Lecture Videos

Enjoy videos from our free public lecture series. Harvard faculty and other noted scholars share their research and the excitement of tackling big questions in the sciences, humanities, and the arts.

• Forever Is Now: Contemporary Art at the Pyramids of Giza
  November 13, 2024
  Nadine Abdel Ghaffar, Founder & Curator, CulturVator|Art D’Égypte

  Forever Is Now is a contemporary art exhibition at the 4500-year-old UNESCO World Heritage Site, the Pyramids of Giza. Against the backdrop of ancient Egypt’s cultural heritage, the contemporary installations are a testament to the continual evolution of art, the transformative power of storytelling, and cross-cultural exchange. Join Nadine Abdel Ghaffar, founder of CulturVator|Art D’Égypte, to explore how contemporary art intersects with ancient history, and how artists from diverse backgrounds use this historical space to celebrate humanity’s timelessness and the search for meaning and connection in art.

  About the Speaker: Nadine Abdel Ghaffar, a visionary French-Egyptian curator, with Greek ancestry, cultural consultant, and ambassador who bridges the rich heritage of Egypt with the dynamic world of contemporary art and design. As the founder of Art D’Égypte, Nadine has revolutionized the art scene in Egypt and beyond, organizing groundbreaking exhibitions that blend contemporary and ancient art in iconic settings such as the Egyptian Museum and the Pyramids of Giza. Her work has received international acclaim and UNESCO patronage, showcasing the profound connections between Egypt’s past and its vibrant present. Under Nadine’s leadership, Art D’Égypte has evolved into CulturVator, a multidisciplinary cultural consultancy that activates spaces for artistic and cultural promotion across various fields including fashion, design, and film. She creates cultural bridges to promote Egypt’s legacy on the international stage by collaborating with global brands like DIOR. Nadine’s dedication to empowering female artists and her recognition as a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government exemplify her commitment to advancing the arts and cultural heritage.

• Rediscovering Sculptures of King Menkaure at the Giza Pyramids
  October 16, 2024
  Mark Lehner, Director and President, Ancient Egypt Research Associates, Inc.

  Between 1908–1910, Harvard’s George Reisner found some of the most iconic pieces of ancient Egyptian art at the Menkaure Valley Temple at Giza—including four magnificent triad statues and the larger pair statue now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Over a century later, Ancient Egypt Research Associates (AERA) reinvestigated the temple. Join AERA President Mark Lehner to learn about new findings that span 300 years—from the time of Menkaure to the end of the Old Kingdom (2447–2153 BCE). Lehner also revisits the site where Reisner found the famous pair statue of the king and an unidentified woman–possibly his queen, mother, or a goddess–with surprising new results. About the Speaker: Mark Lehner is Director and President of Ancient Egypt Research Associates, Inc. (AERA). His forty years of archaeological research in Egypt includes mapping the Great Sphinx and discovering a major part of the Lost City of the Pyramids at Giza. Lehner directs the Giza Plateau Mapping Project (GPMP), which conducts annual excavations of Old Kingdom settlements near the Sphinx and Pyramids with an interdisciplinary and international team of archaeologists, geochronologists, botanists, and faunal specialists. From 1990–1995 Lehner was Assistant Professor of Egyptian Archaeology at the University of Chicago. He is now Associate at the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures of the University of Chicago.

• Uncovering Stars in an Egyptian Temple: The New Sky over Esna
  September 18, 2024
  Christian Leitz, Director of the Department of Egyptology, Institute for Ancient Near Eastern Studies (AINES), University of Tübingen, Germany

  The front vestibule–or pronaos–of the temple of Esna, well-known for its elaborate decorations, is one of the last examples of ancient Egyptian temple architecture. In 2018, the University of Tübingen, in cooperation with the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, launched a complete restoration of the vestibule. The six-year-long project has revealed a magnificent astronomical ceiling, colorful columns, and close to two hundred ink inscriptions previously undescribed. This lecture gives an overview of the restoration project, focusing on the astronomical ceiling and its multiple features, such as the path of the sun and moon, stars used for keeping time, Egyptian constellations, and the twelve signs of the zodiac. About the Speaker: Christian Leitz is the Director of the Department of Egyptology and the Institute for Ancient Near Eastern Studies (AINES) at the University of Tübingen, Germany. He holds a PhD in Egyptian Astronomy and completed his Habilitation in Cologne, studying the Calendar of Lucky and Unlucky Days. His primary research interests include Greco-roman temples, astronomy, medicine, and zoology.

• The Cat’s Meow: How Cats Evolved from the Savanna to Your Sofa
  September 21, 2024
  Jonathan Losos, Director, Living Earth Collaborative; William H. Danforth Distinguished University Professor in Arts & Sciences, Department of Biology, Washington University in St. Louis

  Do lions and tigers meow? Why does my cat leave dead mice at my feet? Should I get a pet ocelot? How did the cat make its leap off the African plain? The domestic cat has, through both natural and artificial selection, transformed into one of our planet’s most successful and diverse species. Yet the cat, ever a predator, still seems only one paw out of the wild. Join Jonathan Losos, scientist, cat lover, and author of The Cat’s Meow (Viking Press, 2023), to learn how researchers are using modern technology to unravel the secrets of the cat and explore the future for both Felis catus and Homo sapiens.

  Presented by the Harvard Museum of Natural History and Harvard Museums of Science & Culture. The Evolution Matters Series is supported through the Herman and Joan Suit lecture Fund and presented in their memory.

  “[An] engaging and wide-ranging narrative…The Cat’s Meow is a readable and informed exploration of the wildcat that lurks within Fluffy.” —The Washington Post

  “Losos is an engaging and often funny guide who explains the science clearly and with nuance.” —New Scientist

  “[A] labyrinth of fascinating riddles explored by Jonathan Losos—himself a lifelong ailurophile as well as an eminent evolutionary biologist—in this engaging and very smart book.” —David Quammen, author of The Song of the Dodo and Breathless

• Manifest: Thirteen Colonies Exhibition Conversation
  May 16, 2024
  Wendel A. White, 2021 Robert Gardner Fellow in Photography, Peabody Museum

  Wendel A. White, Distinguished Professor of Art, Stockton University; 2021 Robert Gardner Fellow in Photography, Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology, Harvard University In conversation with William E. Williams, Audrey A. and John L. Dusseau Professor in the Humanities; Professor of Fine Arts, Haverford College

  Visual artist Wendel A. White photographs objects, documents, and books held in public collections to explore the complexities of American history, slavery, abolition, concepts of race, and Black life and culture. In this program, marking the upcoming exhibition of his work at the Peabody Museum, White engaged in a conversation with photographer William E. Williams, whose own images of architecture, landscapes, and African American historical sites, examine similar topics. Both artists shared their approaches to documenting complex and painful aspects of U.S. history. They highlighted marginalized or overlooked Black and African American stories of resilience, ingenuity, and agency and discussed reconnecting consciousness and memories to places and objects that signify the lives and experiences of Black communities.

• Reading Genetic Tea Leaves
  May 2, 2024
  Molly Przeworski – Alan H. Kempner Professor of Biological Sciences & Systems Biology, Columbia University

  Natural populations harbor extensive genetic diversity. In humans, these genetic differences are being used to predict some individual traits, such as height; cancer risk; and even educational attainment. Population geneticist Molly Przeworski introduces the idea behind these predictions and highlights some of their pitfalls, notably the difficulty of disentangling genetic and environmental effects. She also discusses how similar approaches can be used to predict the response of non-model organisms to strong selection pressures from climate change, with an example from corals.

  About the Speaker: Molly Przeworski is a population geneticist at Columbia University. She is interested in the evolutionary roots of heritable variation within and between species. Her research focuses primarily on the two processes that generate genetic variation, mutation, and recombination, and why they differ among vertebrate species. Research in her lab has also clarified how natural selection operates in human populations: notably, it has demonstrated that few recent human adaptations involved new, single changes of large effect and helped characterize the footprints of other forms of adaptation in genetic variation data. In parallel, her group has worked on mapping trait variation to the genome, both to investigate what associations are being detected in humans and to extend the approach to non-model organisms subject to strong selection pressures from climate change. Dr. Przeworski holds a BA in mathematics from Princeton University and a PhD from the Committee on Evolutionary Biology at the University of Chicago. She then conducted postdoctoral research in the statistics department of the University of Oxford. Before moving to Columbia University, she was a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and a faculty member at Brown University and the University of Chicago. Her work has been recognized by the Rosalind Franklin Award from the Genetics Society of America, a Sloan Research Fellowship, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Early Career Scientist Award, and the Scientific Achievement Award from the American Society of Human Genetics. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. Presented in collaboration with the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University.

• India: An Amphibian Hotspot
  April 25, 2024
  S.D. Biju (Sathyabhama Das Biju) – Professor, Department of Environmental Studies, University of Delhi, India; Radcliffe Hrdy Fellow, Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study; Associate, Museum of Comparative Zoology; and Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University.

  Scientists estimate that only 30 percent of Earth’s biodiversity–including plants, animals, bacteria, and fungi–is known. Due to human activities, habitats across the world are changing or being destroyed. As a result, an increasing number of organisms are threatened or on the brink of extinction–even before they have been documented or described. Amphibians—a group that includes frogs, toads, salamanders, and newts—are particularly vulnerable to habitat changes, pollution, and drought, and species in this group are becoming extinct at alarming rates. In this talk, S. D. Biju discusses his thirty years of research on the frogs of India and Asia and highlights the key role that scientists play in the conservation of species.

  About the Speaker

  S.D. Biju (Sathyabhama Das Biju) is an amphibian biologist whose research focuses on the systematics, evolution, behavior, and biogeography of amphibians, as well as their conservation through the discovery and documentation of species. Popularly known as the “Frogman of India,” his three decades of work has attracted global attention to amphibians in South Asia, and an upsurge in scientific knowledge. He is the only Indian herpetologist to describe 116 new amphibian taxa (2 families, 10 genera, 106 species)—nearly 25 percent of the country’s diversity. Biju’s contributions to amphibian research and conservation have received prestigious recognitions such as the IUCN/ASG SABIN Award 2008 and Indian State Government’s highest civilian award Kerala Sree 2022. He was elected to the Indian National Science Academy in 2023. Biju has published over 100 research articles in scientific journals, including Nature, Science, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. His findings have appeared in BBC, National Geographic, CNN, Times, Forbes, The Economist, New York Times, and The Guardian. During his extensive field studies in forests across Asia, Biju has photographed amphibians with the aim of documenting their diversity, life histories, and behaviors. His photographs have appeared in books and media articles in over ten world languages, have been featured as the covers of several magazines including The Economist (2012), and selected among various best photography categories in Nature magazine (2012), National Geographic (2012), and The Guardian (2017). S.D. Biju holds a PhD in botany from the University of Calicut, India, and a second PhD in animal science from Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium.

• Soil to Foil: Aluminum and the Quest for Industrial Sustainability
  November 6, 2023
  Saleem H. Ali, Blue and Gold Distinguished Professor of Energy and the Environment at the University of Delaware

  “With approachable storytelling, in Soil to Foil, environmental scientist Saleem Ali masterfully traces one such story—the story of aluminum…” —Katrin Daehn, Science

  Aluminum is the most abundant metal in the earth’s crust. It is also ubiquitous in the modern world, from aircraft to soda cans. Today, the efficiency with which we use—and reuse—aluminum is vital to addressing key environmental challenges and understanding humanity’s fraught relationship with the earth. In Soil to Foil (Columbia University Press, 2023), Saleem Ali tells the extraordinary story of aluminum. He reveals its pivotal role in the histories of scientific inquiry and technological innovation as well as its importance to sustainability. He highlights scientists and innovators who discovered new uses for this remarkable element, ranging from chemistry and geoscience to engineering and industrial design. Ali argues that aluminum use exemplifies broader lessons about stewardship of nonrenewable resources: its seeming abundance has given rise to wasteful and destructive practices.

  Presented by the Harvard Museum of Natural History and the Harvard Museums of Science & Culture.

  About the Speaker

  Lecture by Saleem H. Ali, Blue and Gold Distinguished Professor of Energy and the Environment at the University of Delaware and a senior fellow at the Columbia University Center on Sustainable Investment. He is a member of the United Nations International Resource Panel and the Scientific and Technical Advisory Panel of the Global Environment Facility.

• The Power of Antiquity in the Making of Modern Egypt
  April 21, 2023
  Wendy Doyon, Historian of Archaeology and Modern Egypt

  Ancient Egypt conjures images of pharaonic temples, tombs, and pyramids, and perhaps, even the familiar illustrations from children’s books and magazines showing kilted workers on the Nile toiling away on their kings’ great monuments. But what is the relationship between these images—along with the deep history they evoke and the processes of discovery that made them visible—and the history of modern Egypt? In this talk, Wendy Doyon will discusses the relationship between state, archaeology, and labor in Mehmed (or Muhammad) Ali’s Egypt—an autonomous khedival, or viceregal, state within the late Ottoman Empire—and explain how the power of the Egyptian state in the nineteenth century was built, in large part, on the creation of modern antiquities land and the organization of Egyptian workers as state assets controlled by Mehmed Ali Pasha and his dynasty-building successors.

  About the Speaker

  Wendy Doyon is an historian of archaeology and modern Egypt. She is currently writing a history of Egyptian archaeology and its political economy in nineteenth-century Egypt based on her doctoral research at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the co-creator and media manager of Abydos Archaeology, an educational program of the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU excavations at Abydos, Egypt, where she is also an NEH grant collaborator on “The Abydos Royal Breweries and the Emergence of Kingship in Egypt” research project. Her recent publications have appeared in the Journal of the American Oriental Society (JAOS), Unmasking Ideology in Imperial and Colonial Archaeology (Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press), Histories of Egyptology: Interdisciplinary Measures (Routledge), and British Museum Studies in Ancient Egypt and Sudan (BMSAES); she also writes regularly for the Abydos Archaeology blog at abydos.org. She holds a PhD in History from the University of Pennsylvania, an MA in Museology from the University of Washington, and a BA in Linguistics and Anthropology from the University of Washington.

• The Mummies of Aswan: The Missing Link
  November 2, 2023
  Patrizia Piacentini, University of Milan “La Statale”

  In recent years more than four hundred ancient tombs, dating from the 6th century BCE to the 3rd century CE, have been discovered on the West Bank at Aswan, Egypt, near the Aga Khan mausoleum. A multidisciplinary team, including the Egyptian-Italian Mission, has found more than a hundred individuals along with their funerary equipment. Piacentini will share the first results of this archaeological research, highlighting the multicultural environment of the necropolis and possible diverse geographical origins of the people buried there. About the Speaker: Patrizia Piacentini, is a member of the Academy of the Lyncean (Rome), the Ambrosiana Academy (Milan), and a corresponding member of the Advisory Committee of the Shanghai Archaeology Forum, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. She is also professor of Egyptology and Egyptian Archaeology at the University of Milan (since 1993). In 2022, the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (Paris) awarded her the Gaston Maspero Lifetime Achievement Award. At the University of Milan, Piacentini sits in different committees. She has been coordinator of the PhD Program in Literature, Arts and Environmental Heritage (2018–2021). Since 1999, she has managed the scientific and organizational direction of the Egyptological Library and Archives which she founded at the same university. She is director of EIMAWA, the Egyptian-Italian Mission at West Aswan which excavates and studies a large necropolis used from the 6th century BC to the 3rd century AD She serves on scientific and presidential committees of Egyptological foundations and associations, including the Fondation Michela Schiff-Giorgini (Lausanne), and has been the representative for Italy of the International Association of Egyptologists (2015–2023). She has also been invited as Gale Visiting Fellow of The Australian Centre for Egyptology at Macquarie University, for lectures at Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, and Perth (2019). Author of numerous monographs and scientific articles, she has organized Egyptology-themed exhibitions in various countries around the world and numerous conferences. She is also founder and editor of the journal EDAL, Egyptian and Egyptological Documents Archives Libraries (Milan), and serves on the scientific or editorial boards of several journals, including Aegyptus (Milan).
• The Living Dead in Ancient Egypt
  October 11, 2023
  Julia Troche, Associate Professor, Missouri State University; Visiting Scholar in Egyptology and Assyriology, Brown University

  “Oh Unas, you have not gone away dead, but alive.” The Pyramid Text quoted here tells us that the ancient Egyptians believed in the continued influence of the dead in the lives of the living. The dead in ancient Egypt were supernatural intermediaries, folk heroes, and some were even deified, worshiped as gods in the Egyptian pantheon. This talk builds on the research found in Dr. Troche’s first book, Death, Power, and Apotheosis in Ancient Egypt (Cornell University Press, 2021) and invites audiences to learn about the spectrum of deceased actors in ancient Egypt. In particular, she delves into the process by which some of these dead were deified and the ramifications of this deification, such as challenging royal authority during the Pyramid Age.

  Presented by the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East and Harvard Museums of Science & Culture.

  About the Speaker

  Dr. Julia Troche is an Egyptologist, historian, and educator. She holds a PhD in Egyptology from Brown University and a BA in History from the University of California, Los Angeles. She is currently associate professor at Missouri State University in Springfield, Missouri, (on sabbatical, 2023–24). She serves as a governor for the Board of the American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE), is vice president and cofounder of ARCE-Missouri, and sits on the American Society of Overseas Research (ASOR)’s diversity, equity, and inclusion committee. Julia’s first book, Death, Power, and Apotheosis in Ancient Egypt: The Old and Middle Kingdoms was published in 2021 with Cornell University Press. She is currently working on a book about the god Ptah for Bloomsbury, a textbook (with B. Brinkman) for Routledge, and a series of articles on Egyptomania and Imhotep that she hopes to turn into a public-facing book.

• Finding the God Osiris: Latest Excavations at Abusir and Saqqara
  September, 28, 2023
  Miroslav Bárta, Charles University, Czech Institute of Egyptology

  Miroslav Bárta presents the latest results from archaeological research at Abusir and Saqqara, two ancient Egyptian cemeteries. The exploration of several historically essential tombs dating to the Fifth Dynasty sheds new light on the rise and fall of the Old Kingdom empire and the introduction of the god of afterlife, Osiris, into ancient Egyptian society. Presented by the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East. About the Speaker Professor Miroslav Bárta is a Czech Egyptologist and archaeologist. He currently focuses on the study of Egyptian late prehistory and the Old Kingdom, a comparative study of civilizations and their rise and fall. He has led excavations at the site of Usli in Sudan and discovered settlements of early Christian communities at the El-Heyz oasis in Egypt’s Western Desert, organized expeditions to Gilf Kebir, where his expedition discovered the possible origins of ancient Egyptian civilization. Since 2010, he has been in charge of interdisciplinary excavations at the pyramid field of Abusir, where under his leadership, many discoveries have been made in recent years, including the tomb of the legendary sage Kairsu, the tomb of the priest Ptahshepses, and the temple of Ramesse II. He is the author of the theory of seven laws explaining the evolution of civilizations. Bárta is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the New York Explorers Club.

• How Beer Made Kings in Early Egypt
  October, 14, 2021
  Matthew Douglas Adams, Director, Abydos Archaeology; Senior Research Scholar, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University

  Matthew Douglas Adams, Director, Abydos Archaeology; Senior Research Scholar, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University

  The remains of a 5000-year-old brewery found in the ancient Egyptian city of Abydos are providing insights into the relationship between large-scale beer production and the development of kingship in Egypt. Archaeological evidence indicates that the Abydos brewery produced beer on a truly industrial scale—something unparalleled in early Egypt. Matthew Adams will share findings from recent excavations at the brewery and will consider it in context as part of a broad pattern of royal activity at the site that served to define the very nature of kingship at the beginning of Egypt’s history.

  About the Speaker

  Matthew Douglas Adams, Senior Research Scholar at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, holds a dual PhD in Anthropology and Egyptology from the University of Pennsylvania and has directed fieldwork at Abydos for more than thirty years. His most recent publications include “The Origins of Sacredness at Abydos,” in Abydos: The Sacred Land at the Western Horizon (2019), I. Regulski, ed., BMPES 8, pp. 25–70.

• Divine Mortals: Royal Ancestor Worship in Deir el-Medina
  April 18, 2023
  Yasmin El Shazly, Deputy Director for Research and Programs, American Research Center in Egypt

  The Egyptian craftsmen and artists who created and decorated royal tombs during the New Kingdom period (ca. 1550–1070 BCE) lived in Deir el-Medina. Today, this well-preserved village is a key source of information about the daily lives, artistic practices, and religious traditions of ancient Egyptians. Yasmin El Shazly discusses the importance of ancestor worship in Deir el-Medina—particularly of Amenhotep I and his mother Ahmose-Nefertari. Prominently featured in homes, artwork, and tombs, these two royal figures held important positions in the Egyptian “hierarchy of being” and exerted great influence over the daily lives of Deir el-Medina residents.

  About the Speaker

  Dr. Yasmin El Shazly is Deputy Director for Research and Programs at the American Research Center in Egypt. She previously held the position of General Supervisor of the Department of International Organizations of Cultural Heritage and International Cooperation (2016–2018) and Assistant to the Minister for Museum Affairs (2015–2016) at the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities (now the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities). She was also head of the Registration, Collections Management, and Documentation Department at the Egyptian Museum, Cairo (2009–2016) and a member of the Museum’s Board of Directors (2010–2013). Dr. El Shazly is currently a member of several boards, including ICOM Egypt (Vice Chair), Interdisciplinary Egyptology and Kitab (Editorial Board Member). She has taught courses at the American University in Cairo, Cairo University, and AMIDEAST. Dr. El Shazly earned her BA from the American University in Cairo and her MA and PhD from Johns Hopkins University. Her PhD dissertation, entitled Royal Ancestor Worship in Deir el-Medina during the New Kingdom, was published by Abercromby Press in 2015. She has published several academic papers and has appeared in numerous documentaries, the last of which was PBS’s Tutankhamun: Allies and Enemies.

• When Evolution Hurts
  March 2, 2023
  Terence D. Capellini, Professor of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University

  Being able to walk upright on two feet is a physical trait that distinguishes modern humans from our early ancestors. While the evolution of bipedalism has contributed to our success as a species, it has also limited the evolution of other features and increased our risk for certain diseases. Terence D. Capellini discusses the genetic research that is helping scientists better understand the relationship between bipedalism and our risk of developing knee osteoarthritis—a degenerative disease that afflicts at least 250 million people worldwide. By understanding the evolutionary history and genetics of this condition, preventive screenings and potential treatments may be developed.

  Terence D. Capellini is Professor of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. He holds a PhD from the New York Consortium in Evolutionary Primatology (C.U.N.Y) working in the laboratory of Licia Selleri (Weill Cornell Medicine) and performed his post-doctoral research in the laboratory of David Kingsley (Stanford University). His interdisciplinary lab bridges functional genomics and genetics, developmental biology, medical genetics, and paleoanthropology. His lab currently focuses on how gene regulation shapes different bones of the skeleton, how interbreeding with Neandertals facilitated human skeletal adaptations, and most applicable, how alterations to gene regulation during human evolution have influenced the modern world-wide risk of joint-specific osteoarthritis.

  Presented by the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology, the Harvard Museum of Natural History, and the Harvard Museums of Science & Culture

• Panel Discussion: In Search of Thoreau’s Flowers
  November 17, 2022
  Charles Davis, Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology & Curator of Vascular Plants, Harvard University Herbaria
  Marsha Gordon, Professor, North Carolina State University
  Emily Meineke, Assistant Professor, University of California, Davis
  Leah Sobsey, Artist, Curator, Associate Professor of Photography, and Director of the Gatewood Gallery, University of North Carolina
  Robin Vuchnich, Artist, UX Designer, Assistant Professor of the Practice, North Carolina State University
  Moderated by Elena Kramer, Bussey Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology; Interim Director, Harvard University Herbaria, Harvard University

  How can an imaginative fusion of art and science help us reach a meaningful understanding of the relationship between our actions, climate change, and diminishing biodiversity? This panel features the artists and scientists who collaborated in developing In Search of Thoreau’s Flowers, an exhibition now on view at the Harvard Museum of Natural History. The inspiration for this project was a set of 648 plant specimens in the Harvard University Herbaria that were collected by Henry David Thoreau at Walden Pond. Utilizing photography, botanical data, and digital art, the exhibition explores and visualizes the richness of plant diversity in eastern Massachusetts and reflects on how climate change continues to impact this diversity.

• Rethinking Maya Heritage: Past and Present

  October 20, 2022
  2022 Gordon R. Willey Lecture
  Richard M. Leventhal, Professor, Department of Anthropology and Executive Director, Penn Cultural Heritage Center, Penn Museum, University of Pennsylvania

  The story of Maya culture as a once-great civilization that built towering pyramids in the jungles of Central America was developed and popularized by national governments, anthropologists, and archaeologists. Previously unable to control the story of their own culture, Maya communities today are actively reframing their heritage and centering their most recent history—not the distant past—to regain power and self-determination. Richard Leventhal will discuss the importance and role that the nineteenth-century Caste War—one of the largest and most successful Indigenous rebellions—is playing in the Maya’s contested heritage.

  About the Speaker

  Richard M. Leventhal is Executive Director of the Penn Cultural Heritage Center of the Penn Museum as well as Professor in the Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania. He serves as Curator in the American Section at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology where he formerly served as the Williams Director. Prior to coming to Penn, he was the President of the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico and Director of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Leventhal received his PhD from Harvard University. He is one of the Directors of the Tihosuco Heritage Preservation and Community Development Project focused upon the nineteenth-century Caste War rebellion in the Yucatan. He has written extensively about the Maya and about cultural heritage preservation.

• The “Mummy Portraits” of Roman Egypt: Status, Ethnicity, and Magic

  October 06, 2022
  Lorelei H. Corcoran, Professor of Art History; Director, Institute of Egyptian Art & Archaeology University of Memphis

  In ancient Egypt, one of the final steps in the mummification process was to equip the body with a permanent face covering that helped to protect the head and also to ritually transform the deceased into a god. The earliest examples of these were stylized masks, later replaced by more realistic-looking, painted portraits. Using evidence from the archaeological record and the Book of the Dead—a series of spells meant to guide the dead as they sought eternal life— Lorelei Corcoran will discuss the production and function of the “mummy portraits” that were popular throughout Egypt in the Roman period and what these images reveal about the religious beliefs and multi-layered ethnicities of their subjects.

  Presented by the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East and the Harvard Museums of Science & Culture in collaboration with the Harvard Art Museums
   

  Related exhibition at the Harvard Art Museums: Funerary Portraits from Roman Egypt open through December 31, 2022

  About the Speaker

  Lorelei H. Corcoran is Professor of Art History (Egyptian art and archaeology) and Director of the Institute of Egyptian Art & Archaeology at the University of Memphis, TN. She earned a BA in Classical Studies at Tufts University and a PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations (Egyptology) at the University of Chicago. Her publications include Herakleides: A Portrait Mummy from Roman Egypt (Getty, 2010) with Marie Svoboda and Portrait Mummies from Roman Egypt (1-IVth Centuries AD) with a Catalog of Portrait Mummies in Egyptian Museums (Chicago, 1995), as well as contributions to the multi-disciplinary studies, Dress in Mediterranean Antiquity: Greeks, Romans, Jews, Christians (Bloomsbury, 2021) and Portrait of a Child: Historical and Scientific Studies of a Roman Egyptian Mummy (Northwestern, 2019).

  Professor Corcoran’s research interests have focused in depth on the funerary traditions of Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt but also include the complementarity of text and image in Egyptian art and the role of color in Egyptian art. In 2016, she published the results of her identification of the earliest use of the manmade pigment Egyptian blue on a predynastic bowl in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (“The Color Blue as an Animator in Ancient Egyptian Art,” in Global Color History: Interpreting the Ancient Spectrum [Gorgias Press, 2016]). Her work in museums has taken her around the globe and her fieldwork experience in Egypt includes participation as a staff member for the University of Chicago’s Epigraphic Survey and the University of Memphis’ excavation of KV-63 in Luxor, Egypt.  She has been invited to lecture at, among other institutions, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the University of Chicago, Brown University, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the British Museum and has been interviewed by the New York Times, the BBC, and NPR.

• Testosterone: The Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us

  September 16, 2022
  Carole Hooven, Lecturer, and Codirector of Undergraduate Studies, Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University
  In conversation with:
  Daniel Gilbert, Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology, Harvard University

  While most people agree that sex differences in human behavior exist, they disagree about the reasons. But the science is clear: testosterone is a potent force in human society, driving the bodies and behavior of the sexes apart. As Carole Hooven shows in her book T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us (Henry Holt & Company, 2021), it does so in concert with genes and culture to produce a vast variety of male and female behavior. And, crucially, the fact that many sex differences are grounded in biology provides no support for restrictive gender norms or patriarchal values. In conversation with Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, Hooven will discuss why an understanding of testosterone can lead to a better understanding of ourselves and one another—and can help build a fairer, safer society.

  Evolution Matters Lecture Series
  Series supported by a generous gift from Drs. Herman and Joan Suit

  To join the program, you will need to download the free Zoom app in advance. If you already have Zoom, you do not need to download it again. For details on how to improve your Zoom experience, visit the How to Attend an HMSC Program webpage

  About the Speakers

  Carole Hooven, PhD, is lecturer and codirector of undergraduate studies in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. She earned her PhD at Harvard, studying sex differences and testosterone and has taught there since then. Hooven has received numerous teaching awards and her popular Hormones and Behavior class was named one of Harvard Crimson’s “top ten tried and true.”

  Daniel Gilbert is Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and author of Stumbling on Happiness, a New York Times bestseller and winner of a Royal Society Prize for Science Books. He has won numerous awards for his research and teaching, including the American Psychological Association’s Distinguished Scientific Award for an Early Career Contribution to Psychology. In 2008 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

• Why Sharks Matter: Shark Science and Conservation

  September 6, 2022
  Speaker: Dr. David Shiffman, Marine Conservation Biologist, Arizona State University

  Sharks are some of the most fascinating, most ecologically important, most threatened, and most misunderstood animals on Earth. Join award-winning marine conservation biologist Dr. David Shiffman, author of the new book Why Sharks Matter: A Deep Dive with the World’s Most Misunderstood Predator, for a conversation about what’s new and what’s next in the world of shark science and conservation.

  About the Speaker

  Dr. David Shiffman is a Washington, DC based marine conservation biologist who studies sharks and how to protect them. An award-winning writer, educator, and public speaker, his words have appeared in National Geographic, Scientific American, the Washington Post, and a monthly column in SCUBA diving magazine. He is the author of the new book Why Sharks Matter: A Deep Dive With the World’s Most Misunderstood Predator. Follow him on social media @WhySharksMatter where he’s always happy to answer any questions anyone has about sharks.

• Manifest: Thirteen Colonies Lecture & Conversation
  April 7, 2022
  Wendel White, Distinguished Professor of Art & American Studies, Stockton University; 2021 Robert Gardner Fellow in Photography, Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology, Harvard University, in conversation with Brenda Tindal, Executive Director, Harvard Museums of Science & Culture

  Manifest: Thirteen Colonies is a photographic project and journey through the repositories of African-American material culture found in libraries, museums, and archives of the original thirteen English colonies. Conceived by photographer Wendel White, this project is a personal, selective reliquary of the remarkable evidence of Black agency and racial oppression stored in public and private collections. In this program, White discusses his approach to finding, selecting, and photographing artifacts—from rare singular objects, to more quotidian materials—and highlights their significance as forensic evidence of Black life and history in the United States. A conversation with public historian Brenda Tindal follows.

  This program is supported by the Robert Gardner Fellowship Fund

  About the Speaker

  Wendel White has taught photography at the School of Visual Arts, New York, NY; The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, New York, NY; the International Center for Photography, New York, NY; Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY; and is currently Distinguished Professor of Art & American Studies at Stockton University, Galloway, NJ. White is the fourteenth recipient of the Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography, Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnography, Harvard University. He has received other awards and fellowships including a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in Photography, three artist fellowships from the New Jersey State Council for the Arts, a Bunn Lectureship in Photography and grants from Center, Santa Fe, NM (Juror’s Choice), the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, and a New Works Photography Fellowship from En Foco, New York, NY. His work is represented in museum and corporate collections including Duke University; the New Jersey State Museum; California Institute for Integral Studies; The Graham Foundation for the Advancement of the Fine Arts, Chicago, IL; En Foco, New York, NY; Rochester Institute of Technology; The Museum of Fine Art, Houston; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL; Haverford College, Haverford, PA; University of Delaware; University of Alabama; and the New York Public Library Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York, NY. White has served on the board of directors for the Society for Photographic Education including three years as board chair. He has also served on the Kodak Educational Advisory Council, NJ; Save Outdoor Sculpture, the Atlantic City Historical Museum, and the New Jersey Black Culture and Heritage Foundation. White was a board member, including three years as board chair, of the New Jersey Council for the Humanities. Recent projects include; Red Summer; Manifest; Schools for the Colored; Village of Peace: An African American Community in Israel; Small Towns, Black Lives; and others.

• Exploring Humanity’s Technological Origins
  April 6, 2022
  Sonia F. Harmand, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, Turkana Basin Institute, Stony Brook University; Director, Mission Préhistorique au Kenya/West Turkana Archaeological Project

  Human evolutionary scholars have long assumed that the earliest stone tools were made by members of the genus Homo, 2.4–2.3 million years ago, and that this technological development was directly linked to climate change and the spread of savannah grasslands. In the last decade, fieldwork in West Turkana, Kenya, has revealed evidence of much earlier technological behavior. Sonia Harmand discusses the discovery of stone tools in a 3.3-million-year-old archaeological site in Kenya known as Lomekwi 3. She shows how this discovery is reshaping our understanding of the emergence of human-like manipulative capabilities, as well as the development of cognition in early hominins—the group consisting of modern humans and all our immediate ancestors.

• Exploring Egypt’s Middle Kingdom at the Site of Ancient Thebes
  March 31, 2022
  Antonio J. Morales, Assistant Professor of Egyptology, University of Alcalá; Real Colegio Complutense Visiting Fellow 2022, Harvard University; Director, The Middle Kingdom Theban Project

  One of ancient Egypt’s high points of cultural, intellectual, and social life was the period referred to as the Middle Kingdom (2030–1650 BCE). The ancient city of Thebes (modern Luxor) was the Egyptian capital during the early stage of this period and the site of multiple funerary temples and tombs. In this lecture, Egyptologist Antonio Morales discusses an international and multidisciplinary project that is conducting archaeological, historical, and cultural research, as well as conservation work, in Deir el-Bahari and Asasif—two funerary areas at Thebes—to better understand the city’s role in the development of Egypt’s classical age.

• Restoring Ecosystems in a Time of Ongoing Global Change

  March 23, 2022
  David Moreno Mateos, Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture, Harvard Graduate School of Design; Affiliate of the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University

  How long does it take for an ecosystem to recover after it is disturbed or destroyed by human activities? How do we know when an ecosystem has recovered? In this lecture, restoration ecologist David Moreno Mateos will discuss the traditional methods used to assess the recovery of terrestrial ecosystems—such as changes in biodiversity or soil carbon levels—and highlight their limitations. He will make a case for more comprehensive and long-term approaches to understanding and measuring ecosystem recovery and highlight their potential for enhancing environmental policies and large-scale restoration strategies.

  This program is supported by the Michael V. Dyett Lecture Fund.

  About the Speaker

  David Moreno Mateos is a restoration ecologist interested in understanding the long-term recovery of ecosystems degraded by human development. His research aims to estimate how long it takes for ecosystems to recover their less resilient attributes such as the interactions among soil organisms and plants. Better understanding these processes will enable the development of new tools that increase the currently limited performance of ecosystem restoration and increase ecological understanding of landscape architecture. He works on areas degraded by human activities, agricultural fields or mines, abandoned centuries ago. Some of these field sites are the forests of New England, recovering from European settlement agriculture for about 200 years, and Southwest Greenland, where Norse sites have been recovering from ancient agriculture for more than 650 years.

  
  David holds a PhD from the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and the University of Alcalá, both in Madrid with honors (equivalent to summa cum laude) in 2008. After this, he spent three years at the University of California at Berkeley, two years at Stanford University, and one year at the Centre National de la Recherché Scientific (CNRS) in Montpellier, France. During the last five years, he was at the Basque Centre for Climate Change (BC3) near Bilbao, Spain, as an Ikerbasque and Ramon y Cajal research fellow. David has authored more than forty papers in scientific journals and books, including papers in Nature Communications, Nature, PLOS Biology, and Nature Ecology and Evolution. He is associate editor in Journal of Applied Ecology (British Ecological Society) and Ecological Restoration (Society for Ecological Restoration).

• The Maternal Imprint
  March 3, 2022
  Sarah Richardson, Professor of the History of Science and of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Harvard University

  In conversation with Emily Oster, Professor of Economics, Brown University

  At the turn of the twentieth century, any notion that a pregnant woman could alter her offspring’s physical and behavioral traits was dismissed as it was believed that a child’s fate was set by its genes and upbringing. Today, a wide body of interdisciplinary research argues that a woman’s experiences, behaviors, and physiology can have life-altering effects on offspring development. Drawing on her new book, The Maternal Imprint, (University of Chicago Press, 2021), leading gender and science scholar Sarah Richardson examined how our ideas about heredity and maternal-fetal effects have evolved over the last fifty years. A conversation with economist and best-selling author Emily Oster followed.

  About the Speakers

  Sarah S. Richardson is professor of the history of science and of studies of women, gender, and sexuality at Harvard University. She directs the Harvard GenderSci Lab. Emily Oster is a Professor of Economics at Brown University and the author of Expecting Better, Cribsheet, and The Family Firm. Oster’s books analyze the data behind choices in pregnancy and parenting. She holds a PhD in Economics from Harvard. Prior to being at Brown she was on the faculty at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

• Lessons from Plants

  February 23, 2022
  Beronda L. Montgomery, Foundation Professor of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology and Microbiology & Molecular Genetics, Michigan State University
  
  In conversation with Brenda Tindal, Executive Director, Harvard Museums of Science & Culture

  Plants are essential to humans and the environment: they provide food, absorb carbon dioxide, produce oxygen, serve multiple ecosystem functions, and beautify landscapes. In Lessons from Plants (Harvard University Press, 2021) Beronda Montgomery invites us to appreciate our interdependence with plants and the many lessons that can be gained from a better understanding of the ways in which plants grow, adapt, and thrive. In this conversation with Brenda Tindal, she will address what plants can teach us about relating to one another, building diverse communities and being resilient.
  
  Visit the Harvard University Press website to purchase Lessons from Plants.

  About the Speaker

  Beronda L. Montgomery is MSU Foundation Professor of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology and Microbiology & Molecular Genetics at Michigan State University. A Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Microbiology, and the American Society of Plant Biologists, she was named one of Cell’s 100 Inspiring Black Scientists in America, and was the winner of the 2021 Cynthia Westcott Scientific Writing Award.

  
  

• We Dance: An Exploration of Movement, Foodways, and Environments

  February 17, 2022
  Thaddeus Davis, Codirector Wideman Davis Dance; Associate Professor, Departments of Theatre and Dance and of African American Studies, University of South Carolina
  Tanya Wideman-Davis, Codirector Wideman Davis Dance; Associate Professor, Departments of Theatre and Dance and of African American Studies, University of South Carolina
  In conversation with Sarah Clunis, Director of Academic Partnerships and Curator of African Collections, Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology

  From the world-renowned Wideman Davis Dance Company and award-winning filmmakers Ethan Payne and Brian Foster, We Dance is a love story, deconstructed and distilled into its most elemental ingredients. Dreams. Memories. Family. Environments. In this 12-minute film, Tanya Wideman-Davis and Thaddeus Davis take us from Chicago, Montgomery, and New York to the point where their lives meet and become one. Along the way, they honor and signify on Black American art, poetry, and literature. In this conversation with Sarah Clunis, they will discuss the film and delve into the importance of movement and migration to Black American identity, lived experience, and consciousness. And show how all of our stories are kept—in the places we’ve been, in the food we eat, and in the dreams that we so steadfastly chase.

  
  Presented in collaboration with the Theater, Dance & Media Program, Harvard University

  To join the program, you will need to download the free Zoom app in advance. If you already have Zoom, you do not need to download it again. For details on how to improve your Zoom experience, visit the How to Attend an HMSC Program webpage.

  About the Speakers

  Tanya Wideman-Davis is the codirector of Wideman Davis Dance and is on faculty as an associate professor at the University of South Carolina in the Department of Theatre and Dance and of African American Studies. With an extensive career as a dancer, choreographer, and teacher, she completed her Master of Fine Arts from Hollins University/ADF (2012). Tanya has danced with many world-renowned companies, including Dance Theatre of Harlem, The Joffrey Ballet, Chicago, Complexions Contemporary Ballet, Alonzo King Lines Ballet, Spectrum Dance Theater, Ballet NY, and as guest artist with Ballet Memphis, Cleveland San Jose Ballet, and Quorum Ballet Amadora, Portugal. Wideman-Davis has received multiple honors and grants for her work including: 2021 South Carolina Arts Commission Fellow, 2021 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Grant, 2019 South Arts Momentum Grant, 2019 Alternate Roots Artistic Assistance: Project Development Grant, 2018 NEFA National Dance Project Grant, 2017 University of South Carolina Provost Grant, 2013 Map Fund Grant, and Jerome Robbins New Essential Works Grant (2011). She has received international acclaim as Best Female Dancer of 2001-2002 by Dance Europe magazine. Tanya’s academic, choreographic research and lectures examine race, gender, femininity, identity, and location. She has recently contributed a chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Ballet titled “Dance Theatre of Harlem: Radical Black Female Bodies in Ballet.”

  Thaddeus Davis is the coartistic director of Wideman/Davis Dance and associate professor in the Departments of Theatre and Dance and of African American Studies at the University of South Carolina. Through the lens of the African American Experience, he questions notions of spaces and environments that affect the interaction of gender, class, race, technology, and media’s ability to shape our perceptions. His research findings are exhibited in the creation of original dance works, films and essays. Davis has received multiple honors and grants for his work including: 2018 National Dance Project Grant, 2017 Provost Grant to support the creations of a research team for the development of Migratuse Ataraxia, 2013 Map Fund Grant to support the research and development of Ruptured Silence: Racist Signs and Symbol, Jerome Robbins New Essential Works Grant (2011), University of South Carolina Arts Institute, Interdisciplinary Collaboration: Reading/Dance Collaboration. Balance: Homelessness Project (2009), Canvas: The Master Class (2010), Cultural Envoy to Portugal, U.S. Department of State.

  As a Fellow of the 2016 South Carolina Collaboration on Race and Reconciliation, Davis is committed to being an active participant in South Carolina’s efforts to improve community relations and support conversations on race and reconciliation.

  Sarah Clunis is originally from Kingston, Jamaica and received her PhD in art history in 2006 from the University of Iowa. She is Director of Academic Partnerships and Curator of African Collections at Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology. Prior to this role, she was director of the Xavier University Art Gallery, where she supervised the Art Collection team, and was also assistant professor of art history. Dr. Clunis has taught art history for over twenty years at public universities and historically Black colleges and universities. Her research and classes have focused on the history of African art and the display of African objects in Western museum settings. She also studies the influence of African aesthetics and philosophy on the arts and religious rituals and cultural identities of the African diaspora. Her work examines gender, race, and migration in multiple contexts. She has published in both national and international magazines and journals.

• Evolution and Conservation in the Deep Sea
  December 2nd, 2021
  Rus Hoelzel, Professor of Molecular Ecology, Department of Biosciences, Durham University, U.K.; 2020­–2021 Sarah and Daniel Hrdy Visiting Fellow in Conservation Biology, Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University

  The deep sea is a dark, cold habitat, once thought to be inhospitable to life and uniform across its vast expanses. Technologies such as remotely operated vehicles have shown scientists that it is, in fact, home to highly diverse organisms uniquely adapted to its harsh conditions. We still have much to learn, however, about how species and populations evolved in the deep sea. This has important conservation implications because the depletion of nearshore and shallow water species has moved fisheries increasingly into deeper waters. Rus Hoelzel discusses some of the key environmental drivers and adaptations promoting the evolution of diversity in the deep sea, with a focus on those associated with depth itself.

  Presented by Harvard Museum of Natural History in collaboration with the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University

  About the Speaker

  Rus Hoelzel studied biology as an undergraduate at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, evolutionary biology for a MA at the University of Sussex, Brighton, U.K., and earned his PhD in genetics at the University of Cambridge, U.K. He has held postdoctoral positions at Silwood Park, Imperial College, U.K., and the National Cancer Institute in Frederick, Maryland, U.S. He is currently professor of molecular ecology at the University of Durham, U.K. He has published extensively on evolutionary process and conservation genetics, and has been editor-in-chief of the Springer-Nature journal Conservation Genetics since 2000. He and his group currently focus their work on understanding the relative roles of genetic drift and natural selection on the evolution of biodiversity in natural systems, both aquatic and terrestrial.

• Reconstructing Queen Amanishakheto’s Musical Instruments
  November 18th, 2021
  Susanne Gänsicke, Senior Conservator and ​​Head of Antiquities Conservation, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

  Double reed pipes, known as auloi, were popular musical instruments in the ancient Mediterranean. In 1921, archaeologists exploring the necropolis of Meroë (northern Sudan)—as part of the Harvard University-Boston Museum of Fine Arts Expedition—found a large collection of auloi in the pyramid of Nubian Queen Amanishakheto. Susanne Gänsicke will discuss the discovery’s importance and what it reveals about the connections between Nubia and the Mediterranean world as well as the significance of far-reaching musical traditions. She will also share recent efforts to conserve and reconstruct these ancient musical instruments. Susanne Gänsicke is Senior Conservator and Head of Antiquities Conservation at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. She holds a certificate in Archaeological Conservation (Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum, Mainz, Germany, 1987), and was Objects Conservator at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA) (1990-2016), where she remains a project member of The Auloi from Meroë (European Research Council grant project/ Stefan Hagel of the Austrian Academy of Sciences). She worked as site conservator in Egypt and Sudan and has taught conservation at the MFA, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard Extension School, the Metals Conservation Summer Institute (Higgins Armory Museum and the Metal Processing Institute at WPI, Worcester, MA), American Research Center in Egypt, and the Central Asian Museum Conservators Training Program, Tashkent, Uzbekistan. She served as Chair of the Publication Committee of the American Institute for Conservation 2005–2010, and is currently associate editor of the Journal of the American Institute for Conservation. Her research interests include materials and manufacturing techniques of ancient and historic metalwork, and the intersection of traditional craftsmanship and conservation. She is a member of CAST:ING (Copper Alloy Sculpture Techniques and history: an International iNterdisciplinary Group). In 2016, she received an Individual Grant for field work on metal preservation in Nepal (Asian Cultural Council, NY). She coauthored, with Yvonne Markowitz, Looking at Jewelry (J. Paul Getty Museum, 2019).

• Useful Objects: Nineteenth-Century Museums and American Culture
  November 17, 2021
  Reed Gochberg, Assistant Director of Studies; Lecturer on History and Literature, Harvard University
  In conversation with Brenda Tindal, Executive Director, Harvard Museums of Science & Culture

  What can the history of museums tell us about their role in American culture today? What kinds of objects were considered worth collecting, and who decided their value? Join Reed Gochberg, author of Useful Objects: Museums, Science, and Literature in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford University Press, September 2021) to learn about the early history of American museums, including Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. In conversation with HMSC Executive Director Brenda Tindal, she examines how writers and visitors reflected on a wide range of nineteenth-century collections—and how their ideas continue to inform ongoing debates about the challenges and possibilities museums face today.

  Presented by the Harvard Museum of Natural History, the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, and the Harvard Museums of Science & Culture.

• “Light this Candle!” Sixty Years of Americans in Space

  May 05, 2021
  Matthew H. Hersch, Associate Professor of the History of Science, Harvard University

  On May 5, 1961, astronaut Alan Shepard became the first American in space, following cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s mission three weeks earlier. With the United States trailing the Soviet Union in spaceflight, President John F. Kennedy closely watched the launch of Freedom 7, eager for proof that America could match Soviet achievements. In his flawless performance, Shepard—whose position in the space program owed much to the work of Harvard-trained physicians— became the archetype of the American astronaut. In this talk, marking the 60th anniversary of the first American in space, Matthew Hersch will recount the events of Shepard’s flight and offer a discussion of astronaut selection, then and now.

  About the Speaker

  Matthew Hersch is an associate professor of the History of Science at Harvard University, specializing in the history of aerospace technology.  A graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he received his law degree from New York University and his doctorate in the History and Sociology of Science from the University of Pennsylvania where he later taught concurrently in the School of Arts and Sciences and the School of Engineering and Applied Science. He has held fellowships in history and space technology at the Smithsonian Institution, NASA, the Huntington, the University of Southern California, and Columbia University, and is the author of Inventing the American Astronaut (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), co-author (with Ruth Schwartz Cowan) of the second edition of A Social History of American Technology (Oxford, 2017), and most recently, co-editor (with Cassandra Steer) of War and Peace in Outer Space: Law, Policy, and Ethics (Oxford, 2020). Professor Hersch is currently completing a book manuscript for MIT Press entitled Dark Star: A New History of the Space Shuttle. 

• Performance and Ritual in Ancient Egyptian Funerary Practice

  April 29, 2021
  Mariam Ayad, Associate Professor of Egyptology, The American University in Cairo Visiting Associate Professor of Women’s Studies and Near Eastern Religions Research Associate of the Women’s Studies in Religion Program (2020-21) Harvard Divinity School

  One of the best documented Egyptian rituals—occurring in both cultic and funerary contexts—is known as the Opening of the Mouth ritual. Performing this ritual was believed to animate statues and temples, while also restoring the senses of the deceased, thus ensuring that they could eat, drink, and breathe in the afterlife. Textual and iconographic references to the ritual are found in different time periods, from the Old Kingdom through the Roman Period. In this lecture, Mariam Ayad uses the Opening of the Mouth ritual as a case study to illustrate the power of imagery and the efficacy of the spoken word as performative aspects of Egyptian funerary practice.

  About the Speaker

  Mariam Ayad is an Associate Professor of Egyptology at The American University in Cairo. She studied Egyptology at The American University in Cairo (BA), the University of Toronto (MA), and Brown University, where she obtained her PhD in 2003. From 2003 to 2010, Ayad served as Assistant Director of the Institute of Egyptian Art and Archaeology at the University of Memphis (Tennessee), where she was an Assistant, then a tenured Associate Professor of Egyptology and Art History. At the American University in Cairo, Ayad teaches Middle Egyptian grammar (Egyptian hieroglyphics), Egyptian Literature (read in translation), and Coptic, as well as graduate seminars on Egypt in the first millennium BC, Nubian cultures and society, and ancient Egyptian women in temple ritual. For the 2020–21 academic year, Ayad is Visiting Associate Professor of Women’s Studies and Near Eastern Religions and Research Associate in Women’s Studies in Religion Program at Harvard Divinity School. She is currently exploring the impact of class and gender on ancient Egyptian conceptions of death, revival, and the afterlife.

• What Spiders Have to Say

  April 28, 2021
  Paul Shamble, John Harvard Distinguished Science Fellow, Harvard University

  Consider the spider: eight legs, eight eyes, and a brain the size of a poppy seed. These are some of nature’s most amazing and charismatic creatures, and yet we know so little about their worlds. Paul Shamble will discuss the lives, habits, and marvelous morphologies of these animals—from sensory structures and cognition to locomotion and behavior. Understanding these creatures helps us better understand evolution and diversity—and leads us to ask what it means that even tiny animals inhabit complex lives.

  Evolution Matters Lecture Series

  Series supported by a generous gift from Drs. Herman and Joan Suit

  About the Speaker

  Paul Shamble is a John Harvard Distinguished Science Fellow at Harvard University where his work explores cognition, locomotion, and sensory perception in jumping spiders. Shamble received his BA in Integrative Biology from the University of California, Berkeley (2008) followed by a Ph.D. in Neurobiology and Behavior from Cornell University (2015). He has worked with spiders from across Europe and all over the United States including the Great Plains, the Great Lakes, the Mountain West, and New England. His work at Harvard uses novel experimental approaches (high-speed cameras, 3D printing, etc.) to explore the behavior, brains, and biology of these animals.

• Earth Week: Ecology and Spirituality: A Roundtable with Harvard Divinity School Students

  April 23, 2021
  Natalia Schwien, Sakiko Isomichi, jessica young chang, Quinn Parker Matos

  This informal roundtable features four Harvard Divinity School graduate students coming together to speak about the intersection of ecology and spiritual practice. From providing practical ways to connect with nature in urban spaces and thinking about mindfulness in waste reduction to learning how to pause with tea, they will explore how their belief systems engage with the natural world and how that impacts their daily lives.

  About the Panelists

  Natalia Schwien (she/her) is a Master of Theological Studies candidate at Harvard Divinity School studying ecology and spiritual practice. She is a practicing herbalist, wildlife rescuer and rehabilitator, and environmental advocate.

  Sakiko Isomichi (she/her) is a Master of Divinity candidate at Harvard Divinity School studying ethnography, waste, and the Arabic language.

  jessica young chang (she/her) is a second-year Master of Divinity student who is excited about growth and transformation in individuals and communities through creative, embodied, mystical, and collective spiritual practices. Originally from the Midwest, jess studies the intersections of mystical and embodied spirituality in Christianity and non-dual Tantra, and she currently serves the HDS community as one of three chaplain interns. jess is considering a call to chaplaincy and spiritual direction, and pursuing ordination in the United Church of Christ.

  Quinn Parker Matos (they/them) is a first-year Master of Theological Studies candidate at the Harvard Divinity School studying medical and ritual traditions in the Americas and the African Diaspora. Their work and practice involves finding ways to synthesize and work between different medical approaches to adapt and respond to life in urban environments.

• Recovering the Histories of Seven Enslaved Americans

  April 21, 2021
  Gregg Hecimovich, Professor and Chair, Department of English, Furman University
  Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director, Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, Harvard University

  For seven seasons, award-winning Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. has uncovered the ancestral stories of celebrity guests on his hit-television series, Finding Your Roots. In this program, Gates will be joined by Dr. Gregg Hecimovich to discuss the process of unearthing the histories of formerly enslaved people. The focus will be on  Alfred, Delia, Drana, Fassena, Jack, Jim, and Renty, seven Black men and women who were photographed against their will in Columbia, South Carolina in 1850. These controversial photographs are the subject of a new book, To Make Their Own Way in the World  (Peabody Museum Press/Aperture, 2020).

  To Make Their Own Way in the World: The Enduring Legacy of the Zealy Daguerreotypes is available at www.aperture.org.

  About the Speakers

  Gregg Hecimovich  is the author of four books including the forthcoming Life and Times of Hannah Crafts (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2022). Hecimovich was a Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow at the Hutchins Center at Harvard University (2014–15). He also served as the Josephus Daniels Fellow at The National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina (2015–16). Additionally, Hecimovich held a Public Scholar Fellowship appointment from The National Endowment for the Humanities (2015–16).

  Henry Louis Gates Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University. An Emmy and Peabody Award-winning filmmaker, literary scholar, journalist, cultural critic, and institution builder, Professor Gates has also authored or coauthored more than twenty books and created more than twenty documentary films, including The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross, Black in Latin America, Black America since MLK: And Still I Rise, Africa’s Great Civilizations, Reconstruction: America after the Civil War, The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song, and Finding Your Roots, his groundbreaking genealogy series now in its seventh season on PBS. The recipient of fifty-eight honorary degrees, Gates was a member of the first class awarded “genius grants” by the MacArthur Foundation in 1981, and in 1998, he became the first African American scholar to be awarded the National Humanities Medal. A native of Piedmont, West Virginia, Gates earned his BA in History, summa cum laude, from Yale University in 1973, and his MA and PhD in English Literature from Clare College at the University of Cambridge in 1979. He also is an Honorary Fellow, Clare College, at the University of Cambridge. A former chair of the Pulitzer Prize board, he is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and serves on a wide array of boards, including the New York Public Library, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the Aspen Institute, Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Library of America, and the Brookings Institution. In 2011, his portrait, by Yuqi Wang, was hung in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.

• Body Builders: How Animals Regenerate New Parts

  April 14, 2021
  Mansi Srivastava, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Natural Sciences, Curator of Invertebrate Zoology, Organismic and Evolutionary Biology Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University

  Regeneration is a remarkable phenomenon in which an animal can regrow parts of its body that are lost or damaged by injury. Humans, for example, can repair some organs, but some animals can rebuild their entire bodies from small pieces of tissue. How do these animals accomplish this feat? And why is it that humans cannot regenerate as well as these animals can? Studies of how regeneration works at the molecular and cellular level are beginning to answer the first question. To answer the second question, we have to understand how regeneration has evolved. Mansi Srivastava will highlight major insights about regeneration based on her team’s research on the three- banded panther worm, a marine invertebrate species that enables us to study how regeneration works and how the process has evolved.

  Evolution Matters Lecture Series

  Series supported by a generous gift from Drs. Herman and Joan Suit

  About the Speaker

  Mansi received her AB in Biological Sciences from Mount Holyoke College, where she became fascinated by the process of regeneration and wrote her honors thesis on regeneration in segmented worms. She studied animal evolution using comparative genomics for her PhD in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of California at Berkeley. For her postdoctoral training at the Whitehead Institute/Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Mansi returned to her interest in regeneration and developed the three-banded panther worm as a new research organism for studying the evolution of regeneration. In 2015, Mansi joined the faculty of the Organismic and Evolutionary Biology Department at Harvard University and became a curator of Invertebrate Zoology at the Museum of Comparative Zoology. Mansi’s research group uses panther worms to develop new approaches studying both the mechanisms and evolution of regeneration.

• Black Is Queen: The Divine Feminine in Kush

  March 25, 2021
  Solange Ashby, Adjunct Professor, Department of Classics and Ancient Studies, Barnard College

  The prominence of powerful goddesses and queens in the Nubian Kingdom of Kush (now Northern Sudan) highlights the unusually high status of women in this ancient African society and serves as a fitting focus for the study of female power in the ancient world. Using temple inscriptions found in Egypt and Nubia, the rich funerary goods found in royal burials, and temple and tomb imagery, Solange Ashby will discuss how ancient Africans of the Nile Valley understood female power and presence. Songs from Beyoncé’s recent production “Black Is King” will be woven into this presentation on Kushite queens to emphasize the power and centrality of the African queen mother in her royal family and kingdom.

  About the Speaker

  Solange Ashby holds a Ph.D. in Egyptology with a specialization in ancient Egyptian language and Nubian religion from the University of Chicago. She has conducted research in Egypt at the Temple of Philae and participated in an archaeological excavation in El-Kurru, Sudan (royal Kushite cemetery). Her first book, Calling Out to Isis: The Enduring Nubian Presence at Philae, is published by Gorgias Press. Her current research explores the roles of women in traditional Nubian religious practices. Dr. Ashby is working on the first monograph dedicated to the history, religious symbolism, and political power of the queens of Kush. Dr. Ashby teaches in the Department of Classics and Ancient Studies at Barnard College.

• The Intentional Museum

  March 21, 2021
  Christy Coleman, Executive Director, Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation
  Makeda Best, Richard L. Menschel Curator of Photography, Harvard Art Museums, Harvard University
  Sven Beckert, Laird Bell Professor of History Harvard University
  Moderated by Tomiko Brown-Nagin, Dean, Harvard Radcliffe Institute; Daniel P.S. Paul Professor of Constitutional Law, Harvard Law School; Professor of History, Harvard University
  

  American historian Christy Coleman is the distinguished lecturer for the 2021 Seminar in Innovative Curatorial Practice. Coleman is renowned for creating innovative, engaging, and inclusive museum exhibitions and programs that tell a comprehensive story of American history. In this program, she will discuss the power that museums have to genuinely engage with communities around what matters most to them. While expertise within the museums is invaluable, it is wasted if not used to help communities address their issues and aspirations.

  The Seminar in Innovative Curatorial Practice

  Established in 2014 this is a partnership between the Harvard Museums of Science & Culture and the Harvard Art Museums. The program engages renowned scholars whose innovative and interdisciplinary practice challenges traditional approaches to exhibitions. These innovators share their work with the broader public through a lecture, and with Harvard students and faculty, through discussions focused on rethinking ways to integrate the university’s art, natural history, science, and social science collections with the teaching and research mission of the university.

  Presented in collaboration with the Harvard Art Museums and the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, as part of the presidential initiative on Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery.

  About the Speakers

  With a career spanning over thirty years, Christy S. Coleman has served as the chief executive officer of some of the nation’s most prominent museums. She is a tireless advocate for the power of museums, narrative correction, diversity, and inclusiveness. Ms. Coleman is an innovator and leader in the museum field having held leadership roles at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, the American Civil War Museum, and now as Executive Director of the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation. She has written numerous articles, is an accomplished screenwriter, public speaker, and has appeared on several national news and history programs. Most recently, she served as Historical Consultant for the film Harriet and Showtime’s Good Lord Bird miniseries. She has also been a featured public historian for several documentaries, most recently the acclaimed miniseries Grant. Ms. Coleman is the recipient of numerous awards including honorary doctorates from William and Mary, Virginia Commonwealth University, and the University of the South for her decades of impact. In 2018, Time Magazine named her one of the 31 People Changing the South and in 2019, Worth Magazine named her one of the 29 Women Changing the World.

  Sven Beckert researches and teaches the history of the United States in the nineteenth century, with a particular emphasis on the history of capitalism, including its economic, social, political and transnational dimensions. He just published Empire of Cotton: A Global History, the first global history of the nineteenth century’s most important commodity. The book won the Bancroft Prize, the Philip Taft Prize, the Cundill Recognition for Excellence, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The New York Times named it one of the ten most important books of 2015. His other publications have focused on the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie, on labor, on democracy, on global history and on the connections between slavery and capitalism. Currently he is at work on a history of capitalism. Beckert teaches courses on the political economy of modern capitalism, the history of American capitalism, Gilded Age America, labor history, global capitalism, and the history of European capitalism. Together with a group of students he has also worked on the historical connections between Harvard and slavery and published Harvard and Slavery: Seeking a Forgotten History. Beckert is co-chair of the Program on the Study of Capitalism at Harvard University and co-chair of the Weatherhead Initiative on Global History (WIGH). Beyond Harvard, he co-chairs an international study group on global history, is co-editor of a Princeton University Press book series, America in the World, and has co-organized a series of conferences on the history of capitalism. He is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow. He also directs the Harvard College Europe Program.

  Makeda Best is the Richard L. Menschel Curator of Photography at the Harvard Art Museums. Her exhibitions include: Time is Now–Photography and Social Change in James Baldwin’s America (2018), Winslow Homer: Eyewitness, and Crossing Lines, Constructing Home: Displacement and Belonging in Contemporary Art (2019). Her fall 2021 exhibition is Devour the Land: War and American Landscape Photography Since 1970. Prior to joining Harvard, she held professorships at the University of Vermont and the California College of the Arts. She has written for numerous catalogs and journals, most recently for the National Gallery of Poland, Kunsthalle Mannheim, The Archives of American Art Journal, The James Baldwin Review and the Rhode Island School of the Design’s Manual. Her most recent book is Elevate the Masses–Alexander Gardner, Photography, and Democracy in Nineteenth Century-America (Penn State Press, 2020). She is coeditor of Conflict, Identity, and Protest in American Art (2016). Her current book projects explore the intersection between photography, gender, race, and ecological issues. At Harvard, she teaches courses in curatorial practice, and in the history and theory of photography. She holds an MFA in studio photography from the California Institute of the Arts and a PhD from Harvard University.

  Tomiko Brown-Nagin is dean of Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Daniel P.S. Paul Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School, and professor of history in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences. She is an  award-winning legal historian, an expert in constitutional law and education law and policy, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the American Law Institute, a fellow of the American Bar Foundation, and a distinguished lecturer for the Organization of American Historians. She has published articles and book chapters on a wide range of topics, including the Supreme Court’s equal protection jurisprudence, civil rights law and history, the Affordable Care Act, and education reform. Her 2011 book, Courage to Dissent: Atlanta and the Long History of the Civil Rights Movement (Oxford), won six awards, including the Bancroft Prize in U.S. History. In her new book (Pantheon, forthcoming January 2022), Brown-Nagin explores the life and times of Constance Baker Motley, the pathbreaking lawyer, politician, and judge. In 2019, Harvard president Lawrence Bacow appointed Brown-Nagin chair of the Presidential Committee on Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery, anchored at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. Brown-Nagin has previously served as faculty director of Harvard Law School’s Charles Hamilton Houston Institute and as codirector of Harvard Law School’s law and history program, among other leadership roles. She earned a law degree from Yale University, where she served as an editor of the Yale Law Journal; a doctorate in history from Duke University; and a BA in history, summa cum laude, from Furman University. Brown-Nagin held the 2016–2017 Joy Foundation Fellowship at Harvard Radcliffe Institute.

  
  

• Troubling Images: Curating Collections of Historical Photographs

  February 26, 2021
  Mark Sealy, Director of Autograph A.B.P. and Principal Fellow Decolonising Photography at University of the Arts London
  Makeda Best, Richard L. Menschel Curator of Photography, Harvard Art Museums
  Ilisa Barbash, Curator of Visual Anthropology, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University
  David Odo, Director of Academic and Public Programs, Division Head, and Research Curator, Harvard Art Museums

  Historical photography collections sometimes contain images that can be deeply troubling to contemporary viewers. What should be done with collections that include photographs of colonial violence, enslaved subjects, racist stereotypes, or other difficult imagery?

  Join moderator David Odo and photography curators Mark Sealy, Makeda Best, and Ilisa Barbash for a conversation about the challenges and possibilities of curating legacy collections of photographs today.

  Presented in partnership with the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology and the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture

  Support for the lecture is provided by the M. Victor Leventritt Fund, which was established through the generosity of the wife, children, and friends of the late M. Victor Leventritt, Harvard Class of 1935. The purpose of the fund is to present outstanding scholars of the history and theory of art to the Harvard and Greater Boston communities.

• Reimagining Museums: Disruption and Change

  February 25, 2021
  Chris Newell, (Passamaquoddy), Executive Director and Senior Partner to Wabanaki Nations, Abbe Museum
  Jane Pickering, William & Muriel Seabury Howells Director, Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology, Harvard University
  Lorén Spears, (Narragansett), Executive Director, Tomaquag Museum
  Moderated by Castle McLaughlin, Museum Curator of North American Ethnography, Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology, Harvard University
  Responding to keen interest in last fall’s Reimagining Museums event, we have invited the speakers to return and continue the conversation.

  As museums acknowledge their legacy as colonial institutions, many are reimagining their mission as agents of decolonization and social justice. The pandemic, the Black Lives Matter movement, and other community issues continue to create opportunities for reflection and growth. How can American museums—especially those that have strong relationships with Indigenous communities—respond to current national conditions of social unrest and political turmoil? How have New England museums fared and what is likely to happen over the next two to three years?
  Visit the Harvard University Press website to purchase Lessons from Plants.

  Presented in collaboration with the Harvard University Native American Program

  About the Speakers

  Chris Newell is Executive Director and Sr. Partner to Wabanaki Nations for the Abbe Museum in Bar Harbor, Maine. He was born and raised in Motahkmikuhk (Indian Township, Maine) and is a proud citizen of the Passamaquoddy Tribe at Indian Township. Chris is a co-founder of Akomawt Educational Initiative, an educational consultancy working with schools, universities, museums, and all areas of education to incorporate Native perspectives in a culturally competent manner. He is an award-winning museum educator dedicated to expanding the presence of Native content and making a better, more informed world for all peoples. 

  Jane Pickering was appointed as the William and Muriel Seabury Howells Director of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology in 2019. Prior to that she was Executive Director of the Harvard Museums of Science & Culture, a partnership of six museums. She has thirty years’ experience working in university museums, including administrative positions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Yale University. During her career she has focused on the unique opportunities available to university museums for public engagement, through multiple exhibition projects and informal education initiatives. In 2016 she was appointed by former president Barack Obama to the National Museum and Library Services Board. 

  Lorén M. Spears (Narragansett), Executive Director of Tomaquag Museum, holds a Masters in Education and received a Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris causa, from the University of Rhode Island. She is an author, artist, and shares her cultural knowledge with the public through museum programs. She has written curriculum, poetry, and narratives published in a variety of publications such as Dawnland Voices, An Anthology of Indigenous Writing of New England; Through Our Eyes: An Indigenous View of Mashapaug Pond; The Pursuit of Happiness: An Indigenous View, and From Slaves to Soldiers: The 1st Rhode Island Regiment in the American Revolution. Recently, she co-edited a new edition of A Key into the Language of America by Roger Williams.