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Black Students Speak
“Black students were always watching,” historian Jarvis Givens told listeners Tuesday evening during an online discussion of his newest book, School Clothes: A Collective Memoir of Black Student Witness . A professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of …
A Second Pulitzer for Colson Whitehead
In 2017, Colson Whitehead ’91 won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his harrowing novel The Underground Railroad, a story that translated that fraught effort to free enslaved people from a historic metaphor to an actual system of tracks and trains …
Poet-novelist and Neuroscientist-explorer Launch Commencement Week
Formally opening Commencement celebrations, poet Laura Kasischke and orator S. Allen Counter addressed an audience at the Sanders Theatre at the 225th Phi Beta Kappa (PBK) exercises on Tuesday morning. Kasischke, a poet and novelist who teaches English at …
A Passion for Equity
As an undergraduate studying environmental systems technology at Cornell, Anyeley Hallová, M.L.A. ’03, wanted to give back to the black community. She would travel from Ithaca to her home in South Florida to encourage students from predominantly black …
New Graduate School Dean
Allan M. Brandt has been appointed dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS), within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS). A professor of the history of science in FAS, Brandt holds a joint appointment as Kass professor of the history of …
Cambridge 02138
Undertreating Chronic Pain Kathleen Koman’s article about pain (“ The Science of Hurt ,” November-December 2005, page 46) brilliantly articulates the science surrounding the subject. The piece, however, does readers a profound disservice in its failure to …
Issue: January-February 2006
The Food Waste Problem
For one of the world’s leading experts on food waste, visiting a grocery store can be frustrating. Stepping into her local Whole Foods, clinical professor of law Emily Broad Leib notices something awry in the store’s first produce display. The unbagged …
Issue: November-December 2021
Cultivating Friendships with Trees
Tributes to trees, in form and metaphor, have appeared in art, music and poetry for millennia. “And this our life, exempt from public haunt,/Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,/Sermons in stones, and good in everything,” wrote …
Issue: September-October 2024
University People
Heading East Francis J. Doyle III , a professor of chemical engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has been appointed dean of Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), effective August 1. Doyle, whose research has …
Issue: July-August 2015
Re-Wilding Harvard
You might not recognize the front of Harvard’s Museum of Natural History if you haven’t seen it recently. The manicured shrubs that used to occupy the museum’s front planter have been replaced by native species selected by the Rewilding Harvard …
The Uses of Discomfort
“As we sit here tonight, we are not just spectators, but active participants,” Roeshana Moore-Evans, executive director of the Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery Initiative, told those gathered Tuesday evening at the Cambridge Public Library for the first in …
Musician esperanza spalding Departs Harvard
F ive-time Grammy Award winner and professor of practice in the Music Department, esperanza spalding (who does not capitalize her name) will depart the University. In an email to department affiliates last week obtained by Harvard Magazine , the bassist, …
The Shape of Sound
During her junior year of college, Jessica Shand ’22 discovered topology—a branch of mathematics that studies how far shapes can stretch and morph before they lose their core properties. “I just thought it was so strange,” she says, “seeing these …
Issue: May-June 2025
The Dangers of Mirror Life
Synthetic biologists can alter the genes of microbes, plants, and animals to give them new abilities, with wide-ranging applications in medicine, agriculture, and manufacturing. But one advance in the field has raised special concern: that researchers …
Issue: May-June 2025
Quincy Jones and Harvard
LARGELY MISSED in the rush of encomia to beloved musician Quincy Jones, who recently died at the age of 91, were his multiple Harvard connections. He received an honorary doctorate in music in 1997 (“Musician, humanitarian, orchestrator extraordinaire, he …