: “Mischievous Lovers, Hidden Moors, and Cross-Dressers: The Meaning of Passing in Colonial Bogotá.”

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Radcliffe honors Kouskalis ’08 with Fay Prize for ‘compelling’ thesis

    The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study has named Harvard senior and sociology and economics joint-concentrator Eric Kouskalis winner of its 2008 Captain Jonathan Fay Prize. Kouskalis was chosen for the quality and impact of his senior thesis, which featured a compelling argument against the current methods for introducing and deploying computers into South African and…

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Shalala to receive Radcliffe Medal

    The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study has announced that Donna E. Shalala, president of the University of Miami and former U.S. secretary of Health and Human Services, will be awarded the 2008 Radcliffe Institute Medal at the annual Radcliffe Day luncheon on Friday (June 6) at 12:45 p.m. Barbara J. Grosz, dean of the Radcliffe…

    3 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Cultural creativity in the Ethiopian diaspora

    A Radcliffe Fellow this year, Kaufman Shelemay was co-organizer of “Cultural Creativity in the Ethiopian American Diaspora,” a conference held at Harvard this week (April 13-14).

    7 minutes
  • Nation & World

    With old forms, improvisation, Bielawa creates ingenious anachronism

    Manhattan composer Lisa Bielawa is a Radcliffe Fellow this year. Her tiny studio on Concord Avenue is spartan: white walls, a piano, a violin, two chairs, a table strewn with music staff paper. On one side is the glow of a computer. On the other is a single window, with a blur of trees beyond.…

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Protein folding: Life’s vital origami

    The way proteins fold, and the good and bad effects of this molecular phenomenon, are what keeps biologist Susan L. Lindquist busy. Lindquist Ph.D. ’76, a Radcliffe Fellow this year, is an award-winning professor and researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a former director of the Whitehead Institute. She shared her insights…

    6 minutes
  • 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…

    5 minutes