Meet

Meet some valued members of our community and learn about some of their recent work.

GRACE LAUBACHER, ’09, is an artist and theater designer based in New York.  In the past year, she has undertaken collaborations at the Juilliard School, the Bring to Light/Nuit Blanche NYC festival, and the soloNOVA Arts Festival.  Read More...

Xiaofei Tian

Professor of Chinese Literature

The book Visionary Journeys explores the parallel and yet profoundly different ways of seeing the outside world and engaging with the foreign at two important moments of dislocation in Chinese history, namely, the early medieval period commonly known as the Northern and Southern Dynasties (317–589 CE), and the nineteenth century. Xiaofei Tian juxtaposes literary, historical, and religious materials from these two periods in comparative study, bringing them together in their unprecedentedly large-scale interactions, and their intense fascination, with foreign cultures.

Homi K. Bhabha

Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of English and American Literature and Language

Homi K. Bhabha, director of Harvard's Mahindra Humanities Center and an acclaimed post-colonial theorist, was recently awarded an honorary doctoral degree by the Department of Philosophy and Humanities of the Freie Universität Berlin.  Earlier this year, Professor Bhabha received one of India's highest civilian honors, the Padma Bhushan. The award is one of three established in 1954 by the President of India to recognize distinguished service of a high order to the nation, in any field. Bhabha won in the "Literature and Education" category.

Helen Vendler

Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor

Seamus Heaney, Denis Donoghue, William Pritchard, Marilyn Butler, Harold Bloom, and many others have praised Helen Vendler as one of the most attentive readers of poetry. In Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries, Vendler turns her illuminating skills as a critic to 150 selected poems of Emily Dickinson. As she did in The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets, she serves as an incomparable guide, considering both stylistic and imaginative features of the poems.

Robert Levin

Dwight P. Robinson, Jr. Professor of Music

Pianist Robert Levin, a passionate advocate of new music and a noted theorist and Mozart scholar, has been heard throughout the United States, Europe, Australia, and Asia, in recital, as a soloist, and in chamber concerts. In early May, he and cellist Steven Isserlis collaborated on series of events at the 92nd Street Y in New York. After a lecture-recital preview on Wednesday evening, Mr. Isserlis and Professor Levin performed all of Beethoven's works for cello and piano on Thursday and Saturday evenings.
 

"These players, pushing each other to the limit, achieved a gripping excitement seldom heard in these works from the combination of cello and modern piano."
James R. Oestreich, The New York Times

James Simpson

Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English

When we think of breaking images, we assume that it happens somewhere else. We also tend to think of iconoclasts as barbaric. Iconoclasts are people like the Taliban, who blew up Buddhist statues in 2001. Under the Hammer: Iconoclasm in the Anglo-American Tradition argues instead that iconoclasm is a central strand of Anglo-American modernity. Our horror at the destruction of art derives in part from the fact that we too did, and still do, that. This is most obviously true of England's iconoclastic century between 1538 and 1643. And once started, iconoclasm is difficult to stop. It ripples through cultures, into the psyche, and it ripples through history.

Stephen Greenblatt

John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities

Stephen Greenblatt was recently awarded the 2011 National Book Award for Nonfiction for "The Swerve: How The World Became Modern." The book, both an innovative work of history and a thrilling story of discovery, chronicles how one manuscript - an ancient Roman epic by Lucretius - plucked from a thousand years of neglect, changed the course of human thought, fueled the Renaissance, inspired great minds from Galileo to Freud, and helped make possible the world as we know it.

Maria Polinsky

Professor of Linguistics

At the Polinsky Language Sciences Lab at Harvard University, language diversity meets cognitive science. Researchers in the lab study the ways in which people use and process language in real time. The lab has a strong cross-linguistic focus, drawing upon English, Russian, Chinese, Korean, Mayan languages, Basque, Austronesian languages, languages of the Caucasus, and others. One of the major research areas in the lab is in heritage languages and their speakers—people who learned a minority language in childhood but later switched to another, societally dominant language.

Tom Conley

Abbot Lawrence Lowell Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies and of Romance Languages and Literatures

An Errant Eye studies how topography, the art of describing local space and place, developed literary and visual form in early modern France. Arguing for a "new poetics of space" ranging throughout French Renaissance poetry, prose, and cartography, Tom Conley performs dazzling readings of maps, woodcuts, and poems to plot a topographical shift in the late Renaissance.

Doris Sommer

Ira and Jewell Williams Professor of Romance languages and Literatures and African and African American Studies

The Cultural Agents Initiative explores and promotes the arts and humanities as social resources. In courses and individual projects, students learn from philosophers and from a range of creative professionals that art is a feature of active citizenship. Art is also fundamental to effective innovation in everything from medicine and law to political leadership and business. With a long humanistic tradition dedicated to civic development, and thanks to contemporary mentors who show how the challenges of scarcity violence, and disease respond to art and interpretation, Cultural Agents links creativity with service.

Werner Sollors

Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English Literature and Professor of African and African American Studies

"[A New Literary History of America] is a vast, inquisitive, richly surprising and consistently enlightening wallow in our national history and culture...Neither reference nor criticism, neither history nor treatise, but a genre-defying, transcendent fusion of them all... Inevitable, necessary and profoundly welcome..." Laura Miller, Salon.

Alina Payne

Professor of the History of Art and Architecture

From Ornament to Object, one of four new books authored in the past year by Alina Payne, identifies a shift of interest from ornament to objects (increasingly understood as the DNA of culture), and argues for a new understanding of the genealogy of architectural modernism. The Telescope and the Compass, examines the relationship between architecture and science in the age of Galileo, while Teofilo Gallaccini, Writings presents the inedited manuscripts of an early modern Italian scientist and art critic.

P. Oktor Skjaervo

Aga Khan Professor of Iranian

As one of the world's great religions, Zoroastrianism has a heritage rich in texts and cultic practices. The texts are often markedly difficult to translate, but in The Spirit of Zoroastrianism, Prods Oktor Skjærvø, professor of ancient Iranian languages and culture at Harvard, provides modern and accurate translations of Zoroastrian texts that have been selected to provide an overview of Zoroastrian beliefs and practices.

Stephen A. Mitchell

Professor of Scandinavian and Folklore

In Witchcraft and Magic in the Middle Ages, Stephen A. Mitchell offers the fullest examination available of witchcraft in late medieval Scandinavia. By examining witches, wizards, and seeresses in literature, lore, and law, as well as surviving charm magic directed toward love, prophecy, health, and weather, Mitchell provides a portrait of both the practitioners of medieval Nordic magic and its performance.

Sean Kelly

Professor of Philosophy

Re-envisioning modern spiritual life through their examination of literature, philosophy, and religious testimony, Sean Kelly and his collaborator, Hubert Dreyfus, unearth ancient sources of meaning, and teach us how to rediscover the sacred, shining things that surround us every day. All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age will change the way we understand our culture, our history, our sacred practices, and ourselves. It offers a new--and very old--way to celebrate and be grateful for our existence in the modern world.