Arts & Culture
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When to quit a book
Some give up without guilt while others insist going cover to cover. Harvard readers share their criteria.
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Lace up gloves, enter ring, and write
Novelist and boxer Laura van den Berg says the two practices have a lot in common
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Unearthed papyrus contains lost scenes from Euripides’ plays
Alums help identify, decipher ‘one of the most significant new finds in Greek literature in this century’
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A photographer who makes historical subjects dance
Wendel White manifests the impetus behind his new monograph during Harvard talk
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LeVar Burton got his Du Bois Medal, and the crowd couldn’t resist
‘Reading Rainbow’ theme breaks out at ceremony honoring Black luminaries — including trailblazers in sports, arts, politics, and more
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When the act of writing itself is part of the art
Calligrapher Wang Dongling creates piece with ‘chaotic script’ before Harvard Art Museums audience
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Madison Greer, solo artist
During her time at Harvard, Jazz singer and junior Madison Greer has developed her skills in music theory and music performance and learned how to “front” a band.
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Where medicine meets artistry
Transit Gallery at Harvard Medical School, with a new show up, invites busy walkers to slow down and look. Co-exhibitors Svetlana Boym and Deb Todd Wheeler will discuss their work and attend a reception on Feb. 15.
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Notes on music’s lessons
At Harvard as part of an ongoing lecture and performance series, musician and composer Wynton Marsalis met with the Harvard community for two far-reaching discussions in which music and the arts played seminal roles.
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In a land of equality, racism
“Queloides,” an art exhibit visiting Harvard, shows how racial stereotypes prevailed even after the Cuban Revolution.
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The melding of American music
Backed by an all-star band, Wynton Marsalis explored the “mulatto identity of our national music” with a rollicking performance and a thoughtful lecture on America’s porous tuneful genres at Sanders Theatre Feb. 6.
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A jewel in the light of Tel Aviv
With a new museum wing in Tel Aviv, a Harvard architect offers a middle-ground paradigm for buildings that display art.
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Sensibly saving Jane Austen
Two of Jane Austen’s letters — thousands of which were written but only dozens of which were preserved — undergo careful repairs at Harvard, where they reside at Houghton Library.
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The West, plagued by self-doubt
In his new book, noted historian Niall Ferguson sees Europe and America as facing a profound crisis of confidence in what the future holds.
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String quartet focuses on Schubert
The Music Department’s Blodgett Chamber Music Series will continue with a performance by the Chiara Quartet on Feb. 17. Tickets are free and available at the Harvard Box Office beginning Feb. 3.
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Marsalis: ‘Meet Me at the Crossroad’
Wynton Marsalis continues his two-year lecture series at Harvard with an exploration of root styles of American music in Sanders Theatre on Feb. 6.
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Sounds of the Silk Road
The Silk Road Ensemble concluded its January Harvard residence with a Learning From Performers concert featuring four newly commissioned works.
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Arts prove intensive
Across campus, students participated in a series of arts intensives during January’s Wintersession that let them tap their creative talents.
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Writing, clear and simple
Clarity and simplicity are frequent themes in the Harvard College Winter Writing Program, a two-week Winter Break seminar where undergraduate nonfiction writers learn from some of the country’s best authors, teachers, and journalists.
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Devoted to the stage
Anatoly Smeliansky is the founding director of the American Repertory Theater/Moscow Art Theater School Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard University. As part of the program, he is spending the month at Harvard leading a series of classes on the history of theater and drama.
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A key to modernity
Rummaging through worm-eaten layers of parchment at a monastery in southern Germany in 1417, the scribe Poggio Bracciolini discovered a poem titled “De Rerum Natura,” or “On the Nature of Things,” by the Roman philosopher Titus Lucretius Carus. On that day, according to Professor Stephen Greenblatt, history swerved and modernity began.
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Snapshots of the past
A new online exhibit, the Nicholas V. Artamonoff Collection, presented by the Image Collections and Fieldwork Archive at Dumbarton Oaks, features more than 500 photos that a talented amateur photographer took in Turkey from 1935 through 1945.
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The art of Walker Evans
The iconic photography of Walker Evans is on exhibit at Mather House’s SNLH Three Columns Gallery through March. John T. Hill, designer and producer of the exhibition, offers special insight into Evans’ life and work.
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When art advanced science
More than a masterful artist, Albrecht Dürer strongly influenced 16th-century science with cartographic and anatomical work that gets little attention from art historians.
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Using the bully pulpit
In his new memoir, former Harvard Medical School Dean Joseph Martin recalls a small-town childhood, an attraction to medicine, and the ups and downs of leadership.
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Adding art to academics
Modern dance instructor Liz Lerman uses a Harvard semester to cross disciplines, deepen understanding, promote research, and increase knowledge.
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A show fit for royalty
“The Snow Queen,” the classic fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen, has been reworked in an imaginative stage adaptation at the American Repertory Theater. It will be performed through Dec. 31.
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Unraveling a brutal custom
A research team at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study is debunking myths surrounding the brutal practice of foot binding young women in China, tying it to handwork and weaving rather than marriage prospects.
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The wisdom of William James
Physician and Harvard Medical School Professor Arthur Kleinman delivered Harvard Divinity School’s annual William James Lecture, exploring the philosopher’s importance in the area of moral wisdom.
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Words from Wiseman
The dean of American direct cinema, 81-year-old Frederick Wiseman, offers a summary of his documentary shooting and editing techniques.
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The future of archaeology
Smitten as a boy with the wonders of ancient Egypt, archaeologist Peter Der Manuelian deep into excavations but also wedded to the Web.
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Interesting readers, as well as writers
English Professor Leah Price focuses on leading authors and the titles they love in “Unpacking My Library: Writers and Their Books.”
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A song cycle reborn
Rick Burkhardt and his team of collaborators recast the song cycle by Austrian composer Franz Schubert to both deepen and lighten the experience of his somber work “Winterreise.” It is at the A.R.T. from Dec. 7 through Jan. 8.
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Faust digs Gen Ed
President Drew Faust paid a visit Nov. 17 to the popular undergraduate course anthropology 1010: “The Fundamentals of Archaeological Methods and Reasoning.” Faust’s attendance was inspired by a special meeting of the course at the Harvard Ceramics Studio, where students learned how pottery is made, and got to try their hands at making their own pieces.
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Harvard and slavery
A student research project and a resulting booklet and website bring to light some troubling connections to the College in the 18th and 19th centuries.
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Write right, right?
The Harvard Writers at Work lecture series, in its third year, offers public conversations on craft, collaboration, and even challenges to writing in the digital age.