Research & Ideas
Discover Harvard research, scholarship, and ideas shaping the world—from science and technology to policy, education, and the humanities.
Jason Furman: Capitalism Is Working. It Could Work Better.
On Open to Debate, the Harvard economist defended free market competition—with meaningful government involvement.
A celebration of Matthew Meselson
A symposium honors a scientist who championed biological and chemical weapons control.
Tomiko Brown-Nagin to Lead Radcliffe Institute
The legal historian will become dean on July 1.
Harvard’s Bok Players get audiences “below the neck”
A theatre troupe aims for higher ed.
William Sellers boosts history
William Sellers aims to expose a new generation to America’s origins.
Alain Locke as activist aesthete
Rediscovering Alain Locke and the project of black self-realization
by Adam Kirsch
Brew’s clues: profile of Theresa McCulla, the Smithsonian's "beer historian"
A historian tracks the craft-beer boom, and the evolution of American taste.
by Bailey Trela
Excerpt from "The Annotated African American Folktales"
The power and legacy of African-American folktales
Frederick Wiseman gives Harvard's first Norton Lecture on Cinema
Documentarian Frederick Wiseman is the first filmmaker to deliver a Norton Lecture.
Bryan Stevenson on the Evolution of White Supremacy
“I don’t think slavery ended in 1865 —I think it just evolved. I think it turned into decades of terrorism and violence and lynching.”
Harvard botanists hunt rare plants in China
The hunt for rare plants in China