Arts & Culture

Professor Steven Pinker talks about his latest book, “The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century.”

Houghton Library recently acquired its 3,000th American item, the typescript of an unproduced James Baldwin play — a rich tangle of the author’s obsessions in need of a scholar’s clarifying touch.

Performance artist Laurie Anderson delved into her inspirations and motivations as she gave the Music Department’s Louis C. Elson Lecture.

During two days of programming at the Harvard Art Museums, scholars, students, and the public explored the significance and innovative conservation of Mark Rothko’s Harvard murals. The events highlighted the murals’ return to public discourse and their new role as potential models for the treatment of aged and damaged art.

A symposium will investigate what makes us human, and go beyond philosophy to do it.

In a visit to Harvard, Marin Alsop discussed some of the challenges she has faced as music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra.

As part of a course on music composition, Harvard students created original works inspired by objects in the Harvard Art Museums collections. Those compositions were recently brought to life by cellist Neil Heyde of London’s Royal Academy of Music at a concert held in the Calderwood Courtyard.

Harvard course uses the game of soccer to explore the complexity of the humanities.

Author ZZ Packer is spending her Radcliffe year working on her newest effort, a novel titled “The Thousands” that tracks the lives of several families following the Civil War through the American Indian campaigns in the Southwest.

In an age of bits and bytes and pixels and text on screens, Harvard Design Magazine — relaunched in a new format last year ― fervently embraces the thingness of print, the quotidian actuality of paper and ink.

Henri Cole is working on a new collection of poems while a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

In May, Matt Aucoin’s “Crossing” will premiere with the American Repertory Theater as part of the theater’s commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War.

The new Murty Classical Library of India from Harvard University Press, aiming for 500 volumes over the next century, will reveal to the world a “colossal Indian past” of multilanguage literary history from as far back as two millennia.

The Harvard South Asian Association’s annual arts showcase, called Ghungroo, is a complex coordinated production that draws hundreds of student performers and delighted classmates in the audience.

“Exiled by the sound of the lash” from the slaveholding state of South Carolina, the Grimké sisters came North before the Civil War with rule-breaking ideas on slavery’s wrongs and women’s rights. They represented an antebellum moment in which “women became political.”

A series of virtual tours enables a deep dive into selected pieces at the Harvard Art Museums.

Escaped slave and abolitionist Lewis Hayden’s work goes on, through the students who receive the scholarship established in his name at Harvard Medical School.

One of the nation’s largest and most prestigious literary awards, the George Washington Book Prize recognizes the best new books on early American history.

Film critic A.O. Scott spoke with the Gazette about the current crop of Oscar contenders, and Hollywood’s trends.

In a question-and-answer interview, New York Times film critic and Harvard alumnus A.O. Scott explains his craft, and how he came to it.

Historian Richard Dunn talks about his new book, a sweeping historical analysis of life on two plantations in Jamaica and Virginia across the final decades of slavery.

Experts on World War I gathered for a conference on the “great seminal catastrophe” of the 20th century.

A new exhibition at Harvard’s Loeb Music Library, containing items from the Harvard Theatre Collection in Houghton Library, offers visitors a disturbing look at the racist history and enduring legacy of blackface minstrelsy.

A new Harvard-wide seminar program, slated for three years, takes on a constellation of interdisciplinary issues around violence and nonviolence.

The Harvard Film Archive is launching a retrospective of the work of Robert J. Flaherty, a pioneer in documentary film. “Folklore and Flaherty: A Symposium on the First Irish-Language Film” will be held on Feb. 19 from 1:30 to 4 p.m. at the Harvard Film Archive.

In 1944, the young and gifted creators of ‘On the Town’ quietly stirred diversity into their groundbreaking musical, Professor Carol Oja recounts in her new book.

Pulitzer Prize-winner Suzan-Lori Parks returns to the American Repertory Theater with her new play, “Father Comes Home From the Wars.”

“Selma” director Ava DuVernay discussed the film with Henry Louis Gates in an event sponsored by Harvard’s Hutchins Center.

Drawn from a series of family correspondence, letters, diaries, and journals, a new exhibit at the Schlesinger Library offers firsthand accounts of men, women, soldiers, and slaves caught up in the Civil War.

The Harvard Semitic Museum, hosting a retrospective exhibit on its long history and founder David Gordon Lyon, is refurbished, reordered, and increasingly ready for the future.