Past Events
& Exhibitions
View recordings of more Radcliffe events on YouTube.
All Events & Exhibitions
Solidarity! Exhibition Gallery Tour
Gallery Events • Solidarity! Gallery SeriesPlease join us for a tour of the Solidarity! Transnational Feminisms Then and Now exhibition led by our student guides and staff from the Schlesinger Library.
3 PM ET
3 James Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
Talk to Me: Two Nations, Coup, and Democracy
Fellows' PresentationA presentation from 2023–2024 Walter Jackson Bate Fellow Rich Benjamin
12 PM ET
Water Stories: River Goddesses, Ancestral Rites, and Climate Crisis Opening Event
LecturesIn this opening discussion for the exhibition, Water Stories: River Goddesses, Ancestral Rites, and Climate Crisis, the exhibition curator and faculty director Jinah Kim will engage in conversation with the art historian Yukio Lippit and Radcliffe’s curator of exhibitions, Meg Rotzel.
4 PM ET
Book Talk with Katherine Turk
Lectures • Virtual Radcliffe Book TalksThis installment of our 2023 summer Book Talk series will feature Katherine Turk RI ’19, author of The Women of NOW: How Feminists Built an Organization that Transformed America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023).
4 PM ET
Book Talk with V.V. Ganeshananthan
Lectures • Virtual Radcliffe Book TalksThis installment of our 2023 summer Book Talk series will feature V.V. Ganeshananthan RI ’15, author of Brotherless Night (Random House, 2023).
4 PM ET
Book Talk with Jarvis R. Givens
Lectures • Virtual Radcliffe Book TalksThis installment of our 2023 summer Book Talk series will feature Jarvis R. Givens RI ’21, author of School Clothes: A Collective Memoir of Black Student Witness (Beacon Press, 2023).
4 PM ET
Book Talk with Ann-Christine Duhaime
Lectures • Virtual Radcliffe Book TalksThe 2023 summer Book Talk series will begin with Ann-Christine Duhaime RI ’16, author of Minding the Climate: How Neuroscience Can Help Solve Our Environmental Crisis (Harvard University Press, 2022).
4 PM ET
Predicting Mosquito-Borne Disease Transmission in a Rapidly Changing World
Lectures • Climate Change Science Lecture SeriesDisease ecologist Courtney Murdock will focus on understanding the climate variables that influence mosquito-borne disease transmission.
3 PM ET
The Moving Parts (&) Tour with the Artist Mary Lum
Gallery Events • The Moving Parts (&) Gallery SeriesJoin the artist Mary Lum and the curator Meg Rotzel for a tour and discussion of the exhibition The Moving Parts (&).
1 PM ET
8 Garden Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
The Moving Parts (&): Gallery Tour with Meg Rotzel (June)
Gallery EventsJoin the curator Meg Rotzel for a tour and discussion of commissioning the exhibition The Moving Parts (&), and making of the artist’s book.
4 PM ET
8 Garden Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
Poetry Reading and Discussion with Anthony Cody
Lectures • Roosevelt Poetry ReadingsAnthony Cody is the author of two collections of poetry. His most recent collection is The Rendering (Omnidawn, 2023). Anthony’s debut collection, Borderland Apocrypha (Omnidawn, 2020), was winner of the 2018 Omnidawn Open Book Prize, selected by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge.
4 PM ET
More or Less in Common: Environment and Justice in the Human Landscape
Lectures • Climate Change Science Lecture SeriesThe climate crisis is a matter of environmental as well as historical injustice. Human geographer Garrett Dash Nelson will explore the uneven distributions of harm, responsibility, vulnerability, and power, in both historical and local perspective.
1 PM ET
Radcliffe Day 2023
Radcliffe DayOn Radcliffe Day 2023—Friday, May 26—we will award the Radcliffe Medal to Ophelia Dahl to honor her work advancing global access to healthcare and championing the rights of the poor.
10 AM ET
10 Garden Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
Tell Me Everything
Fellows' PresentationA presentation from 2022–2023 Robert G. James Scholar Fellow Homeira Qaderi
12 PM ET
Resonating with the Universe: The Embodiment of Entropy in My Music
Fellows' PresentationA presentation from 2022–2023 Rieman and Baketel Fellow for Music Ka Shu (Kenneth) Tam
12 PM ET
Solidarity! Exhibition Gallery Tour
Gallery Events • Solidarity! Gallery SeriesPlease join us for a tour of the Solidarity! Transnational Feminisms Then and Now exhibition led by our student guides and staff from the Schlesinger Library.
12 PM ET
3 James Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
Next in Food Sustainability and Climate Change
Lectures • Next in ScienceWhat does climate change mean for our food systems? How do our food production and consumption habits contribute to the climate crisis? Speakers will explore the complex interplay of food and climate change, challenging and illuminating our unsustainable relationships with meat and water, soil and sea.
2 PM ET
10 Garden Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
The Moving Parts (&): Gallery Tour with Mary Lum (May)
Gallery EventsJoin the artist Mary Lum for a tour and discussion of commissioning the exhibition The Moving Parts (&), and making of the artist’s book.
12 PM ET
8 Garden Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
Milk, Sugar, Honey: Sweetness and the Making of the Modern World
Fellows' PresentationA presentation from 2022–2023 Evelyn Green Davis Fellow Elizabeth Maddock Dillon
12 PM ET
Minding the Gap: Gender and the Mental Health Crisis
Conferences & SymposiaHarvard Radcliffe Institute’s 2023 gender conference will explore the relationship between gender and mental health, with a focus on youth, underserved communities, and the impact of social justice issues.
9 AM ET
10 Garden Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
Tireless Sacred Work: Performance by and Conversation with Ezra Furman
PerformancesSinger, songwriter, musician, and critic Ezra Furman will perform and open Harvard Radcliffe Institute's “Minding the Gap: Gender and the Mental Health Crisis” conference. Through music and conversation, she will explore themes of identity and anxiety, angst and fearlessness.
7 PM ET
10 Garden Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
Eat, Poop, Die: How Animals Make Our World
Fellows' PresentationA presentation from 2022–2023 Radcliffe fellow Joe Roman
12 PM ET
Solidarity! Exhibition Gallery Tour
Gallery Events • Solidarity! Gallery SeriesPlease join us for a tour of the Solidarity! Transnational Feminisms Then and Now exhibition led by our student guides and staff from the Schlesinger Library.
11 AM ET
3 James Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
The Sky’s Not the Limit: My Journey into Space Exploration and STEM
Lectures • Kim and Judy Davis Dean’s Lecture in the SciencesThe 2023 Kim and Judy Davis Dean’s Lecture in the Sciences will feature space engineer MiMi Aung.
4 PM ET
10 Garden Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
Fascism in America
Fellows' PresentationA presentation from 2022–2023 Catherine A. and Mary C. Gellert Fellow Omer Aziz
12 PM ET
Mary Lum: The Moving Parts (&)
ExhibitionFor this exhibition, Mary Lum has created an artist’s book and installation featuring photographs of temporary constructions made from a palette of broken vintage letterforms. The small constructions carry ideas about language coming into being and piling up on itself. Fragments are rearranged in attempts to communicate, to form something whole and understandable, against backgrounds of varying colors.
through Saturday, June 24, 2023
8 Garden Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
Mindfulness Drawing Workshop with Cara Bean
Exhibition • Gallery Events • Drawing Us Together Gallery SeriesJoin cartoonist Cara Bean for an in-person and hands-on visual thinking and mindfulness workshop. Participants will review the basics of communicative and idea-generating drawing and develop skills needed to doodle as a form of play and problem solving.
11 AM ET
8 Garden Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
Thinking with Comics with Dan Nott
Exhibition • Gallery Events • Drawing Us Together Gallery SeriesJoin comics educator and cartoonist Dan Nott for an all-ages drawing workshop exploring visual metaphor and the unique power of combining words and pictures. Nott will provide an overview of his work and artistic process, and facilitate an activity on using basic drawing to depict complicated ideas and experiences.
2 PM ET
8 Garden Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
Exhibition: The Age of Roe: The Past, Present, and Future of Abortion in America
ExhibitionThe Age of Roe exhibition examines the political, cultural, and societal landscape of reproductive and women’s rights in America. It reevaluates the legacy of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision through the work of those who have defined the debate about reproduction in the past five decades and uplifts stories of women, people of color, and communities that have been affected by the ruling.
through Saturday, March 4, 2023
3 James Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
The Quarantine Public Library with Tracy Honn and Katie Garth
Exhibition • Gallery Events • Drawing Us Together Gallery SeriesQuarantine Public Library is a repository of one-page books made by artists, free for anyone to download, print, and assemble—to keep or give away. Tracy Honn and Katie Garth will present their collaborative project and talk about its origins, reception, and outcomes, as well as their approach and collection curation.
12 PM ET
Drawing Us Together: Gallery Tours with Curator Meg Rotzel
Exhibition • Gallery EventsJoin curator Meg Rotzel for a tour of the exhibition Drawing Us Together: Public Life and Public Health in Contemporary Comics. Learn about the topics raised in the exhibition and how comics are capable of telling stories across time, experience, and identity; and create your own zine.
through Wednesday, November 9, 2022
8 Garden Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
Drawing Us Together: Public Life and Public Health in Contemporary Comics
ExhibitionThis interactive exhibition—anchored by wall-sized graphics from the Center for Cartoon Studies’ graphic guides to the US healthcare system and democracy—includes a library of over 80 comics spanning the genres of memoir, historical narrative, graphic novel, and informational guide. The comics included in this exhibition illustrate who has the power to make decisions about our lives and our health, and how those decisions affect individuals and communities over time, often determined by class, race, gender, and zip code.
through Saturday, December 17, 2022
8 Garden Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
Out for Blood: Feminine Hygiene to Menstrual Equity
ExhibitionThroughout the 20th century, the marketing and design of menstrual products often stigmatized menstruation as an unmentionable bodily affliction. Menstruation was wrapped in euphemism: that time of the month, a weakness, a nuisance. “Feminine hygiene” products offered sanitation, invisibility, and freedom—but at what cost? Out for Blood: Feminine Hygiene to Menstrual Equity shows how marketing and social norms around menstruation create a cultural construct with power to shape people’s lives.
through Friday, September 30, 2022
3 James Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
Gala Porras-Kim: Precipitation for an Arid Landscape
ExhibitionDuring her 2019–2020 fellowship at Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Gala Porras-Kim researched how items from the Sacred Cenote of Chichén Itzá, a Maya site in the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico, arrived in the collections of Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. Precipitation for an Arid Landscape grows out of that research, presenting new work that explores how sacred objects may continue to perform their original functions once they enter museum collections and are subject to institutional paradigms of classification, conservation, and display.
through Thursday, June 30, 2022
8 Garden Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
Elect/Ability: Pride, Prejudice, and the Female Candidate
ExhibitionToday’s American political landscape showcases a diversity of strong female candidates, the culmination of a proud but contested history of women running for political office. This exhibition, drawn from the Schlesinger’s collections, presents a diversity of candidates and the struggles that they continue to face in the press, on the campaign trail, and once in office. Nevertheless, they persist.
through Friday, March 18, 2022
3 James Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
Brown II
ExhibitionTomashi Jackson combines a practice based in painting and printmaking with archival research in the histories of law, urbanism, and social justice. Her work plumbs the intersections between the formal languages of visual art (color, composition, layering) and the political languages driving the histories of segregation, voting rights, education, and housing in the United States. By activating these shared motifs of art and policy, her work brings the full power of both traditions to bear on historical engagement and critical action.
through Saturday, December 18, 2021
8 Garden Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
Accompanied: The Artworks of Marilyn Pappas and Jill Slosburg-Ackerman
ExhibitionThe virtual exhibition Accompanied: The Artworks of Marilyn Pappas and Jill Slosburg-Ackerman presents a pair of artists whose work was transformed by an abiding friendship. Pappas and Slosburg-Ackerman, both fellows at Radcliffe’s Bunting Institute in the 1980s, have sustained a conversation over four decades about artistic endeavor, studio practice, and pedagogy. The artists were members of the founding group of the Brickbottom Artists Building—one of the country’s first artist-developed live-work buildings—and are professors emeriti at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. They have continued to work in adjoining studios for more than 30 years and have taught generations of artists.
through Saturday, January 16, 2021
Seeing Citizens: Picturing American Women’s Fight for the Vote
ExhibitionView this digital exhibition on the Long 19th Amendment Project Portal.
through Thursday, August 26, 2021
EJ Hill: The Lily League
ExhibitionThe Lily League is part of a series of exhibitions referred to by EJ Hill as “lessons.” The Lily League borrows its name from the Black Star calla lily. Initiated during Hill's Radcliffe fellowship year, each of these lessons include a declarative chalkboard.
through Saturday, March 28, 2020
8 Garden Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
Dario Robleto: Unknown and Solitary Seas
ExhibitionDario Robleto’s exhibition for the Radcliffe Institute examines the 19th-century origins of the pulse wave as a graphic expression of internal life. He explores the profundity and confusion of this early moment, when ineffable emotional and sensory experiences first became visible as data.
through Saturday, January 18, 2020
8 Garden Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
Angela Davis: Freed by the People
ExhibitionNo single person sits more squarely at the intersection of transnational struggles for freedom than the controversial political activist and pioneering philosopher Angela Yvonne Davis. Her arrest, incarceration, and trial formed one of the most widely debated legal cases in world history. Because she sparked worldwide movements that changed the 20th century, Davis was “freed by the people” well before her trial came to an end.
through Monday, March 9, 2020
3 James Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
Pine in the Sand
ExhibitionPine in the Sand tells a story about unpredictable change while highlighting the often overlooked maintenance and infrastructure enlisted to preserve and stabilize the environment.
through Tuesday, February 23, 2021
10 Garden Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
Willie Cole: Beauties
ExhibitionWillie Cole’s Beauties are haunting, full-scale prints made from crushed and hammered ironing boards, each named after a woman from the artist’s family and cultural history. Cole has used irons and ironing as central motifs in his work for 30 years, evoking everything from African masks to slave ship diagrams to the routines of domestic servitude. In this special installation, the gallery will be lined wall to wall with the Beauties. Standing silent—like sentinels, tombstones, shrouds, or windows—the prints will open a space for confronting anew the whole range of often contradictory energies running through them: resistance and oppression, beauty and violence, labor and forbearance.
through Saturday, June 29, 2019
8 Garden Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
Clarissa Tossin: Future Fossil
ExhibitionClarissa Tossin RI ’18 expands on her fellowship project with a newly commissioned exhibition that considers the ecology of an uncertain future. Inspired by Octavia E. Butler’s science fiction trilogy Xenogenesis (1989), in which the Amazon becomes the site for a new civilization of alien-human hybrids, Tossin speculates on a postapocalyptic world following ecological collapse. Pairing DIY plastic recycling techniques with the materials and practices of Amazonian aesthetic traditions, she highlights the contemporary footprint left in the geological sedimentation of the earth. These new works consider indigenous knowledge in relationship to the environment while also resembling ruins of a world yet to come.
through Saturday, March 16, 2019
8 Garden Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
Anna Von Mertens: Measure
ExhibitionAnna Von Mertens uses the structures of quilting and drawing to examine the frontiers of human understanding. In this exhibition, commissioned for the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Von Mertens explores the life and work of Henrietta Leavitt, one of the women “computers” hired a century ago to study glass-plate astronomical photographs at the Harvard College Observatory. Leavitt searched for patterns among these glassy stars, and her findings provided a unit of measurement for galactic distances and led to our current understanding of the shape of the cosmos. Von Mertens’s meticulous stitches and intricate graphite marks reimagine Leavitt’s patient work, exploring the potency of single, measured actions as units of understanding.
through Saturday, January 19, 2019
8 Garden Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
Bouchra Khalili: Foreign Office
ExhibitionThe Radcliffe Institute presents a solo exhibition featuring a selection of elements of Bouchra Khalili’s work from Foreign Office, consisting of a digital film of the same title, a group of photographs, and a silkscreen print, titled The Archipelago. The exhibition’s combination of artistic elements suggests an alternative historiography of utopian movements—working in concert, they invite reflection on potential gestures of resistance for the present and the future.
through Saturday, April 21, 2018
8 Garden Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
Jennifer Bornstein: Feminist Archaeology
ExhibitionFeminist Archaeology, an exhibition created by Jennifer Bornstein RI ’15, is an interdisciplinary art project consisting of an original video projection with accompanying prints and sculptures. The exhibition explores various strains of feminism that the artist has experienced both personally and through her research and that have been somewhat at odds with one another over time.
through Saturday, January 20, 2018
8 Garden Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
Altered Gazes
ExhibitionAltered Gazes foregrounds women as creators and consumers of countercultural content. In addition to materials from our growing collection of comics, zines, erotica and pornography, and other alternative publications, the exhibition features materials from the Ludlow Santo Domingo Collection, one of the largest gatherings of underground, alternative, and pop-culture publications in the world.
through Friday, January 19, 2018
3 James Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
100+ Years at 73 Brattle
ExhibitionA public art installation by John Wang ’16, winner of the biennial Radcliffe Institute Public Art Competition
through Friday, March 1, 2019
10 Garden Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
Xaviera Simmons: Overlay
ExhibitionOverlay, an exhibition created by the multimedia artist Xaviera Simmons for Harvard Radcliffe Institute, uses text-based video, photographs, and soundscapes to feature characters rooted in stories and historical narratives found in the archives of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute’s Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America.
through Saturday, July 1, 2017
8 Garden Street
Cambridge, MA 02138