Arts & Culture

Explore Harvard’s vibrant arts scene—from campus exhibitions and theater to cultural analysis and literary reviews. Discover how creativity shapes the Harvard experience.

Harvard football player in red attempts to block a pass from a Penn player in white during a game.

Harvard Football: Harvard 45, Penn 43

An epic finish ensures another Ivy title. Next up: Yale. And after?

by Dick Friedman

Yucky Pollution, Shiny Pretty, 2001, Hilltop Children’s Center, Seattle. From <em>Can Poetry Save the Earth?</em>

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Recent books with Harvard connections

A still from Olch’s film shows Richard Rogers at his editing console, watching footage of his mother

The Windmill Movie

Filmmaker Alexander Olch has made an biographical documentary based on footage left behind by his mentor, Richard Rogers.

by Craig Lambert

Pete Seeger, shown singing in an undated photo, traveled light, always ready to make music.

The Bible and the Almanac

How Pete Seeger got his start: an excerpt from Alec Wilkinson's new biography, The Protest Singer

Ancestral Influences

View images of Phillip Charette's masks alongside masks from the Smithsonian Institution holdings that inspired him.

Arts Administration in Challenging Times

Michael M. Kaiser, known for steering the Kennedy Center and other troubled arts organizations back to health, shares his secrets with a Harvard audience.

Comedian Richard Pryor sends up the image of a “primitive” in this 1968 photograph, which appears on the cover of Laughing Fit to Kill.

Laughing at Slavery

In Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery, Glenda Carpio describes how slavery has provided a background and a source of raw material for African-American humor.

by Craig Lambert

Grandiose dreamer Bronson Alcott impoverished his family—but spurred Louisa’s imagination.

The Alcotts, Père and Fille

John Matteson, who left the law to pursue literature, won a Pulitzer Prize for Eden’s Outcasts, his double biography of Bronson and Louisa May Alcott.

by Julia Wallace

From Literature to the Lab

In this excerpt from his new book, The Art and Politics of Science, Nobel laureate Harold Varmus reflects on his switch from graduate work in English to medical school.

On Judicial Interpretation

Paul M. Barrett reviews The Invisible Constitution, by Loeb University Professor Laurence H. Tribe.

by Paul M. Barrett

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Recent books with Harvard connections