Past Events
& Exhibitions

Miguel Syjuco RI ’14 is an author, journalist, civil society advocate, and assistant professor of practice, literature and creative writing at New York University Abu Dhabi. This book talk will feature Syjuco’s most recent work, I Was the President’s Mistress!! (‎Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022).

Gish Jen RI ’02 is the award-winning author of Thank You, Mr. Nixon (Knopf, 2022), eight other books, and dozens of short stories and articles. Jen’s reading will be followed by a discussion with Alice Kessler-Harris RI ’02, R. Gordon Hoxie Professor Emerita of American History at Columbia University.

On the 50th anniversary of the passage of Title IX, we will celebrate the significant strides made in women’s athletics and discuss the inequities that remain. Current and former competitive athletes will reflect on advancements since 1972, share their personal experiences, and consider the best ways to push forward.

Heather Knight will present work from the Collaborative Humans and Robotics: Interaction, Sociability, Machine learning and Art (CHARISMA) robotics lab at Oregon State University. CHARISMA demonstrates the possibility of automated work and technology with everyday human communication and interactions.

This program will explore what real police accountability looks like and include the voices of current and former law enforcement officers, activists, and academics to ask the question: Who is policing the police?

Inclusions–a participatory, student-generated art installation–serves as the inspiration for this conversation about the intersection of art, visual culture, and representation at Harvard. The discussion will foreground the perspectives of the Harvard student organizers and focus on how we can use art to envision justice collectively and translate these ideas to the immediate context of our own campus.

Join us for a discussion featuring leading activists and scholars working toward menstrual justice. The program will open the exhibition Out for Blood: Feminine Hygiene to Menstrual Equity.

Join us for the second of two one-hour webinars exploring the legacy of Eileen Southern, author of The Music of Black Americans: A History and founder and editor of The Black Perspective in Music.

Michael W. Twitty will discuss his insights about the role of enslaved people in shaping American foodways, as well as the critical importance of including stories of the enslaved prominently in public history and historical interpretation.

On the 50th anniversary of the US Senate’s passage of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), leading experts on constitutional law, politics, gender, and race will explore the complex history and legacy of the ERA, female citizenship, and America's rights tradition more broadly.

Timnit Gebru will discuss why she founded the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR) and what she hopes this interdisciplinary, community-based, global network of artificial intelligence (AI) researchers can accomplish.

The speakers in “Next in Climate Change” will discuss emerging scientific research and multi-dimensional implications of climate change for people, society, and our planet.

Camille T. Dungy is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Trophic Cascade (Wesleyan University Press, 2017), winner of the Colorado Book Award, and the essay collection Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood and History (W.W. Norton, 2017), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. 

This year’s Julia S. Phelps Annual Lecture in the Arts and Humanities will feature W. Ralph Eubanks RI ’22, who seeks to tell the story of the struggle toward transformation in the Delta.

This installment in our winter series of Virtual Radcliffe Book Talks will feature Anita Hill, author of Believing: Our Thirty-Year Journey to End Gender Violence (Viking, 2021). Professor Hill is University Professor of Social Policy, Law, and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Brandeis University.

The 2022 Kim and Judy Davis Dean’s Lecture in the Humanities will feature Midori—artist, activist, and educator who explores and builds connections between music and the human experience, which makes her one of the most outstanding violinists of our time. She has performed with many of the world’s most prestigious orchestras and has collaborated with world-renowned musicians, including Leonard Bernstein, Yo-Yo Ma, and many others. 

This installment in our winter series of Virtual Radcliffe Book Talks features Tomiko Brown-Nagin, dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, who will discuss Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality (Pantheon, 2022).

Pathology plays a critical role in the diagnosis of disease and the development and implementation of tissue-based prognostic and predictive biomarkers. In this talk, Andrew H. Beck will discuss the potential for recent advances in artificial intelligence to significantly advance the accuracy, reliability, and predictiveness of pathology with applications to both clinical research and practice.

In this lecture, economist Darrick Hamilton argues that throughout human history racism, sexism, and other “isms” have been used strategically to consolidate economic and political power for some at the expense of others. Economic systems have been grounded in values of self-interested accumulation without bounds. But we can make a different political choice: an economy grounded in values of inclusion, human dignity, sustainability, and shared prosperity. Hamilton will discuss how—without this potent policy alternative that neuters racist regimes—white supremacy and the despotic political appeal for divisive leadership will remain.

Join us for the first of two one-hour webinars exploring the legacy of Eileen Southern, author of The Music of Black Americans: A History and founder and editor of The Black Perspective in Music.

Jennifer Rubin, a Washington Post opinion writer, will discuss how American women transformed their own lives and redefined US politics in the last election. Looking ahead, she will examine women’s key role in defending the rule of law and multiracial democracy.

The first-ever detections of gravitational waves from colliding black holes and neutron stars have launched a new era of gravitational wave astrophysics. Nergis Mavalvala, dean of and the Curtis (1963) and Kathleen Marble Professor of Astrophysics in the MIT School of Science, will describe the science, technology, and human story behind these discoveries.

The final installment in our summer series of Virtual Radcliffe Book Talks will feature a discussion of Our Bodies, Ourselves, first published in 1971. This event is organized in recognition of the 50th anniversary of the book’s first edition and in connection with the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective Records housed in our Schlesinger Library.

This installment in our summer series of Virtual Radcliffe Book Talks will feature Daniel Carpenter, author of Democracy by Petition: Popular Politics in Transformation, 1790–1870 (Harvard University Press, 2021). Carpenter is the faculty director of the social sciences at Harvard Radcliffe Institute and the Allie S. Freed Professor of Government in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

This installment in our summer series of Virtual Radcliffe Book Talks will feature Tiya Miles, author of All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake (Random House, 2021). Miles is a Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at Harvard Radcliffe Institute and a professor of history in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences.