Britain’s Arcadia Fund has awarded $5 million to the Harvard University Library. Arcadia’s five-year grant will provide flexible support for the library’s core functions: acquisitions, access, preservation, and dissemination.
On April 8, 1903 — Easter Sunday — a mild disturbance against local Jews rattled Kishinev, a sleepy city on the southwestern border of imperial Russia.
A politician intends to revolutionize the educational system in Kenya. A husband-and-wife team offers professional development to teachers to reduce social violence, develop civic competencies, and help eradicate poverty in Mexico. A student hopes to work on international educational reform.
Some scholars are hard-pressed to identify what exactly drew them to their field. Others can point to a specific “aha!” moment when they found their academic calling. In Justin Weir’s case, it all began with a bit of bureaucracy.
U.S. Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, came to the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) Monday (April 6) to lay out a four-point program for re-regulating the nation’s financial system.
The writing of culture watcher and critic Louis Menand — Harvard’s Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of English — has cast a wide net over the years.
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.
Jose Maria Aznar, the prime minister of Spain from 1996 to 2004, will deliver a lecture titled “The Role of Europe in the Geopolitical Context” at 5 p.m. Wednesday (April 15) in the Belfer Center’s Starr Auditorium at Harvard Kennedy School.
In December 2000, Dorothy Sewe and her family — fleeing tribal violence in Kenya — escaped across the border into Tanzania. In the first few days, all 17 huddled under plastic bags in the pouring rain. They camped outside the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, begging for help.
The Ash Institute for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) recently announced the top 50 programs of the 2009 Innovations in American Government Awards competition. The programs, which represent the best in government innovation from local, county, city, tribal, state, and federal levels, were selected from more than 600 applicants, and include 21 cities and towns, seven counties, one school district, 11 states, eight federal agencies, one tribal government, and one regional authority.
Raj Chetty, a public economist whose work focuses on social insurance and tax policy, has been appointed professor of economics in Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), effective April 1.
The mayor of Jerusalem visited Harvard Thursday (March 26) and outlined a plan for his city’s economic future, one created with the help of Harvard Business School (HBS).
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 often time travel,” Miyagawa told a lecture audience March 16 at the Radcliffe Gymnasium. “It’s my favorite thing to do as a playwright.”
It has been almost 20 years since photographer Felice Frankel started working with scientists by helping them illustrate the intricate geometries of physical worlds too tiny to see. From the beginning, she was struck by one thing: To explain their ideas, scientists always start by drawing them. That gave Frankel an idea — “Picturing to Learn,” a project that requires students to draw basic concepts so that a senior in high school might understand them. Why is the sky blue? What do ions do?
When housing prices on Main Street tumbled last year — who doesn’t know this? — tremors rumbled all the way to Wall Street, and beyond. For the first time in 40 years of record-keeping, the median price of a single-family home declined. In six months, the value of U.S. housing stock dropped $3 trillion. Credit got tight; sales and housing starts slid.
Michèle Lamont, Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies and professor of sociology and of African and African American studies, analyzes the system of peer review in her new book “How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment.”
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.
With literally tens of billions of dollars in federal research funding suddenly available — and application deadlines for proposals extraordinarily short — Harvard’s Provost’s Office has established a new Web site to aid faculty members seeking grants.
In his classes, economist Pol Antràs likes to talk about Barbie. He’s not a devoted fan of the iconic toy. Rather, the native of Spain, who studies the organizational aspects of trade, globalization, and outsourcing, uses her to make an important economic point.
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 of study on how women are represented in lawmaking bodies worldwide.
What is creativity? Does it depend on more than that red wheelbarrow that William Carlos Williams saw? Is creativity a creature of neuron bundles, brain size, daydreaming? Is it the capacity for metaphor or divergent thinking?
Can a diverse religious community unite and heal after a brutal murder in broad daylight, one possibly motivated by religious hatred? That profound question and others like it, questions of religious diversity and tolerance, are at the heart of the new documentary “Fremont, U.S.A.,” which was developed by Harvard’s Pluralism Project and screened last Thursday afternoon (March 5) at Boylston Hall’s Fong Auditorium.
Juliette Kayyem, undersecretary of homeland security for the commonwealth of Massachusetts, has been named assistant secretary of intergovernmental programs of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Kayyem, who is a former executive director at Harvard Kennedy School’s (HKS) Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, is also a current member (on leave) of the Belfer Center’s board of directors, and previously served as executive director for research at the center and taught courses in public policy at HKS.
Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, has announced a collaboration with the Educational Testing Service (ETS) on a study of the experience of undergraduate members of racial and ethnic minorities on predominantly white college campuses.
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.
Jim Yong Kim, tireless advocate for bringing Western standards of health care to the world’s poor and a professor of medicine and of public health at Harvard, has been named the 17th president of Dartmouth College.
President Barack Obama announced March 2 that he has nominated Ashton B. Carter to serve as undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics. Carter’s nomination was announced in a press release along with several other key nominees.
The president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas delivered a somber economic message Monday night (Feb. 23) during the annual Albert H. Gordon Lecture at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum. But while Richard Fisher admitted that policymakers should have heeded the signs of financial stress long ago, he expressed hope that central bankers can play a key role in bringing the global economy back to health.
A group from the worlds of politics, business, and the academy gathered at the Harvard Faculty Club for a look at “Germany in the Modern World: Division and Unity,” a student-organized conference.
Featured series 
