“Entrepreneurs are always in search of ideas, and artists have a knack with creativity and original thinking, which entrepreneurs can learn from,” said Mihir Desai, Mizuho Financial Group Professor of Finance, who moderated an afternoon panel with Marsalis and professors from Harvard Business School (HBS) at the Harvard Innovation Lab, or i-lab, a new University initiative aimed at fostering innovation and collaboration. The conversation was the first in a series of planned events for the i-lab that will explore the connections of artists as entrepreneurs.

Following his Monday night lecture, the third of six in a two-year presidential series, Marsalis pointed to Duke Ellington, the composer, musician, and big band leader as an example of a true innovator.

Marsalis (center) spoke about the “Artist as Entrepreneur” at the i-lab. Also attending the event were Nancy Koehn (from left), Mukti Khaire, Rohit Deshpande, and Mihir Desai. Photo by Rose Lincoln/Harvard Staff Photographer

Ellington stuck fast to his mission of creating a fusion of sound based on musical tradition. He surrounded himself with other expert musicians who could help him realize his musical vision, and he worked harder than anyone, making up for a lack of resources by constantly sacrificing for his dream, said Marsalis during the HBS panel.

“He so believed in his music that he would sacrifice whatever he had to sacrifice for that music to be right. And the first thing he sacrificed was time. When everybody else was sleeping, he was up,” perfecting his music, said Marsalis.

Like music, business requires a profound understanding of the subject matter at hand, said the artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, and confident professionals who know their material and are ready to lead. Marsalis said he examines a spreadsheet the same way he reviews a complicated musical score, by studying every number on the page.

“There’s not a conductor in the world who gets the score of [Igor Stravinsky’s] “The Rite of Spring” and goes, ‘Wow, there are a lot of notes here.’ You don’t sit in front of an orchestra with a score and say, ‘Well, I don’t understand these 20 measures, but we’ll make it through that OK.’ ”

In a story that resonated with the innovators and dreamers in the crowd, Marsalis recalled important advice he received from his father as he prepared to leave home as a teen. Friends and family told him to have something to fall back on if his plans for a musical career didn’t work out. Others cautioned that if he stuck with music he would struggle, like his father, a pianist, who worked hard just to make ends meet.

“My daddy said, ‘Man, the only thing I can tell you is, don’t have nothing to fall back on.’ ”

Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot (left) was among those who shared the stage with Marsalis during a discussion at the Graduate School of Education. His topic: “Education for Moral Agency and Engaged Citizenship.” Photo by Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer

Music and the arts can be a guiding force in helping students to develop solid, moral foundations, several Harvard professors agreed during a talk with Marsalis titled “Education for Moral Agency and Engaged Citizenship” at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

During the discussion, Marsalis touched on many of the themes in his 2008 book “Moving to Higher Ground: How Jazz Can Change Your Life.” The book discusses how concepts in jazz can be applied to broad life lessons involving integrity, creativity, empathy, and humility.

The trust, collaboration, experience, and communication that unfold on a stage filled with jazz musicians are applicable to the classroom as well, said Marsalis.

“Music forces you to hold two opposite thoughts in your mind, and it forces you to act on both of those things … all the time.” As part of a band, he said, you have to always be aware of what you are playing and what somebody else is playing. That art of listening, he argued, is essential to education.

As a young man, Marsalis played with an ensemble that included many members of Ellington’s band. The experience taught him a lesson in communication and understanding.

“The old men were always cussing us out and saying, ‘you all are playing too loud, too loud, too loud, too loud’ … Being around them forced you to play softer. Then, when you played softer, you could hear what somebody else was playing.”

Holding students to high standards and expecting them to bring ideas, energy, and commitment to their music is another Marsalis hallmark. He challenges young musicians, he said, as a means of getting them to take their craft seriously and bringing out their best.

His message was an important one for educators to remember, said panelist Diane L. Moore, a senior lecturer in religious studies and education at Harvard Divinity School.

“You take them seriously. You expect that they can rise to a standard,” said Moore. “Too often, we don’t involve and invite our students in any context of any classroom to collaborate, to assume they come into the classroom with valuable information that they can share.”

A new art exhibit at Harvard tells a different tale. “Queloides,” a show whose name is the Spanish word for scar, is a counterpoint by Cuban visual artists, many of them persons of color. Its collective intent shows how race and racism — a sort of social scarring — continued in post-revolution Cuba, simmering beneath a cultural facade of social equality and justice.

“Queloides” was shown twice in Havana, first 15 years ago. Its creators grew up in a communist Cuba that was economically diminished by the end of the Cold War and the withdrawal of Soviet support. “They began to talk about subjects that were unspeakable in Cuban official culture,” said University of Pittsburgh historian Alejandro de la Fuente, a scholar of race and slavery. “In art, you can talk about unspeakable topics.”

More recently, an expanded version of the show, organized and curated by de la Fuente, made the rounds in New York and Pittsburgh. In Cambridge, a stunning (though abbreviated) version is on display through May 30 at the Neil L. and Angelica Zander Rudenstine Gallery, sponsored by the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research.

For the opening in late January, de la Fuente joined in a panel discussion on art, race, and Cuba. With him in the institute’s cozy Hiphop Archive were Cuba-born artist Elio Rodriguez and moderator Henry Louis Gates Jr., the institute’s director and Harvard’s Alphonse Fletcher University Professor.

"Queloides" will be at the Rudenstine Gallery through May 30. Du Bois Institute Director Henry Louis Gates Jr. views a piece included in the art exhibit.

A few years ago, de la Fuente was researching the show. He was stung that “Queloides” (pronounced “Keyloids”) got so little attention in the official Cuban press in 1997 and 1999. Even on the Internet, he said, mentions were few and slight. But he thought this was a corrective story that needed to be told, and he called the show’s revival “a history project.”

It is possible to criticize racial disparities in Cuba and still hew to your national identity. “I’m a Cuban and a black artist,” said Rodriguez. “You can’t separate it. … You can’t pull against the way you are.” Yet racism remains a reality in Cuba for the dark-skinned, he said. He described routine police stops that ignored his white-skinned friends, and later a lexicon of jokes and insults that apply to black Cubans.

Then there is sex, a factor in racial fears in Cuba as elsewhere. Rodriguez, whose website is called Macho Enterprise, chooses to be playful about the matter. One series of posterlike paintings portray a black man (looking much like himself) as a sort of superhero. “Macho Forever” (1997) is one; another is “Gone with the Macho” (2007), in which a Rhett Butler figure (again, looking like Rodriguez) is suddenly very black. Other paintings in the series depict black figures as leering cherubs or as a pouncing bull.

At the same time, Rodriguez, who now lives in Spain, does not regard himself or his friends of that era as political artists. “We just wanted to make some art,” he said, and dreaded getting boxed into categories. But the political label was unavoidable in Cuba, said de la Fuente. “‘Queloides’ was a transgression.”

Still, even in repressive Cuba, art has made its place, he added. “Cuban authorities have come to realize a Cuban painting, however good, doesn’t topple the government.”

Censorship is a fact of life for artists in Cuba, said Rodriguez. “You have to know your limits, [but] it’s a game,” he said. Artists would devise one explanation of their work for timid bureaucrats and another for buyers and friends. “It’s not a lie,” said Rodriguez of the practicality of deception. “It’s a different truth.”

The panelists agreed that racial stereotypes and divisions endure worldwide, whether in Spain, said Rodriguez, or in the United States, said de la Fuentes, a professor here for two decades. In Cuba, there is racism, but there is integration in housing, street life, and the workplace.

Years ago, when he moved to the United States from his native Cuba, de la Fuente was struck by “the degree of separation, physical separation” of the races here. “For somebody who came from the Caribbean,” he said, “that looked terribly foreign.”

“Meet Me at the Crossroad,” the third of six lectures in his two-year presidential lecture series, “Hidden in Plain View: Meanings in American Music,” took the audience in Sanders Theatre on an aural tour of American history. Marsalis was supported in his task by accomplished performers: Doug Wamble on guitar and vocals, Herlin Riley on drums, Houston Person on tenor sax, Lucky Peterson on organ and piano, Reginald Veal on bass, and female vocalist Brianna Thomas.

In a wide-ranging lecture that spanned more than 150 years of American history — and in a loose, at times improvisational, but always seamless performance with his band — Marsalis explored “the mulatto identity of our national music.” In Americans’ willingness to mix genres while simultaneously cultivating distinct regional sounds, he said, they have used music both as a force for racial integration and as a celebration of diversity for centuries.

“We readily accept new styles as a way to enrich our style, our form, and our technique,” Marsalis said. “While other [countries’] traditions may seek purity and perfection of form, we seek cross-pollination as an important step in achieving a more inclusive and complex musical language.”

Music has always been a part of American culture. In 19th-century America, ragtime was a national craze, music was taught in schools, and households had 5 million pianos. After the Industrial Revolution, Marsalis said, a musical culture emerged that incorporated a variety of “root genres,” from jazz and Latin to country western and bluegrass to folk and gospel music.

In the 20th century, those genres were brought together under the dominant aesthetic of the blues, Marsalis said.

Singer Brianna Thomas performed a soulful rendition of a Bessie Smith number.

“The blues came right up from the bowels of the American soul,” he said. “The blues didn’t given a damn what anybody in Europe thought, or anybody else for that matter.”

The blues united all American root styles, he said, and brought together diverse musicians, black and white, under one musical language. “This embracing of the blues issued a deep indictment of racial injustice,” he said. It exposed “the irony of living in a deeply segregated nation in which performers from all regions and classes chose to express [themselves] through an Afro-rooted music.”

Marsalis and his band explored some of those unlikely marriages of genres and regional sounds, playing hits by such greats as Thomas Dorsey (a writer of “dirty” songs who found the Lord and became a gospel legend), Bessie Smith (“a mastress of metaphor … innuendo, and just the lowdown truth”), Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, and Rosetta Tharpe.

The early 20th century was a golden era of experimentation, Marsalis said, when musicians of all races were surprisingly free to play together and to borrow songs and techniques. Musical genres “were only labeled so that the record companies could sell them,” he said.

After World War II, however, things changed. America became a country of highly educated, wealthier citizens who, thanks to the rise of the suburbs, were more segregated than ever. American music, long a bastion of racial integration and a celebration of regional diversity, lost out to the increasingly popular medium of television, which presented a “white bread” portrait of American life that came to dominate the popular imagination.

Meanwhile, Marsalis recounted, another battle was being waged between big bands and vocalists. In 1942, bands went on strike against the major labels and refused to put out new records; vocalists began releasing their own music. Meanwhile, a 20 percent-wartime tax on ballrooms kept people out of the dance halls where bands ruled.

“Eventually, singers eclipsed band leaders as pop stars,” Marsalis said. “By 1946, the bands were doomed, and by 1950 they were gone.

The end of the war also saw the rise in clout of the American teenager, a demographic to be reckoned with and marketed to. With their disposable income, teenagers helped give rise to genres like shuffle and R&B and rewarded entertainment above artistry. Even today, Marsalis said, America recognizes “absolutely no public distinction between entertainers and musicians.”

Still, the era produced some catchy rock ’n’ roll, as Marsalis’ band proved with a rendition of “Johnny B. Goode” that brought down the house.

Turmoil in the 1960s finally severed Americans from their musical tradition, Marsalis said. After the Soviets launched Sputnik, American schools pushed math and science over music and arts. Young people, caught up in political rebellion, developed their own musical traditions of rock and folk to break from what they saw as a corrupt past.

“Our music, genetically engineered to bring us together, became the principal tool for keeping us apart,” Marsalis said. After the Vietnam War ended, he added, “What remained were generations whose social, political, and musical agendas barely survive beyond satire, beyond commerce, beyond apathy.”

Modern Americans can’t appreciate a musical past that they don’t know existed, Marsalis told the crowd. Indeed, a large part of his mission is to bring the importance of that shared past to life by sparking conversation not just among musicians but with leaders in education, business, and other fields.

The next day, Marsalis was scheduled to appear in a panel discussion on “Educating for Moral Agency and Engaged Citizenship” at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, co-hosted by the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, as well as a discussion of the artist’s role as entrepreneur at the Harvard Innovation Lab.

There are instructive lessons for America’s cultural future that can only be found in “knowing and embracing the root styles, and in mastering the regional and national particulars of our identity as sung by our greatest poets,” Marsalis said.

Marsalis’ lectures inspire deep thinking about how to both celebrate and overcome our differences, said Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the Du Bois Institute and Alphonse Fletcher University Professor.

In his work as an educator and a musician, Gates said, Marsalis “shows us how to combine the long list of American differences … and then composes them into the uniquely American symphony that we all are.”

In his work as an educator and a musician, Marsalis “shows us how to combine the long list of American differences … and then composes them into the uniquely American symphony that we all are,” said Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the Du Bois Institute.

“Lightfall: Herta & Paul Amir Building, Tel Aviv Museum of Art,” the exhibit on display at Gund Hall through March 4, is the story of a new building so unexpected and quirky that one critic called it “a surprise package” delivered to the city in Israel that is dominated otherwise by Brutalist and Bauhaus styles of architecture.

Preston Scott Cohen’s Herta and Paul Amir Building, a dramatically prismatic structure of concrete and glass, rises out of a city arts plaza like the prow of a ship. Three of the five stories are below ground and hidden from the street, making them hard to see until you are very close. But inside it is hard not to see. A spiraling, 87-foot slash of curving light — a top-lit atrium called the “Lightfall” — reaches toward stacked galleries that spiral along a void within hyperbolic parabolas.

Planning for the $55 million wing of the Tel Aviv Art Museum started in 2003; design and development spanned 2005 and 2006; groundbreaking was in 2007; and the wing’s grand opening was last November. The building houses the largest collection of Israeli art in the world.

Cohen, who is a principal of a Cambridge, Mass., architecture firm, is the Gerald M. McCue Professor in Architecture at GSD, and chair of the Department of Architecture. At the exhibit’s late-January opening, he explained the building’s origins, challenges, and statements to a capacity crowd in Gund Hall’s Piper Auditorium. Afterward Cohen had a public conversation with former New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff.

In the beginning, Cohen faced a puzzle: How do you fit five stories of building (200,000 square feet) onto an eccentric, triangle-shaped space whose footprint was less than 50,000 square feet? (He and his team designed the three stories that were below grade but lit them from above, and created a complex geometry of levels along different axes.)

Cohen and his team faced another puzzle, one that was both aesthetic and political. How do you satisfy a museum director who at first insisted on a building made of stone, the stuff of permanence and monuments? (Cohen argued for a modern look-alike, with a façade of 460 precast, reinforced concrete panels.)

Cohen faced an additional problem, one that reflected a debate within architecture: What should an art museum look like? On one hand is “the universal art museum,” he said, a place of “neutral boxes” designed to foreground the art within them. Cohen used the example of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, which he called “a processional sequence of rooms,” designed to lead a viewer along linear pathways. According to this prevalent model of museum space, said Cohen, “If architecture is anything but neutral, it runs into difficulties.”

The other hand is the idea of the museum itself as an artlike spectacle, a structure on a par with, or even surpassing, the art within it. Cohen used the example of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain, architect Frank Gehry’s audacious, curving 1997 masterpiece of glass, titanium, and limestone. Ouroussoff later called the Guggenheim Bilbao a sign of “the triumph of capitalism” in the mid-1990s, and agreed that it placed the architect “on the same level as the artist.”

During the public conversation, Ouroussoff (left) praised Cohen for his quest for “the middle ground between the two extremes” of museum architecture. The solution seemed to the critic “an almost romantic, idealistic idea."

But with the Amir Building, Cohen sought a hybrid of the two trends. “Something else happens” in the new building, he said. Outwardly, the museum wing does not stand out. It’s crafted of horizontal planes meant to house and not shock. But inwardly, said Cohen, the spatial effects are “deep and vertical,” an “infinity of heaven.” Its sunlit small galleries and walls, large enough for big installations, will impart “curatorial flexibility.”

This third paradigm for art museums of the future acknowledges architecture as art, but also preserves the neutrality and efficiency of the “white boxes” meant to display the art. In the Tel Aviv structure, curves and twists predominate, creating the geometric challenges of making galleries rectangular. (Putting rectangles in a space like that, said Cohen, “is a delicious game to try to play.”)

During the public conversation, Ouroussoff praised Cohen for his quest for “the middle ground between the two extremes” of museum architecture. The solution seemed to the critic “an almost romantic, idealistic idea.”

There is strength and sense in the middle way, said Cohen — having an art museum be art, yet not be dominant over what it holds. “The building should be about something else,” he said, “yet not disappear.”

But fame did follow. A collected edition of Austen’s novels appeared in 1833, and they have been in print ever since. By 1880, Austen was the subject of a public adulation so wild that Victorians called it “Austenolatry.” In the 21st century, this fervent literary fandom remains unchecked.

But Austen’s fame is a problem for scholars in search of scarce clues to her life.  Consider, for one, the fate of her letters. By some estimates, Austen wrote 3,000, but only about 160 survive.

Harvard’s Houghton Library owns five complete letters and one fragment. They are little storms of gossip, fashion, and drawing-room intrigue — novels in miniature that show off Austen’s ready humor and astute powers of observation.

Even in their lightness, they remain valuable to scholars. In the fall of 2010, Harvard Assistant Professor of English Andrew Warren arranged for his class to see one of the Austen letters, because the experience “draws us into Austen’s social world, which after all is the inspiration for the novels,” he said. “The world of the novels is uncannily close to the world depicted, or rather enacted, in the letter.”

For Harvard, it’s only a matter of sense and sensibility to treat the Austen letters well, with temperature and humidity controls, flat storage in acid-free folders, protection from ultraviolet light, and limited physical access.

Add to those protections the expert ministrations of the Weissman Preservation Center, an arm of the Harvard University Library. Last month, experts there finished restoring two of the University’s Austen letters, one written in 1805 and the other in 1813.

Both are “autograph letters,” handwritten missives addressed to Austen’s sister and lifelong confidante Cassandra. They were gifts from Amy Lowell, the Brookline poet and John Keats biographer who in 1925 bequeathed to Harvard an extensive literary collection of books and autographs. (A Houghton exhibit of the Lowell collection is planned for the fall.)

The letters, on cream-colored writing paper, are in remarkable shape, despite the intentional creases common in Austen’s day, when letters were folded for mailing. (The modern envelope appeared nearly a century later.)

The two letters are also full to the edges with Austen’s neat, small handwriting, in lines as straight as a ruler. “Keats wasn’t so tidy in his letters,” said Debora Mayer, the Weissman’s Helen H. Glaser Conservator. (Lowell’s Keats collection is ample and comprehensive.) But however neat the handwriting, she added, the Austen letters illustrate one joy of the conservation business: the thrill of proximity to the greats of history and literature.

“We’re artists, we’re historians, and we like to be connected,” said Mayer of conservators. “Working on objects connects us, very much so … to another place and time.”

Closest to the Austen letters was Harvard conservation intern Allison Holcomb, a master’s degree student in the Winterthur/University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation. Late last year she examined the letters and wrote a detailed “proposal record” for repairing each. It’s a technical job, but a private thrill, said Holcomb. She emailed a friend about the project, filling in the subject line with exclamation points.

Holcomb showed her tools, which illustrate the cleanliness, care, and precision required for literary conservation: specialized blotters to protect text, needle-like awls, delicate brushes, magnifying glasses, long-fibered Japanese tissue for mending tears, surgical scalpels, and a stainless steel tool for turning pages — aptly called a “micro spatula.”

Before treatment, Holcomb examined the Austen letters under magnification, traced water marks to determine the origin of the paper, took documentary digital images (a step repeated after restoration), and used “raking” (oblique) light to search for minor distortions in the paper. Conservation work, said Mayer, first involves “looking closely and intently.”

During the treatment, Holcomb used vinyl eraser crumbs to gently clean the letter surfaces. (Using water was out of the question; it would accelerate the destructive chemistry of the iron gall ink common to Austen’s era.) But she left the graphite marks within each letter untouched, because they are editorially significant attempts on the part of early editors to mark logical paragraph breaks. To finish, Holcomb removed old repairs, flattened bent corners, and fixed several tears.

The two letters bring Austen alive — observant, funny, gossipy, and irreverent. The 1813 missive closes with what might be a message to anyone still under the spell of Austenolatry today. “Now I think I have written you a good sized Letter & may deserve whatever I can get in reply,” she wrote. “Infinities of Love.”

Conservationist

Allison Holcomb, an intern at Harvard Library’s Weissman Preservation Center, repairs two 19th-century letters written by Jane Austen to her sister, Cassandra.

Lettres de Austen

Holcomb has read the translations for each and refers back to them when necessary.

How do you do?

This letter from Jane to Cassandra begins halfway down the page, as was the practice, with “How do you do?” It is written on hot-pressed paper in corrosive iron gall ink.

Worlds ago

Holcomb, who attends the Winterthur Museum at the University of Delaware, uses a micro-spatula to repair this letter written in 1805.

Tricks of the trade

Because her field of conservation is so small, Holcomb appropriates materials from other fields. The tweezers, water pen, and micro-spatulas are all utensils she is using on this current project.

Flourish

Through the microscope Holcomb can see minute details of the lettering.

Tedious work

Using her fingers and eraser crumbs, Holcomb cleans each letter.

Near perfect

This letter, containing a previous repair (upper left), will be restored to its original form.

Sincerely

Austen’s signature appears at the bottom of this 1813 letter.

Photo slideshow: Yours truly

Rose Lincoln/Harvard Staff Photographer

The feeling started years ago, during one of his stints leading a course in Western civilization. “Each time I taught it, I felt I was getting closer to an original answer to the question, ‘Why did the West dominate the rest?’ plus the subordinate question, ‘Is it over?’ ”

Ferguson, the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History, believes we are witnessing the end of the predominance of the West — “Europe and North America, broadly,” he says — relative to countries like China, India, and Brazil. Much of the rest of the world has not only caught up with Western achievements; according to Ferguson, the West also has lost faith in its own civilization because of the widespread perception that its success was almost exclusively the result of violence and imperialism.

So his latest book, “Civilization: The West and the Rest,” was mostly produced amid a mood of uneasiness, he admits. “I was worried that the West was losing sight of what made it so successful, and perhaps losing those advantages that had previously been so important.”

In “Civilization,” Ferguson dubs these Western advantages his six “killer apps,” which are competition, science, property rights, medicine, consumerism, and the work ethic. “The prescription must be to reinstall and update these apps, to take these six things and make sure we’re doing them as well as we can,” he argues.

“I’ve spent a lot of time lately thinking about how healthy these things are in the West, and the answer is not very. While I was writing the book I also realized that what other fallen civilizations had in common was the speed with which their downfall happened. Things don’t always happen gradually in history; sometimes they fall apart quite fast. So there’s a certain urgency in my argument. If you don’t watch out, things can go wrong very rapidly. By the way, I think that’s what’s happened in Europe. The financial crisis has gone from bad to worse in the span of a year.”

The candid and sometimes controversial Ferguson is especially troubled by the rampant belief that all civilizations are not only equal, but that “the West was actually bad because Western power was based exclusively on conquest and colonization.”

“That self-flagellation, which has been a feature of the academe for a generation, is quite corrosive, because if you teach a generation that the West was essentially wicked and its passing shouldn’t be mourned, then your students aren’t going to feel tremendously committed to its values.”

“The West, in some respects — not all — was a more successful civilization than any other because it was successful economically in making people richer than they ever were before; successful socially in creating greater opportunities, not least for women than any previous society; and successful culturally in opening up whole avenues of scientific and other inquiry that had previously been closed,” he says. “Therefore, we shouldn’t think of the West just in terms of conquest and colonization, slavery and exploitation. That’s only a part of the story. The least original thing that the West did after 1500 was empire.”

Apart from his prolific writing (he’s now at work on a multivolume biography of Henry Kissinger), Ferguson makes ample time for his four children, including a new son, and for playing the double bass.

The former high school punk rocker (“We had several different names, one of which was ‘The Strand’; we were closely modeled on the Jam”) traded in his six-string after discovering jazz. He still plays bass occasionally with the London-based quintet “A Night in Tunisia.”

Ferguson’s sobering message will air on television this spring, when PBS screens the series ‘Civilization: Is the West History?’, which he wrote and presented. “My argument is, ‘Look, let’s identify the strengths, and let’s not pretend that in the period after 1500 something remarkable didn’t happen. There’s a reason why the West got so much richer, longer-lived, healthier, and better educated than anybody else, and it wasn’t just machine guns.’ This idea annoys some people,” he shrugs, “but that’s OK.”

Chiara (key-ARE-uh) is an Italian word meaning “clear, pure, or light.” Comprising Rebecca Fischer and Hye Yung Julie Yoon on violins, Jonah Sirota on viola, and Gregory Beaver on cello, the Chiara Quartet’s concert is free and will be performed in Harvard’s John Knowles Paine Hall at 8 p.m. Feb. 17. Tickets will be available beginning Feb. 3.

The program is an all-Schubert concert and includes his String Quartet in A minor, D. 804 “Rosamunde”; String Quartet in C minor, D. 703 “Quartettsatz”; and String Quartet in D minor, D. 810 “Death and the Maiden.” Renowned for bringing fresh excitement to traditional string quartet repertoire, as well as for creating thoroughly insightful interpretations of new music, the Chiara String Quartet’s recent recording of Jefferson Friedman’s String Quartet No. 3, released in April 2011, has been nominated for a Grammy in the “Best Contemporary Classical Composition” category.

More information about the Chiara Quartet can also be found on Facebook.

The Chiara Quartet will perform a free concert at John Knowles Paine Concert Hall at 8 p.m. Feb. 17. Free, first-come, first-served tickets will be available at Harvard Box Office, Holyoke Center Arcade, beginning Feb. 3. 

Marsalis’ third lecture, “Meet Me at the Crossroad,” will begin at 7:30 p.m. and include musical illustrations by acclaimed musicians, including Doug Wamble (guitar and vocals), Herlin Riley (drums), Houston Person (tenor sax), Lucky Peterson (organ and piano), Reginald Veal (bass), and Brianna Thomas (vocals).

“The blues, American folk music, gospel, American popular song, hillbilly, bluegrass, country western, and jazz are root styles of our national music,” Marsalis said. “This lecture will identify the similarities and differences of those roots, and explain why they are musically compatible.”

In addition to his lecture-performance, Marsalis will spend the following day on the Harvard campus, appearing in a panel on “Educating for Moral Agency and Engaged Citizenship” held at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and co-hosted by the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research. Later that day he will participate in a discussion at Harvard’s new Innovation Lab to talk about the artist as entrepreneur.

Marsalis launched his lecture series last April before a sold-out house with “Music as Metaphor,” a two-hour journey through the history of American music, punctuated with performances by renowned bluegrass and jazz musicians. He returned to campus in September with a team of dancers for his second lecture, “The Double Crossing of a Pair of Heels: The Dynamics of Social Dance and American Popular Musics,” which traced the evolution of American social dance from the Charleston to the fox trot and the tango to the twist.

“Marsalis’ prior lectures have illustrated vividly the ways in which the arts have intertwined with the history and culture of our country,” Harvard President Drew Faust said. “Just as importantly, they have acted as catalysts for activity on our campus, prompting class discussions, inspiring study, and elevating the arts across campus. I look forward to hearing him again next month.”

In addition to his lectures, Marsalis has engaged in dialogue with students across the University and throughout the community, teaching a master class and holding a question-and-answer session with students from Harvard and local public high schools.

Marsalis’ lecture is one of several arts events taking place throughout the year as part of Harvard’s 375th anniversary celebration. The Marsalis lecture series highlights the University’s focus on the arts since a 2008 presidential task force called for increasing the presence of the arts on campus.

A native of New Orleans, Marsalis is one of the nation’s most highly decorated cultural figures. In addition to winning nine Grammy awards, he was the first jazz musician to receive the Pulitzer Prize for music. His international accolades include an honorary membership in Britain’s Royal Academy of Music, the highest decoration for a non-British citizen, and the insignia of chevalier of the Legion of Honor, France’s highest distinction. He has more than 70 albums to his credit, which have sold more than 7 million copies. Marsalis is also the first jazz artist to perform and compose across the full spectrum of jazz: from its New Orleans roots to bebop and modern jazz. By creating and performing an expansive range of new music for everything from quartets to big bands, chamber music ensembles to symphony orchestras, and tap dance to ballet, Marsalis has expanded the vocabulary of jazz and created a vital body of work that places him among the world’s finest musicians and composers. He was recently named a CBS News Cultural Correspondent. Harvard awarded him an honorary doctorate in music in 2009.

Tickets for Marsalis’ lecture at Sanders will be free. They will become available for the Harvard community Jan. 26 and for the public Jan. 27. For information on obtaining tickets.

The offbeat rendering was no surprise given the diverse mix of musicians behind it, members of the Silk Road Ensemble, Yo-Yo Ma’s collective of artists that explores musical crossroads. In between performing new compositions for a packed house, the players serenaded one of their own, tabla player Sandeep Das, with the familiar song for his special day.

On the impromptu stage at the end of the wood-paneled hall were the string instruments typically associated with the classical repertoire, violins, a cello, a viola, and a bass. But there was also a kamancheh, a Persian bowed-string instrument, and a pipa, a four-stringed instrument from China, and a gaita, a Galician bagpipe, and the shakuhachi, a Japanese bamboo flute.

Made up of internationally renowned performers and composers from more than 20 countries, the ensemble was back in residency at Harvard during winter break as part of a five-year collaboration between Harvard and the project, a nonprofit inspired by the cultural traditions of the ancient Eurasian Silk Road trade routes that connected East with West.

For the next several years, the group will present a series of performances, workshops, and collaborations with local arts, cultural, and educational institutions.

During the week the ensemble worked on four new commissioned works, which they played for the evening concert, which was co-sponsored by Harvard’s Office for the Arts’ popular Learning From Performers program.

Addressing the audience before the show, violinist Colin Jacobsen said the week during which the musicians and composers worked in a “creative cauldron” was “amazing.”

Yo-Yo Ma (left) speaks with composer Vijay Iyer, who created “Playlist for an Extreme Occasion,” a work that included a type of musical dialogue between the cello and the tabla, along with the use of the piano as a percussive instrument, and segments of improvisation.

So too was the input from Harvard students, he said.

“To have Harvard students reflect on what we were doing as we were doing it and give us their feedback was incredibly valuable for us.”

Composer Vijay Iyer created “Playlist for an Extreme Occasion,” a work that included a type of musical dialogue between the cello and the tabla — a pair of Indian drums — along with the use of the piano as a percussive instrument, and segments of improvisation.

In creating the work, Iyer said he tried to “think about how we experience music today, what is it for, and how does it function in our lives. … You can’t force meaning onto any musical situation, but you can at least open it up as a question.”

David Bruce composed the four-part work “Cut the Rug,” which included a frenetic final movement that he said “sort of raises the roof.” He said he was forced to rethink how to craft a work for musicians with such different approaches to the art form.

“I am used to writing everything down. … And knowing that there were some musicians who don’t come from traditions where that happens, it was quite hard for me to get my head around.

The evening also included the rhythmically challenging work “Mille Etoiles” by Glenn Kotche, percussionist for the alternative rock band Wilco. Inspired by a night camping in France under the stars and the birth dates of members of his family, the work is based on impossibly complex time signatures like 31/8.

A taped rehearsal would have been peppered with “four-letter words,” joked bass player Jeff Beecher. To prepare the piece, the musicians broke it down into sections, he said during a question-and-answer session with the audience, working slowly and prepping “for the inevitable.”

As part of the recent residency, the ensemble also took part in a Wintersession arts intensive titled “Knowing the Score: A Workshop in New Music Without Borders.” Throughout the week, ensemble members met with a small group of undergraduate and graduate students to help them develop independent projects based on the ensemble’s work.
Harvard participants included Graduate School of Design student Timothy Carey, who was interested in the collaborative process of music as opposed to that of design. Robert Moore, a student in the Graduate School of Education’s International Education program who has worked in Nepal to establish a national music curriculum, was also eager to see the group’s rehearsal and collaborative process. Freshman Stella Fiorenzoli, an aspiring composer, created a mini-composition for the group based on Tibetan and Indian folk tunes.

The intensive culminated in a final presentation of the projects, which included discussions and the performance of brief compositions.

Across the campus this January, students collaborated with artists and other professionals to sculpt, write, laugh, dance, produce, perform, and play during Harvard’s Wintersession.

The University’s revamped academic calendar not only offers students the chance to unwind during break without the worry of looming papers and exams, it also provides them with a relaxed week back at Harvard where they can engage with a range of inventive programming before classes begin. Many seminars and workshops are artistic and connect students with areas or aesthetics they might never explore when in full academic mode.

The Harvard Breakers, a break-dancing group, follow the lead of instructor Thorn Lim (right) during practice at Lowell House. Jon Chase/Harvard Staff Photographer

“They get to step outside the day-to-day requirements of living in an academic environment and treat it like a playground, and let their minds run in an open and free way,” said Jack Megan, director of Harvard’s Office for the Arts (OFA), which sponsored a series of arts intensives with alumni in collaboration with the Harvard Alumni Association. “It’s creative play, but that feeds so much, including the way we learn and engage with other kinds of learning.”

Among the myriad OFA offerings, students took a turn creating a show for the popular doctor drama “House” under the guidance of Harvard graduates Cuse, executive producer and head writer for the hit show “Lost,” and Monica Henderson Beletsky ’99, a writer for the shows “Friday Night Lights” and “Parenthood.” In Sever Hall, the pair walked the undergraduates through the creative brainstorming process, discussing ideas and exploring plot themes and narrative arcs. Using suggestions from the students, they settled on a storyline involving the main character House and his archrival, Moriarty, House’s visiting nephew, and a young boy with a penchant for swallowing things like his parents’ car keys and an engagement ring.

“It’s fun to see the students take some of these concepts that are very specific to the craft of television writing and run with them and see where their imaginations take them,” said Cuse.

He praised the University for its efforts to increase the presence of the arts on campus.

“Harvard has recognized the need to increase the exposure of students to the arts, and I think it’s enormously valuable, whatever you end up doing in your life.”

Students curious about what it takes to score a major motion picture turned to music industry executive Robert Kraft ’76. Using clips from movies such as “Ice Age,” “Night at the Museum,” and “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” Kraft had the group listen carefully to how a pulsing score or a line from a popular song can heighten a film’s atmosphere.

If the job is done right, said Kraft, “you don’t notice the music at all.” It becomes just part of the overall film experience. While a strong music background and an ability to tell a story with music are key, said the music executive, collaboration in an industry with big personalities and big money on the line is paramount.

The work can involve pleading with musical icons like Paul McCartney for the rights to a song, or convincing a composer to rescore a film in a few days­, a process that typically takes about two months. Such was the case with “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” when the initial soundtrack was deemed too melodramatic once the digitally generated apes were edited into the film.

One of the OFA offerings has students creating a show for the popular doctor drama “House” under the guidance of Harvard graduate Carlton Cuse (right), executive producer and head writer for the hit show “Lost,” and Monica Henderson Beletsky ’99, a writer for “Friday Night Lights” and “Parenthood.” Amanda Swinhart/Harvard Staff Photographer

“Your political skills,” Kraft said, “are the No. 1 attribute.”

For Andy Borowitz ’80, comedy is king.

“The funny people go into comedy; the not funny people go to law school. So now’s the time to decide,” joked the humorist and author to a crowd in Boylston Hall during a talk titled “Comedy: The Career.”

His parents, he said, assumed he would take the law school route, but his love for comedy intervened. While at Harvard, he wrote, performed, and eventually became president of the Harvard Lampoon. Borowitz encouraged students interested in his path to first “find out if you are a funny person.”

“It’s possible that you’re occupying some kind of underground niche where no one understands your comedy. That’s what we call failing.”

To succeed, you have to write on a daily basis, become passionate observers of the world, and, above all, he said, “follow your bliss.”

“This is my bliss. I don’t feel like I am working; I am having fun every day.”

Arts @ 29 Garden hosted arts intensives based on the connection between the digital age and the arts, including one for wannabe spin masters.

While turntables are still a critical part of a deejay’s repertoire, much of the music crafted for clubs today employs computers and sophisticated software. Sarah Hankins, a.k.a. DJ Super Squirrel, a Harvard graduate student in ethnomusicology who studies the deejay culture and clubs in the Middle East, used the popular computer program Ableton to help students create a high-tech mix tape during her intensive “Learn to DJ.”

Sarah Joan Kariko (right), a visiting scholar, and Rebecca "Bex" Kwan '14 (front) perform creative dance. Kwan was part of a seminar called “The Technology of Performance.” Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer

“With two hands and two turntables, you could only play two sounds at once. Now it’s like you have the equivalent of an infinite number of hands,” said Hankins.

Using the computer program, students chopped up songs and then merged the sections back together to create their mixes. Their ultimate goal was a creative sound that keeps the beat seamless and steady.

Hankins also added a historic dimension to the weeklong session, paying homage to people like Grand Wizard Theodore, the inventor of scratching, the technique of manipulating one record over another by scratching it back and forth under the needle, and to New York’s South Bronx of the 1960s and ’70s, where the deejay art form, an import from Jamaica, took root and evolved.

“I feel like anyone who is going to deejay needs to know that history. Otherwise, you are just faking,” she said. “You want to know the history of the art form.”

But being a deejay also has broader implications, said Hankins, who compares the art form to an increasingly interconnected worldview.

“This is the future of world culture to me. … This whole remix aesthetic, that’s what we all do now, that is what the world is doing, whether in the realm of music or art or medicine or literature — it’s all about sampling” from something else. “The more you understand how to remix, the more you understand how the world is working.”

Hankins also went old school with the class, helping students to perfect their vinyl scratching techniques. She carefully walked sophomore Greg Yang through the “one-click flair,” a fast finger twitch method of isolating a single sound while spinning two records.

“It’s pretty awesome,” said Yang, as he worked the side-by-side turntables. “It feels like you’re the man.”

Down the hall, sophomore Bex Kwan practiced her inner moss. Flopping her body over a railing, she remained motionless for a minute, before slowly standing and raising her arms in the air, transforming from the small soft plant into a swaying fern. Kwan was part of a seminar called “The Technology of Performance.” Two New York-based video designers led the session and helped students to create performances that incorporated movement with audio and video components.

“I’ve trained as a photographer and actor,” said Kwan, a Dudley House resident and VES concentrator. “They are completely different fields, but I’ve always wanted to merge them. … Finding people who are as passionate about where these media come together is really amazing.”

Selena Kim '15 rehearses a performance as part of the January Arts Intensives events. Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer

The theme for the intensives at the Garden Street space encouraged students to collaborative on issues involving the arts, media, and technology, said Lori Gross, associate provost for arts and culture. “By exploring identity in the digital age through text, visual imagery, and performance, students were able to intensely focus on their own innovative artistic explorations.”

Movement and motion were also part of Wintersession’s eclectic mix. At the Harvard Dance Center, students worked with renowned choreographer Christopher Roman to create a work for the Harvard Dance Program’s spring show. In the Lowell House dance studio, the Harvard Breakers, a student-led dance troupe specializing in street styles of hip-hop dance, led a five-day beginner boot camp.

At Agassiz House, an aspiring composer was reveling in an intensive that teamed her with members of the Silk Road Ensemble, the collection of musicians from around the world, led by cellist Yo-Yo Ma, who explore the cultural traditions of the ancient trade route.

At Harvard as part of an ongoing residency, the ensemble practiced new compositions and mentored a small group of students who created projects inspired by the group’s work.

Freshman Stella Fiorenzoli has wasted no time connecting with Harvard’s art scene. She partnered in the fall with the ensemble and was back for Wintersession, creating a mini-composition based on Tibetan and Indian folk tunes and written for the ensemble’s shakuhachi, a Japanese bamboo flute, and the pipa, a Chinese stringed instrument.

A classically trained pianist and cellist, Fiorenzoli called her work with the ensemble and the exposure to so many types of instruments and music “inspiring.”

“There is this world of instruments that have these unique sounds and tones and that really should be … explored more in the music that we listen to today. This has been one of the greatest experiences that I have had at Harvard so far.”

“I had to write a draft during first semester,” said Rees, an economics concentrator who is writing about the debt crisis in the Euro zone. “I was still doing a lot of data stuff, and I didn’t want to write anything yet. I ended up spitting out pages of writing that was terrible.”

The good news is that the feedback came from bestselling author Walter Isaacson ’74, the former chairman of CNN and managing editor of Time, and was part of the Harvard College Winter Writing Program, a two-week Winter Break seminar for undergraduate nonfiction writers. Rees was one of 50 students admitted to the program, which is co-taught by Isaacson and Evan Thomas ’73, the Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University and former editor at large at Newsweek.

“It’s been great,” said Rees. “The course is moving me in the direction of writing a story and explaining my topic in the form of a narrative, which helps because the Euro crisis is kind of a saga. Professor Isaacson also suggested I cut down some of my sentences and make things clearer.”

Clarity and simplicity are frequent themes in the program. Thomas said many Harvard students write well but run into the trap of making the simple complicated, rather than the other way around.

“Simple does not mean ‘simpleton,’ ” he said. “Simple often means quite the opposite, that you’ve really thought through the problem and found a clear way to express a complex thought. But students see a lot of different models of writing and think that they have to sound sophisticated by writing convoluted sentences. Really, they should take complicated thoughts and figure out how to render them in a clear way.”

Like Rees, each program participant submitted a writing sample, which was reviewed in meetings with Thomas and in small groups with Isaacson. Thomas also asked students to edit their own pieces with direction from a short guide that he authored for the class. Then he had undergraduates trade writing samples with classmates, edit and return the pieces, and compare the results. “The idea is for students to see how they edit their own piece, how their classmates edit the students’ piece, and then look at the difference,” Thomas said.

Students convened as a class for 90 minutes every afternoon to hear some of the country’s most distinguished nonfiction writers talk about their craft. During the two-week session, the program welcomed Pulitzer Prize finalist Megan Marshall, National Book Critics Circle Award winner Anne Fadiman, Washington Post columnist Alexandra Petri, and Peabody Award-winning radio host and author Kurt Andersen. The program’s first guest speaker, however, was none other than Harvard University President and Lincoln Professor of History Drew Faust.

Faust discussed her most recent book, “This Republic of Suffering,” which looks at the way the Civil War redefined death and identity in American culture. She used the example of a letter she discovered during her research to illustrate the challenges of balancing objectivity and sentimentality in writing about history. The note, written by a dying Mississippi soldier to his father, begins, “You will be delighted to hear from your son.” Faust explained that the “delight” stemmed from the fact that the father would know his son’s fate. The soldier would not be among the many war dead who went missing.

“For me, there is a kind of charge from looking at that letter and thinking, ‘Someone touched this,’ ” she said. “The connection to the soldier’s sacrifice, his suffering, is beyond words for me. A professional historian isn’t supposed to care about that. It’s supposed to be what the words are, what the impact of it was, what you interpret from it. But the magic of the embodiment of the letter is sentimental on the one hand, and emotional on the other.”

Faust’s candor and passion for her work made an impression on Lena Bae ’12, a government concentrator and program participant.

“It might be sentimental,” Bae said, “but as a student debating various potential careers, that’s the kind of bar I’d like to set on whatever it is that I choose — a career where I feel that extent of emotion, not necessarily of the heartbreaking kind, but the kind that reminds me why it is that I have made this choice.”

Isaacson, whose most recent work is a best-selling biography of the late Apple Computer co-founder Steve Jobs, said that he and Thomas were getting as much from the students as they were giving. It’s fascinating to talk to students who grew up in the digital age, he said, and to get their thoughts on what shapes nonfiction storytelling will take in the future. A Harvard overseer, Isaacson is even more excited about what the success of a course like this could mean for future Winter Break programming.

“It’s interesting to figure out what January can be,” he said. “Harvard teaches academic subjects well, but it would be fun to see if Winter Break could be a time during which more practical subjects could be done on a noncredit basis, whether it’s accounting, emergency medical training, or writing narrative nonfiction. There are all sorts of practitioners who would come to Harvard, even in January, and say, ‘I can teach you something useful.’ ”

Bae says the program has taught her to be more conscious of her audience. It’s also taught her that good writing takes time, and many revisions.

“I’ve learned to think much more about the reader, especially in terms of making things simple,” she said. “I’ve also learned that writing is a circular and extensive process. Your brain works on your piece during sleep, and gnaws on your ideas throughout the day. This means start early, no matter how badly your first draft comes out, and allow yourself to work on various pieces at the same time. I think simply recognizing that this is the kind of thing that your mind works on slowly will change how I play around with my writing process.”

When asked why acting is so important, he responds with a knowing chuckle that makes his point.

“It’s among those questions like, ‘Why is laughing important?’ There is no answer. We love it.”

One of Russia’s most distinguished theater scholars, Smeliansky is the founding director of the American Repertory Theater (A.R.T.)/Moscow Art Theater School Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard University. As part of the program, he is spending the month at Harvard leading a series of classes on the history of theater and drama.

During a recent session, with the American Repertory Theater’s lobby serving as an impromptu classroom, Smeliansky connected the political situation in Russia and recent anti-government demonstrations to the nation’s wave of “dark” dramatic productions.

Two new Russian stagings of Anton Chekhov’s “The Seagull,” he said, make earlier versions of the work appear “rosy” by comparison and are likely a reflection of a sense of broad societal despair. But with the protests, Smeliansky sees signs of a new direction for the country, and the arts.

“Russia has gotten back, for the first time, some kind of perspective of real freedom, of real democracy … it’s good news for Russia.”

Before and after the class, the program’s first-year students welcomed Smeliansky back to the A.R.T. with bear hugs and warm Russian greetings.

“He’s just a remarkable man; he is just full of wisdom,” said first-year A.R.T. Institute student Henry Austin Shikongo. “The amount of his generosity, and spirit and heart … is just something you don’t see very often.”

Those qualities have made Smeliansky, longtime associate director of the famed Moscow Art Theater, a more effective teacher. He has helped students in the Harvard program develop their talent by teaching them about the history of the craft.

Teachers from the Moscow school also visit Cambridge to teach classes and offer instruction. The two-year, five-semester graduate training program includes a three-month residency at the Moscow institution, where students perform a play on one of its three stages. Students who graduate from the program receive a master’s degree from the Russian theater school.

While in Cambridge, Smeliansky will offer insights into the minds and methods of 20th-century giants such as Bertolt Brecht, Gordon Craig, Michael Chekhov, Henrik Ibsen, and Samuel Beckett.

“My goal is to make the students sure that the world is not limited to America, the same way I teach in Russia that the world is not limited to Russia.”

Another name on Smeliansky’s list is Constantin Stanislavski, a co-founder of the Moscow Art Theater whose theories and techniques emphasizing a psychological approach to acting led to the method school.

But by studying his critics, and the ways he continuously sought to refine his teaching techniques, students get a better, fuller understanding of Stanislavski and his system, said Smeliansky.

“The last couple years of his life he completely started the method from scratch. … The truth of Stanislavski is the truth of any great artist; they are not an answer — they are a question for us, that’s the point.

“Much of what we understand of modernity made its way back into the world from an older world, thanks to the efforts of Poggio Bracciolini,” Greenblatt, the John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities, told a group of nearly 50 rapt Harvard undergraduates in Sever Hall on Wednesday. “On the Nature of Things” was “an ancient work of philosophy, in magnificent poetry, but it is a work of physics at its core.”

Greenblatt’s most recent book, “The Swerve: How the World Became Modern,” centers on Bracciolini’s discovery and was the topic of the third in a series of book talks given by Harvard faculty and alumni throughout the Wintersession programming period. The talks were designed primarily for undergraduates, but were open to all members of the University community.

Greenblatt said the discovery of Lucretius’ work was hardly noticed at first, sort of like an earthquake at the bottom of the ocean. But the poem’s ideas gathered strength over the decades and eventually landed like a tidal wave in the medieval intellectual world. Why was the book so important? To begin with, “On the Nature of Things” anticipated modern understandings of the physical universe.

“It argues that the universe consists of atoms, void, and nothing else,” Greenblatt explained. “The atoms are eternal and always moving. Everything comes into existence simply because of the random movement of atoms, which, given enough time, will form and reform, constantly experimenting with different configurations of matter from which will eventually emerge everything we know, and into which everything we know will collapse.”

Not only did Lucretius anticipate the basis of modern physics, Greenblatt said, but also Darwin’s theory of evolution.

“Lucretius believed that nature ceaselessly experiments,” he said. “The experiments throw out lots of weird things: mutations, creatures not fitted for survival or reproduction. But when a certain species of creature emerges that is able to find food for itself more successfully and is able to reproduce successfully, that species will survive.”

The most explosive — and perhaps most modern — idea forwarded in “On the Nature of Things” is that humanity is not at the center of the universe, either physically or spiritually. A disciple of the Greek philosopher Epicurus, Lucretius believed that religions were cruel delusions, and that the aim of life should be not sacrifice, but the reduction of suffering.

Lucretius argued that “the universe wasn’t created for human beings,” said Greenblatt. “Humans are not unique. The Earth is not the center of the universe. There are an infinite number of worlds. The soul is a material thing, just like the body. Therefore, there’s no afterlife, and no judgment, rewards, or punishments. The moral order that we have exists simply because we need to organize societies as cooperative beings. And the highest goal in life would have to be not pain or piety but pleasure, which all creatures seek.”

Lucretius’s ideas were heresy in the Middle Ages. But, wrapped in gorgeous poetry, they made their way through time to shape how we think and understand the world today. Still, Greenblatt pointed out that Western culture still struggles with the concepts that the Roman poet set forth 2,000 years ago.

“The reason that no American politician can run on [Epicureanism] is that most people don’t want to believe it,” he said. “It’s not gratifying to believe it. It doesn’t feel liberating for most people to believe that we’re in a material universe of atoms and emptiness and nothing else.”

After the talk, Sarah Siskind ’14 said that the story of Bracciolini and Lucretius got her thinking about the meaning of modernity and antiquity.

“The whole concept of modernity is interesting,” she said. “He’s talking about ideas from antiquity as modern ideas, so why don’t we just call them modern? I took a class on modern political philosophy that got me interested in these questions. Now I’m excited to read the book. I had never heard of Poggio Bracciolini, but I’ll definitely be talking about him now.”

The Nicholas V. Artamonoff Collection, presented by the Image Collections and Fieldwork Archives (ICFA) at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, in Washington, D.C., features more than 500 photos that Artamonoff took in Istanbul and at archaeological sites across western Turkey from 1935 through 1945.

The photos document sites and monuments, many of which have since fallen into disrepair or have disappeared entirely, which adds to the collection’s historical value.

To Günder Varinlioğlu, Byzantine assistant curator of ICFA, the body of work reveals a talented amateur who was intensely interested in photographing his surroundings. Although Artamonoff was not formally trained as an architect or art historian either, the images he captured through his lens are the work of a man who was dedicated to his craft and who had a profound understanding of historical monuments.

Varinlioğlu and intern Alyssa DesRochers worked last year to organize the collection, while researching both Artamonoff and his photography. Their efforts have resulted in a new online exhibit. The collection’s photos can be browsed or searched by title, location, or key word.

Photographed by Artamonoff in 1935, the Ottoman courtyard with an old cypress tree, Istanbul, Turkey.

The images show 1930s Istanbul, a dynamic and romantic setting steeped in antiquity and well worth preserving for posterity. Jan Ziolkowski, director of Dumbarton Oaks, described Artamonoff as a “Casablanca figure,” and his Istanbul as a center of “multicultural, polyglot espionage types.” Even though Turkey is across the Mediterranean from Morocco, Ziolkowski said that the latter “has been in a similar position by being sometimes the edge of a tectonic plate between empires, and sometimes an imperial tectonic plate in its own right.”

Invoking tectonic plates calls to mind both the constant gradual change and periodic violent change that affect historic cities such as Istanbul. The relentless sun has faded aged frescoes, and the rhythmic waves have eroded sea walls, while successive iterations of urban renewal have claimed such important sites as the Aqueduct of Valens.

Varinlioğlu singled out Valens as an example of the urgency of archaeological preservation. The aqueduct, newly surrounded by a neighborhood in Artamonoff’s 1936 photograph, “represents the dynamism of a major center of population like Istanbul, as reflected by the fresh debris of recently demolished buildings. The urban fabric is like a living organism. Its transformation is inevitable, but it should not proceed in an uncontrolled manner at the expense of the cultural heritage.”

In later decades, the neighborhood surrounding the aqueduct made way for a highway. The landscape is sure to change further, but the researchers at Dumbarton Oaks hope that this photo collection encourages the preservation of visual and cultural memories, as well as the thoughtful restoration of monuments.

The photos document sites and monuments, many of which have since fallen into disrepair or have disappeared entirely, which adds to the collection’s historical value.

In the meantime, there is more work to do. Varinlioğlu and DesRochers continue to research Artamonoff’s life to enrich the collection’s context. They have identified additional Artamonoff works in the archives of the Smithsonian Institution’s Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Archives. In addition, there are more images from the ICFA inventory that may be by Artamonoff. The exhibit organizers hope that viewers may help determine their authorship. They also hope that scholars, local residents, and others may recognize some of the many unidentified ruins and individuals in the photos.

The occasion, though, was a happy one: the centennial re-enactment of the Civil War Battle of Antietam, a turning point for the Union Army that is perhaps better remembered as the single bloodiest day in America’s history. The anniversary events that day were designed not to foster solemn remembrance of those 3,600 deaths, but to be “a spectacle that would remind us of the courage and the sacrifice that we had been taught to revere since we were very small.

“This was a carnival without carnage, a battle that was stripped of content and context,” Faust told a packed house at the Cambridge Public Library on Tuesday.

The re-enactment was a formative moment for the young Faust, who would go on to become Harvard’s Lincoln Professor of History and its first female president, as well as the author of six books, including “This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War.” The event demonstrated not just the inherent appeal of war — its promises of personal sacrifice and national glory — but the ways in which our histories of war are shaped by the politics of the present.

In her lecture, “Telling War Stories: Reflections of a Civil War Historian,” Faust explored the meanings the Civil War holds today, what its history says about modern conflicts, and what role historians and other writers can play in uncovering the deeper truths of warfare.

A full house greeted President Drew Faust at Cambridge Public Library's main branch as they waited for the first of the John Harvard Book Celebration lectures to begin. Harvard will donate 400 books to the Boston and Cambridge library systems, an act that mirrors John Harvard’s own gift of 400 books to the fledgling university that would later bear his name.

The talk kicked off the John Harvard Book Celebration, a recently announced program that will commemorate Harvard’s 375th anniversary, as well as its ties to its Cambridge and Boston neighbors. Over the next several months, prominent Harvard faculty and others will speak at library branches in both cities. Other faculty, staff, and students will fan out across smaller branches to host community events.

Harvard also will donate 400 books to the two library systems, an act that mirrors John Harvard’s own gift of 400 books to the fledgling university that would later bear his name. The partnership is fitting, said Susan Flannery, Cambridge’s director of libraries, since Harvard and the public libraries share the aim of “fostering learning over a lifetime.”

One could simply study the Civil War for a lifetime and continue to find new meaning in the conflict, as Faust and other historians have done.

“We remember a very different Civil War from the one we celebrated and contested in the 1960s,” Faust told the audience. The war’s legacy was hotly disputed during the centennial, as contemporary debates over civil rights and racial equality put the role of slavery in the conflict into sharp relief. Civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. even invoked President Abraham Lincoln’s words in his “I Have a Dream” speech, Faust noted.

If the capacity crowd at the lecture was any indication, the public continues to find the Civil War as fascinating — and confounding — as ever. In the five decades since the centennial, scholars have published books on the Civil War at the rate of 100 a year, according to Faust. Still, “The conflict over its interpretation continues, once again mirroring our contemporary debates over national purposes.”

That very night, Republican candidates were vying for victory in the New Hampshire presidential primary after campaigning on issues that echo some of those debated during the Civil War, she said. Rep. Ron Paul decries the federal government’s growing power, just as antebellum Southerners once did, while Gov. Rick Perry once suggested secession for his home state of Texas.

“As we come in time to see ourselves differently, we will ask different questions of our past,” and the fresh answers will change our perceptions of ourselves, Faust said.

She touched on the similarities of war and literature (a topic that formed the subject of her 2011 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities), noting that both thrive on a narrative. What elevates war above random violence is our expectation that such conflicts have a meaningful beginning and progress toward an ending of victory or defeat. In truth, Faust said, war is chaotic, its truths hard if not impossible to define.

“We write about war because it is so hard to write about war, because its contradictions demand attention, if not resolution,” Faust said. “We seek the order that narrative promises to impose on the incoherence of conflict.”

In the aftermath of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, she noted, Americans replaced their fear of terrorism with the “efficacy” and national purpose of a named “war on terror.” Only by adopting the narrative of war could people assure themselves that terrorism could be eradicated.

Now, during the Civil War’s 150th anniversary and amid debates over U.S. engagements in the Middle East, people must remember the responsibility that rests on those who write the histories of wars, Faust urged.

“Human beings are in fact powerfully attracted to war,” she said. “As we continue to be lured by war, we must be committed to trying to tell the true story of its horrors.”

The next lecture, “Teaching About Values: Revisiting King’s Beloved Community,” will feature Harvard College Dean Evelynn M. Hammonds, the Barbara Gutmann Rosenkrantz Professor of the History of Science and of African and African American Studies. The lecture will be held Jan. 29 at 3 p.m. in the Cambridge Public Library, Central Square Branch, 45 Pearl St. See a complete schedule.

John T. Hill, designer and producer of the exhibition — “Walker Evans: Before and After the FSA” — was a friend and colleague of Evans at Yale, and executor of his estate. Following the opening, Hill discussed the artist’s inspirations and creations in a seminar co-sponsored by the Rethinking Translation seminar of the Mahindra Humanities Center.

Hill, who was a friend and colleague of Walker Evans at Yale, is the executor of Evans' estate.

Hill, who also was a friend of Mather House Master Christie McDonald’s family, presented Evans’ life through his photographs, chronicling his travels and influences over time. Evans is most closely associated with his starkly elegant photographs of Farm Security Administration (FSA) tenant farmers, but Hill said Evans’ other work should not be overlooked.

“Evans’ work for the FSA is what he is best known for. But I wanted to show that he had a life before and after that,” Hill said. “He had trouble giving a name to his work. He called it ‘straight photography,’ then ‘lyric photography.’ His whole way of looking at it was very anti-art. He gained inspiration from the tabloids, postcards — anything. His art was very vernacular.”

Evans loved books and knew that they would circulate long after photo exhibits closed, so many of his first photographs were taken to reflect authors’ works. In 1930, he published photographs of the Brooklyn Bridge with Hart Crane’s epic poem “The Bridge.”

In 1933, Evans photographed a Cuban revolt for the publisher of Carleton Beale’s book “Crime of Cuba.” Evans insisted that his photos never simply illustrated a book. He presented them as visual commentary to the text.  Readers loved Evans’ cool, black-and-white photography contrasted against Beale’s hot political prose.

In 1935, Evans began photographing for the Resettlement Administration (RA) and then for the FSA. In the summer of 1936, Evans accompanied writer James Agee to rural Alabama to photograph tenant workers for Fortune magazine. The article was canceled, so Agee and Evans decided to collaborate on a book called “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.” The first edition sold only 600 copies, but the book gained popularity after the publication of Agee’s “A Death in the Family” and has since taken its place in the ranks of great American literature.

After leaving the FSA in 1937, Evans began taking pictures of riders on the New York City subway. He would hide a camera in his coat and snap the shutter as people went about their days, eventually creating a fascinating study of American life in the 1930s. These photographs were later published in his 1966 book, “Many Are Called.”

In 1945, Evans began working for Time Magazine, and shortly afterward moved to Fortune magazine, where he was an editor until 1965. According to Hill, his two obsessions late in life were photographing signs and, after he became too weak to handle large equipment, using a Polaroid camera to take head shots.

Evans is most closely associated with his starkly elegant photographs of Farm Security Administration (FSA) tenant farmers.

“Evans was not about beauty,” Hill said. “He was about getting the information and presenting it clearly.”

Hill, who became the executor of Evans’ estate when Evans died in April of 1975, gave all of his work except for the RA and FSA photographs to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1994. Since then, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has “done an incredible job of conservation and promotion of his work.” The RA and FSA photographs are now in the Library of Congress and are in the public domain.

The Mather exhibit contains Hill’s prints of Evans’ original photographs. Hill, who created the exhibit, said he tried to keep the it free from his own influence, but admitted that his “fingerprints are all over this stuff. There’s no way of getting around that.”

“Walker Evans: Before and After the FSA” will be open to the public (on a limited basis) starting in January in Mather House’s SNLH Three Columns Gallery, 10 Cowperthwaite St., through March. Visiting hours are Tuesdays, 2-4 p.m., Wednesdays, 7 -9 p.m., and Thursdays, 2-4 p.m. (please check in at the Guard’s Office).

But Dürer was more than an artist, said Harvard art historian Susan Dackerman in a Harvard Art Museums “In-Sight Evenings” lecture on Wednesday. In fact, he greatly influenced 16th-century science with his cartographic and anatomical work. It was so innovative, she said, that it shows Dürer as a science collaborator — an equal partner in creating knowledge, not a servant charged with depicting it.

Consider the examples Dackerman offered her audience in the Arthur M. Sackler Museum lecture hall: Dürer’s iconic woodcut of a rhinoceros, so enduring that it was the animal’s staple scientific image until the 18th century; a groundbreaking terrestrial map, “the first perspectival rendering of a terrestrial hemisphere,” she said; a vivid woodcut depicting the causes and effects of the disease syphilis; a map of brain function; and in 1515 the first printed maps of the northern and southern celestial hemispheres shown as polar projections.

His influence on the astronomy of the day was profound,” Dackerman said, “and helped visualize changing conceptions of the universe.”

In a radical departure, Dürer used the same maps to move humankind to the center of the depicted science. Copying a 1503 celestial drawing by astronomer and collaborator Conrad Heinfogel, Dürer replaced allegorical figures like Venus and Mars with portraits of four ancient astronomers, including Aratos and Ptolemy (who is busy measuring with dividers). “Choosing to depict historical scholars engaged in empirical investigation was a momentous conceptual shift,” said Dackerman. “Dürer’s astronomers represent a changing worldview, one in which the universe is comprehended through human intervention rather than through spiritual or symbolic means.”

Study a print like this closely enough, and you can sense the shifting values of a vanished age. Dürer’s substitution, in fact, seems equivalent to Stephen Greenblatt’s metaphorical moment in which the world became modern: the 1417 rediscovery of Lucretius’ first century BCE poem “On the Nature of Things.” (Greenblatt is Harvard’s Cogan University Professor of the Humanities, and author of the new book “The Swerve: How the World Became Modern,” which recently won the National Book Award.)

Dackerman’s lecture, “Taking Dürer Out of the Box,” was informed by her work on the recent Sackler exhibition “Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe,” which showcased atypical works of Renaissance masters, and how they influenced scientific inquiry.

Part of the story of that age is one of collaboration, the rich admixture of art and science practitioners. The 1515 maps, she said, required three experts to produce: The stars’ coordinates from Johannes Stabius, imperial astronomer and adviser to the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I; the stars’ positions from Heinfogel; and Dürer’s imaginibus circumscripsit, his circumscribing the images of the stars. (The final maps included a coat of arms for each of the three, equal, and in a row.)

“Dürer is not positioned as a mere illustrator in the service of the two theoreticians,” said Dackerman, “but as an equal collaborator who brings particular knowledge and skills to the project.” The artist later bought a Nuremberg house with an observatory on the top floor, complete with astronomical books and instruments, suggesting, said Dackerman, that “he was more than a hired hand in the service of an astronomer.”

Still, Dürer remained the consummate artist. His robust woodcut maps, in contrast to Heinfogel’s faint drawings, depict astrological creatures like the lion (Leo) and the lobster (Cancer) as vivid, flexible, and lively — evoking, said Dackerman, “the motion of the constellations.”

Meanwhile, Dürer ’s celestial maps gained momentum as a scientific standard. They were used as templates for cosmographer Johann Schoner’s 1515 printed globe, whose “gores” — elongated sections — were inspired by the master’s woodcuts.

Even before the celestial maps, Dürer had experience with astronomical subjects. He was 25 when the syphilis broadsheet appeared in 1496, including a swirl of planets above the victim’s head. (Dürer’s collaborator, Nuremberg physician Dirk van Ulsen, believed syphilis was caused by a misalignment of the planets.) The science was off, but not the young Dürer’s art, right down to the figure’s lumpy lesions and red, swollen face. It is proof again of an artistic partnership with science, said Dackerman, though this time in the realm of medicine.

His terrestrial map required a knowledge of geometry, she said, and calculations that enabled Dürer to depict a two-dimensional surface as if it were a globe.

The artist’s rhinoceros woodcut, circa 1516, was rendered from a sketch and a description of the animal that made its way to Nuremberg; Dürer never saw the animal itself. But his depiction — including fanciful armor plating, scalloped edges, and an inaccurately placed dorsal horn — showed another dimension of the artist’s relationship with science, namely “the tension between the growing importance of empirical observation,” said Dackerman, “and Dürer’s display of his own artistry, in which his skills of making are rendered equal to or better than the results of direct observation.

Regardless of that tension, Dürer was not a solitary art maker in these matters, but a collaborator. He was one craftsman in a workshop peopled by others, not the “genius toiling alone,” she said.

The mythology of the solitary genius is an artifact of “modernist thinking,” said Dackerman, and its retrospective violation by Dürer may explain why his collaborative scientific work merits so little attention from art historians. But that’s an imposed bias, she said, and the great German artist’s minor prints “should continue to be taken out of their boxes.”

His book “Alfalfa to Ivy: Memoir of a Harvard Medical School Dean” “began as a family memoir,” said Martin, former dean of Harvard Medical School (HMS) and the Edward R. and Anne G. Lefler Professor of Neurobiology.

“My family … emigrated from Switzerland to Pennsylvania to Canada, but my parents never took Canadian citizenship,” he said. “So I was born a dual citizen, which was very convenient to move back and forth across the border. I call myself an American with Canadian roots.”

“But as I kept writing, I started to develop thoughts about academic leadership — leading by listening — and I realized there were some lessons I’d learned along the way that might be valuable.”

Growing up in Duchess, Alberta, a remote Mennonite prairie town, gave Martin a humble, relatable quality that’s unmistakable in his professional life and writing. There are passages in his book about his boyhood dog, and a near-death experience involving a fall from a horse. And Martin peppers the book with family photographs of the idyllic countryside he roamed until going away to the University of Alberta at age 16.

“My teachers could see I was bored, and skipped me,” he said. Martin knew he wanted to be a doctor from the get-go. “My earliest memory,” he recalled, “is walking across a field when I was 4 or 5 years old and thinking, ‘I want to be a doctor, I want to help people.’ And I wasn’t trying to escape my community, but I really had a passion, led, in part, by hearing the stories of the missionaries who came through our community from Africa, India, where they’d been working.”

By his own admission, Martin was an awful university student. “That first year, I went home for Canadian Thanksgiving, and I didn’t want to go back. I was petrified. I flunked my first English paper, I flunked my first physics exam,” he said. “I thought it was all over. But by the end of the year, I was able to pick up and pass. I started medical school two years later, and by that time I was first in the class.”

Martin’s career has taken him from McGill University to Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) to the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), where he served as chancellor. Harvard President Neil Rudenstine wooed Martin from UCSF to become dean of Harvard Medical School (HMS) in 1997, a job Martin made clear he never expected, nor necessarily wanted.

“At MGH, I’d observed the dean’s role … I thought it was a terrible job. I said to my wife, ‘That’s a job I’ll never take.’ But as chancellor of UCSF, I missed the close relationships with students and faculty, and I was missing the fun of teaching,” he said.

Martin’s deanship has been heralded for unifying a fragmented HMS, improving communication, encouraging collaboration, and diversifying departments, all while leading the School under three very different Harvard presidencies.

“I’ve read many academic memoirs, and I didn’t want to write another one that pontificated about my accomplishments, but about the process of how you get things done,” said Martin. “Academic leadership is hard and erratic and complicated by the big egos that you work with, and some things go well and some things flunk. And I wanted this book to be a personal illustration of how those things arose, and were dealt with, and walked away from if they weren’t working.”

Martin stepped down in 2007, after a decadelong tenure highlighted by Martin and his team successfully locating the gene for Huntington’s disease, an extraordinary moment for him.

“One of my principles of leadership is that you do your best work within the first decade,” he said. “I’ve always felt that the leadership of the most effective sort is not ostentatious, it’s not using the bully pulpit to advertise who you are, but to use your position to try to make the community in which you work a better place.”

But dance is all about movement, and Lerman came to Harvard this semester as a visiting lecturer in the Music Department and as the Josep Lluis Sert Practitioner in the Arts. “The timing was right,” she said.

“My presence was a kind of research” for her and for Harvard, said Lerman. What would it be like, she wondered, for a working artist to be at the University for so much time? And what would it be like for a modern dancer to spend so much time trying to integrate with other disciplines?

For Harvard, the result was wonderful.

“Inspiring and energizing,” said Lori Gross, associate provost for arts and culture. “Liz Lerman demonstrated how artistic practice can cross disciplinary boundaries to help students grapple with complex problems.”

Lerman, who is dancer-slim and electric with energy, led workshops on movement for courses in law, mythology, arts education, and more. She initiated a conversation series called “Treadmill Tapes” with Harvard experts in English, government, botany, art history, and other disciplines. (These 45-minute talks, conducted on side-by-side treadmills, are being edited down to a few minutes each.) She taught a course. And in November Lerman staged “Healing Wars,” a work in progress that will be part of a grander national artistic re-imagining of the Civil War during its sesquicentennial years.

Bill Pullman acted as narrator — and sometimes a dancer — in the show. Photo by Helen Shariatmadari

In addition, she was just named a United States Arts Fellow.

Lerman was “an unqualified success” and an “extraordinarily dynamic presence,” said D.N. Rodowick, the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies. (He is also chair of the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies, which sponsors the Sert Practitioner program.)

In “Healing Wars,” dancers, actors, and musicians performed on every floor of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, inside and outside. The audience members roved, following the action. It was theater that “showed off our wonderful Corbusier building in new and exciting ways,” said Rodowick. (The performers included Lerman’s two teaching assistants, Alli Ross, Ed.M. ’10, and Lauren Simpson, Ed.M. ’11, as well as noted actor Bill Pullman his wife, Tamara Hurwitz Pullman, a modern dancer.)

Integrating the arts with other disciplines was at the heart of Lerman’s four-month visit. It was familiar territory. In the past decade, she oversaw a series of collaborations at Wesleyan University designed to embody scientific ideas. (Her dance piece “Ferocious Beauty: Genome,” for instance, opened at Wesleyan in 2006.)

Those interdisciplinary experiments prepared her for this semester, she said, and may signal a future when practicing artists move in and out of Harvard — weaving their skills into multiple curricula.

That’s Lerman’s hope. “In schools where lectures are still the primary form of learning, this is all experiential,” she said of combining text and talking with movement. “We move, we talk, we discuss, we read, we talk, we move.”  That creates “added forms in which you put knowledge,” said Lerman.

Considering any realm of inquiry “in terms of its shape, contour, and movement can be a powerful way of opening up new questions and perspectives,” said Laura Ricci, Ed.M. ’12, who studied with Lerman this semester. “I am amazed at how the dance and movement tools Liz has shared with us have opened up my thinking about my academic work.”

“Choreography can be used to increase knowledge in any academic field, again and again and again,” said another of Lerman’s students, Mariah Steele, a master’s degree candidate at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. “In particular, I appreciated her emphasis on ways of conducting research other than the typical recourse to written texts. Liz validated that researching oneself through movement or personal stories can reveal as much information as a scholarly article.”

In the class Music 101r: “The Choreography and Design of Partnership and Collaboration,” everyone had to perform a solo after the first four weeks, to demonstrate that rigorous, expressive movement can be integrated with reading and talking and other pathways to learning. Lerman calls the work of putting thoughts into movement “translating.”

“Working with Liz Lerman this semester has been one of my most difficult experiences at Harvard thus far,” said Bex Kwan ’14, who described her as “an artist and teacher who reveals the intellectual rigor of art.”

Dance and movement can bring something to every academic discipline, said Lerman, and eventually to the workplace. Consider these life lessons from the world of art-making:

•  Listen in pictures. Paying attention to a lesson or a conversation creates images in your mind. “And if you become aware of that, you’ll be better in most meetings. You’ll have more ideas, faster,” said Lerman.
• Listen to gestures. Linking movement to thinking attunes you to messages beyond words. “You can pay attention in ways you wouldn’t pay attention.”
• Learn good leadership and also “followership,” she said. “You need both. You have to know how to take initiative, and you have to know when to step back.” Lerman compared school and the workplace to the “ensemble experience” of an arts practice like dance.
• Invite other ideas. If her course had one theme, she said, it was: “Ask a big enough question, and you need more than one discipline to answer it.”

This semester, Lerman brought in four guest practitioners who stayed from three days to a week: Urban Bush Women ensemble founder Jawole Willa Jo Zollar; artist and architect Michael Singer; literary activist and poet Ethelbert Miller; and Room 404 Media designers Kate Freer and Dave Tennant.

Praising the resources that Harvard gave her, Lerman also deepened research into her Civil War project, which evokes an irony: that medical practice becomes more advanced during wartime.

“People often think about a special semester like this as a retreat,” said Lerman of her Harvard autumn. “Not me.”

In the same spirit as that of the Muppets, the iconic puppets created by Jim Henson whose mayhem and mischief speak to children and adults, “The Snow Queen,” complete with its own set of enchanted puppets, engages audiences of any age with a clever and elegantly reimagined version of the classic fairy tale by Danish storyteller Hans Christian Andersen.

The new stage adaptation is the work of a group of students from the A.R.T. Institute, a two-year, graduate training program for aspiring actors and dramaturges. Institute student Tyler J. Monroe adapted the story for the stage.

Searching for a family holiday show, one that would attract theatergoers of any age, Allegra Libonati, an artistic associate at the A.R.T., turned to the mythical fable.

“It is such an amazing story; it’s epic,” said Libonati, who directs the new work. “It felt like it was a story that a lot of people were intrigued by but didn’t know really well, so it had a lot of potential to mold into a new dramatic interpretation.”

Andersen’s story, a timeless tale of good versus evil, centers on two young friends, Gerda and Kai. When a wicked sorceress captures Kai, Gerda embarks on a long, bitter journey to the North Pole to save him from the evil queen. Along the way, she encounters wild and wonderful creatures, including a talking reindeer, two kindhearted swallows, and a group of wood-dwelling bandits.

“The story captures the imagination of the kids and brings a message for the adults. That’s what Hans Christian Andersen loved doing, and that is what we were trying to do, too.” said Libonati.

Audience participation was an essential element for the show’s creators and is central to the family-friendly production. During the hour-and-a-half play, Gerda frequently turns to the audience for help, asking the crowd to dance, wave paper snowflakes and roses in the air, and even chirp loudly, to aid her quest.

Inventive staging lends an ethereal quality to the show. Competing for time and space on the A.R.T.’s main stage with the recently opened “Three Pianos” sent the show’s artistic team into creative overdrive. Fortunately, “The Snow Queen” ’s designers were able to piggyback on the concurrent production’s evocative winter set. Still somewhat constricted by space, the designers chose to use simple everyday items to further transform the stage.

“It forced us to be creative,” said Libonati. “We alighted on this idea of the ordinary transforming to become extraordinary right before your eyes, and the power of your imagination to create a new world.”

In that vein, white sheets and cloth become swirling snow, and an uncovered mattress instantly, and convincingly, morphs from a bed to a sleigh.

Adding to the magic is the artistry of actor Michael Kane, the grandfather narrator who, like most of the other actors, also weaves in and out of many roles throughout the performance. In addition to being an actor, Kane is a skilled puppet maker who has worked with the legendary activist group Bread and Puppet Theater.

Since August, Kane, with help from local children, has worked to create the mystical masks and puppets used in the show including the giant and beautifully eerie head of the evil snow queen.

The puppets artfully animate the supernatural world of fantastic animals and entities and “were integral to how we wanted to tell the story,” said Libonati.

After the opening performance Saturday (Dec. 10), the fun continued in the hallway outside the theater as the actors mingled with the crowd. Cast member Milia Ayache chatted with two young fans, helping them try on her wild wig made of multicolored yarn.

“This isn’t the best way to make friends,” she joked with some third-grade students, pointing to her fake knife, a prop she uses as one of her many characters in the play, the gruff but lovable “Robber Girl.”

In preparing for the production, Ayache and her cast mates used the acting techniques learned during their spring semester graduate studies at the Moscow Art Theater School in Russia. The work was part of the institute’s close collaboration with the Moscow Art Theater School, which includes a three-month residency in Moscow. Students who graduate from the A.R.T. program also receive a master’s degree from the renowned Russian theater school.

Watching members of the Russian institute take their children-oriented productions just as seriously as they approached works such as Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” was a revelation, said Ayache, and inspired the A.R.T. troupe to do the same.

“We never talk down to kids,” said Ayache, adding that for many young members of the audience the A.R.T. production would be their first exposure to theater. “We are building citizens. Theater builds citizenship.”

It was clear that the first run of the show already had built a legion of citizen fans of many ages.

“It was awesome, just awesome, even for an adult,” said Lynn Rose, who made the three-hour trip from Rutland, Vt., to see the play and hear the work of her son, Aaron Mack, the show’s sound designer.

Seven-year-old Cambridge resident Jasenina DeJesus, who attended the show with her mother and 5-year-old sister, Janelle, captured the spirit of the production with three simple words.

“That was fun!” she said as the lights came up.

The show runs through Dec. 31.

Dreaded

Teri Gamble (right), who plays the Robber Queen, leads the dance as she and other A.R.T. Institute students rehearse "The Snow Queen," which runs through Dec. 31 at the Loeb Drama Center.

Costumer

Mallory Frers (left) mends a bonnet; she is the show’s costume designer.

Giving direction

Allegra Libonati (right) directs Scott Ray in the role of Kai.

Final touches

As the actors are about to do their final run-through on the Loeb stage, choreographer and assistant director Lanise Antoine Shelley (right) gives directions.

Kai

Kai, played by Scott Ray, is reflected in the mirrored scenery.

Ice cold

The ethereal Snow Queen, played by Lindsey Liberatore, passes behind gossamer lace curtains.

Magic flowers

Gerda, played by Lisa Maley, falls under the spell of the flowers, played by Teri Gamble (from left), Liza Dickinson, Dustyn Gullege, and Michael Kane.

Cue the snow

Snow falls on Kai, played by Scott Ray.

Puppetry

Michael Kane's puppets, illuminated through a lace curtain, represent the comical dreams of the Prince and Princess.

Rosy

While searching for her friend Kai, Lisa Maley as Gerda is helped by these roses, played by Milia Ayache (from left), Teri Gamble, and Michael Kane.

Hi-ho!

A reindeer is just one of the wonderful creatures that help Gerda find Kai.

Take a bow

Bravo! Encore!

Photo slideshow: The Snow Queen

Rose Lincoln/Harvard Staff Photographer

It was a foot in name only. The misshapen mass looked more like a hoof bisected by a crack. The deformity was the result of foot binding, a common practice in much of China until the middle of the last century that involved wrapping the foot of a young girl or woman tightly with a cloth to stunt its growth, explained Laurel Bossen, the Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

That particular type of bound foot was called “the three-inch golden lotus,” said Bossen. “That’s the ideal. It gradually broke the girl’s arch … you can see that the arch is just a crevasse on that foot.”

While at Harvard, Bossen and Melissa Brown, Radcliffe’s Frieda L. Miller Fellow, in collaboration with anthropologist Hill Gates, are writing a book on female labor and foot binding in early 20th century China. Their research is based in part on large-scale surveys in the 1990s done by Gates, and on their own interviews from the past few years with thousands of elderly women from 11 provinces in rural China.

Their findings dispel several “origin myths” and mistaken assumptions associated with the brutal custom.

The scholars reject the prevailing theories that bound feet in China were considered more beautiful, a means of male control over women, a sign of class status, and a chance for women to marry well. They also reject the widespread notion that such women couldn’t work, and thus contributed little to their families and the larger economy, and the belief that campaigns against the practice were what ultimately put an end to it.

Instead, their research suggests that the practice was directly linked to the use of young girls and women in the hand-labor force, and that its disappearance coincided with the arrival in China of the Industrial Revolution.

When they asked women during interviews why they thought their feet were bound, many responded that they were expected to “marry up economically,” said Brown, a researcher at the Minnesota Population Center at the University of Minnesota who is interested in historical processes of transformative social and cultural change.

But she questioned the notion that bound feet were considered more alluring to men and that they could lead to a better marriage, because men weren’t picking their own brides. Their mothers were.

“Why in the world would a mother want to pick a sexy daughter-in-law?”

While the women surveyed thought foot binding would lead to a good marriage, the numbers didn’t add up. After a detailed analysis, the researchers found no overall statistically significant data to support the theory that women with bound feet were in more prosperous households after marriage as compared with their birth households.

“What we found, in fact, is that there is not a link,” said Brown, adding, “The majority show no marital mobility.”

So why were the feet of 7-year-old girls bound so often if the end result had no impact on their ability to marry above their class?

The answer involves a financial reality.

“For me, the question about foot binding has always been ‘How could rural families afford to lose women’s labor’ ”? said Bossen, anthropology professor emerita at McGill University. “What work could they do when they had bound feet?”

Bossen said the research points to a clear connection between foot binding and hand labor. Mothers needed their daughters’ help to produce both cloth for the family and extra cloth for sale. They needed to keep their “willful, playful” young daughters at their sides, she said, to have them learn how to spin, wind, twist, and weave fibers they could sell when the crops failed or fell short at harvest.

“For girls who are doing handwork for income, the odds are 4.5 to 1 that they will be bound,” said Bossen of the studies they conducted in China’s Yunnan Province.

“Foot binding can be seen as a way of tying them down, and training them in the handwork, supervising them, and keeping them close at hand. It’s not the only way, but I would argue it became part of the cultural repertory.”

And as the value of women’s hand labor decreased, so did foot binding.

The eventual arrival of the Industrial Revolution had a dramatic impact on women’s work, as cotton yarn began to be imported and factories eventually replaced the work women did by hand. Citing research that spanned the 1920s to the 1940s, the researchers found that the likelihood that a woman doing commercial handwork would also have bound feet dropped drastically.

The link between commercial handwork and foot binding is “highly statistically significant,” said Bossen. The arrival of cheaper machines made textiles “undercut income from hand labor and caused foot binding rates to plummet.”

In a lecture on Monday, physician and Harvard Medical School Professor Arthur Kleinman discussed the importance of living a fulfilled life based on a deep “moral wisdom,” one illuminated in the writings of James, and the need for such insight in the academic realm.

As context for his 2011 William James Lecture at Harvard Divinity School, Kleinman, Rabb Professor of Anthropology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, described two crises in his own life, a turning point in his professional career more than 40 years ago, and the recent loss of his wife of almost half a century.

The events were connected by an old journal yellowed with time. On its pages were pithy comments from 20th-century continental philosophers, compiled by a young Kleinman when he served in Taiwan as a U.S. Public Health Service officer and a National Institutes of Health fellow from 1969 to 1970. Struggling then with the decision to leave his primary care clinic in favor of anthropological fieldwork and psychiatric practice, he searched the copied words for “an intellectual and … moral foundation.”

Kleinman returned to the diary after the death of his wife Joan, “while struggling to come to terms with a great sadness, oscillating with aching yearning,” and he drew parallels to those two times of intense uncertainty. “I needed, in both periods, reassurance, confirmation that the very grounds of who I was and what I was doing were real.”

But with reflection, Kleinman realized that the running file of philosophical entries couldn’t offer up a “deep wisdom” that would help him face life’s extreme challenges.

He ultimately understood that he was asking the wrong question of the philosophy writers, he said, searching their words to understand “experience as a philosophical problem” instead of “experience as practice.” Only in his role as mentor, caregiver, doctor, and teacher has he come closest to the end of that vital quest, he said, through a practice involving action among and for others, what he called “the very art of living.”

“My search for wisdom had been a largely unfulfilled quest, but as in the case of caregiving,” he said, “not an unfulfillable one.”

Still, his search has been informed in large part by the work of James, the groundbreaking scholar, author, and philosopher considered by many the father of American psychology.

For four decades, Kleinman said, James’ prose has aided him with a type of creative back and forth, “from metaphor to rhythm of words, to findings from experience, to major conclusions relevant to my life.”

For Kleinman, James became a kind of “intellectual interlocutor who could come right down into my experience and illuminate it from within.”

“If this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will,” read Kleinman from James’ “The Varieties of Religious Experience.” “But it feels like a real fight — as if there were something really wild in the universe which we, with all our idealities and faithfulnesses, are needed to redeem.”

In dealing with the loss of his wife and the “fierce and joyful love” they shared, Kleinman again turned to James. The wisdom that Kleinman needed to address his grief “came out of my readiness to respond to James’ pushing, at a certain time when I was faced with a problem central to the human condition.”

That engagement, said Kleinman, helped him to understand that wisdom needs, above all, to be experienced and is most useful as a “moral practice that redeems our humaneness amidst the inevitable disappointment and defeat.”

For Kleinman, James’ take on religion and its relationship to “quests for wisdom” offers similar insights and deserves further academic study.

In the face of the uncertainty of the human condition, people turn to religion, said Kleinman, noting that James “saw religion, like philosophy, as a resource for getting through life,” and a way of fortifying the human spirit “not to be afraid of life.”

James and his understanding of the “human uses of religion … needs to become more a serious source of interdisciplinary academic discussion,” said Kleinman, “that bridges the study of religions, the social sciences, and the humanities, as well as the helping professions.”

Wiseman, peppery and lean, was at Harvard on Dec. 1 to deliver a witty, illustrated primer on how to shoot, edit, and “read” a documentary. He spoke before a packed audience at the Radcliffe Gymnasium, delivering the Julia S. Phelps Annual Lecture in Art and the Humanities, sponsored by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

You can’t get advanced training in filmmaking in an hour and 24 minutes, the time Wiseman took at the podium. But you can gain insights. For starters, don’t expect to hear any pronouncements in the language of film criticism, which he professes not to understand.

“There’s an enormous amount of (expletive deleted) about documentary film,” he told one questioner, “and I try not to participate in it.”

Wiseman was equally dismissive of his career before films. Speaking of his time at Yale Law School, he said, “I was physically present.”

But it was the law that, in a way, led him to make his first documentary film, “Titicut Follies,” a journey of relentless shocks. The title refers to a talent show put on by the inmates of Bridgewater (Mass.) State Hospital, a correctional institution that in 1967 housed the criminally insane — some of them kept naked and ranting in cells. It was a place where Wiseman would take his Boston University law students, a field trip designed to show them the fate of some of their clientele.

His films since then have been about institutions both dark and light, including one that he called a logical follow-up to a film about a place for the insane: a high school. He has also plumbed a zoo, a park, a hospital, a police precinct, a welfare office, and a public housing complex. But don’t call him one-sided, or a chronicler of the downtrodden, said Wiseman. He’s after the complexity, ambiguity, and diversity of impressions you might derive from a play or a novel — art forms to which he compares his films.

“I show up at a place,” Wiseman said in a summary of his technique. “The analogy for the process is Las Vegas. It’s a crapshoot.”

But Wiseman’s talk wasn’t long on personal history; it was long on technique. How, exactly, do you make a documentary film? How do you research, shoot, and edit a product meant to give the viewer an illusion of actual experience in a certain place?

His idea of research is nonconformist, and might involve a day or a half-day. “The shooting of the film is the research,” said Wiseman, who prefers showing up at a school or an office or a hospital knowing very little about it. At the end of the day, he watches silent rushes, and lets the structure of the story and its characters emerge from the reality of what he sees. “I show up at a place,” he said in a summary of his technique. “The analogy for the process is Las Vegas. It’s a crapshoot.”

But Wiseman knows how to throw the dice. He uses a small crew (he handles the sound, and by instinct names the shots he wants). Working alone, he lets the rushes reveal a story. And postproduction is slow and long. Shooting might take a few weeks or a month. Editing can take a year.

“Part of the fun of doing it is the surprise,” said Wiseman of his instinctual shooting and slow editing. In the end, he added, the intention is to create “a dramatic structure out of ordinary experience.”

That ordinary experience — captured in the film clips he used to illustrate his talk — can be troubling. In “Law and Order” (1969), a burly police officer is pictured choking a prostitute during an arrest. (Wiseman, alert to ambiguities, refused to condemn him.) The scene is proof, he said, that a camera does not change behavior, and that “most of us think our behavior is appropriate for the situation we are in.”

That ordinary experience can also be mesmerizing, as in the six-minute “night crawl” scene in “Basic Training” (1971). Faced with five hours of rushes, Wiseman had to compress what was literal about the training — camouflage, silent communication, traversing barbed wire — and what abstractions it evoked. He chose the metaphor of dance. The music score was dual: the sound of crickets, and then the sound of machineguns.

The ordinary experience that Wiseman honors can be wistful and funny too. He used the opening sequence of “Welfare” (1975) to illustrate both the continuity of his shots and a needed lesson at the time: that public benefits go to a variety of races, not just one. We see clients getting their welfare mug shots and a visual medley of people waiting, most of them well dressed. In the first “talk sequence,” said Wiseman, a man has a loud complaint that eases into a conversation, which shows how public offices can include moments of private human intimacy. Then a homeless couple’s plea for help becomes a comic riff on marriage. “Any documentary filmmaker,” Wiseman said later, “runs into a lot of funny material.”

And that ordinary experience can be both visually gorgeous and suggestive of tedium. In “Belfast, Maine” (1999), a film about a sardine factory, little fish in silvery streams slip and flush through stainless steel troughs. It’s a trip to death, snipping, and being sealed into cans. With them in the noise and the steam are the workers, steady and grim-faced, and wearing hairnets. “You begin to feel,” said Wiseman, “what it’s like to work there.”

After the talk, you begin to feel what it is like to make documentary films. And along the way, Wiseman offered related wisdom for filmmakers. Permission? Just ask. Video or film? It doesn’t matter, said Wiseman, who has shot two recent films on HD, his first foray into the digital realm. “It still takes me a year to edit a film.”

Along the way, he added, stay organized. Wiseman enters each shot into a log, along with every camera roll, sound roll, and edge code. “It’s the only area of my life I’m meticulous about,” he said.

The elderly Wiseman said he had reached a point “where I can hardly remember my name — but I remember all my rushes.” He ended with a story from making “Near Death” (1989), a film about an intensive care unit. It required Wiseman to visit the morgue, where he became friendly with a supervisor. On his last day of filming, Wiseman thanked the supervisor for helping. The morgue director replied, “See you soon.”

He was transfixed by ancient Egypt. “It was the first time a subject grabbed me,” said Manuelian ’81, who is Harvard’s first Egyptologist since 1942, and who realizes that a childhood fascination with pyramids usually goes the way of dinosaurs and superheroes. “Most people grow out of it. I never did.”

It was the vast scale of things he fell in love with — the huge pyramids, and the three millennia that Egypt was an unwavering civilization of pharaohs and deities and social systems as stable as salt beds. Of course there were the mummies too, and the gorgeous art, and the puzzle of the language written in hieroglyphs.

Sustaining his interest through the years was the incomparable collection of Egyptian artifacts at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), where the young Manuelian signed up as a volunteer. The longest running archaeological dig in Egypt and the Sudan (1905 to 1947) was the joint Harvard-MFA Expedition, and thousands of artifacts came to be housed in Boston. “I was lucky to be local,” he said.

By the time Manuelian enrolled at Harvard College in 1977, he had already spent the first of what were to be numerous summers on expedition to Giza, a site filled with pyramids, temples, and tombs just west of modern Cairo. And he was in his second year as an assistant at the MFA in ancient Egyptian, Near Eastern, and Nubian art. So Manuelian was well primed for his next major Egyptological inspiration: Harvard itself.

A key mentor was Thomas Oden Lambdin, the College’s senior teacher of biblical Hebrew, Egyptian, and a host of other languages, and the closet thing Harvard had to an Egyptologist at the time. “He took me in,” said Manuelian, whose present-day office at the Semitic Museum is next to the office that Lambdin (now emeritus) once occupied. (For effect, there is a mummy nearby too.)

While still an undergraduate at Harvard (where he played varsity squash and bunked at Lowell House), Manuelian joined two Washington State University expeditions to Nagada, Egypt, and continued his research internships at the MFA. After earning an A.B., magna cum laude, in Near Eastern languages and civilizations, Manuelian studied at Germany’s Tübingen University on a Fulbright-Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst Fellowship.

Then he took up doctoral studies at the University of Chicago, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1990. After that, Manuelian spent three six-month stints in New Kingdom temples as a staff Egyptological artist on the University of Chicago’s Epigraphic Survey in Luxor, Egypt. (An epigrapher records and deciphers inscriptions.)

Returning to Boston in 1987, Manuelian rejoined the MFA as an Egyptian Department curator, lectured at Harvard, taught at Tufts University for a decade, and in 2000 became Giza Archives director at the MFA, a post he held until 2010. In July of that year, he was named Harvard’s Philip J. King Professor of Egyptology.

To find a parallel you have to go back almost 70 years to George A. Reisner, who was the University’s de facto Egyptologist from 1910 to 1942. He lived and worked in the fruitful tumult of an era of fervent artifact hunting in the ancient world. “He was my predecessor and my hero,” said Manuelian, who is writing a Reisner biography. “He was one of the first scientifically minded archaeologists.”

Reisner was so busy at Harvard Camp at Giza, and at 22 other dig sites, that he taught in Cambridge perhaps just a few semesters in his four decades with the University. “You could fault him” for teaching so little, said Manuelian — but not really. “He was interested in excavating.”

Manuelian is a digger too, one with a grasp of computer-based tools that capture and archive data and artifacts in 3-D layers of information. The showcase of that effort is the Giza Archives Project, a decade-long effort to assemble all extant Giza materials into a comprehensive, attractive, searchable whole. (There are 37,000 photographs, 1,200 spinning 360-degree panoramas, and more than 21,000 objects currently online.) “I’m a cataloger, basically,” said Manuelian. “I’m trying to bring diverse materials together.” Helping him have been the more than 400 students and volunteers that he has recruited for the work over the last decade, in addition to more than $3 million in support to the MFA from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

At the heart of the project is the mass of maps, excavation photographs, diaries, letters, tomb records, artifacts, and other finds from the 1904-1947 Harvard-MFA Giza Expedition. To enrich the database, Manuelian has scoured Giza collections in Egypt, Austria, Germany, France, the United States, and elsewhere.

Manuelian is working with colleagues from Dassault Systèmes to develop computer interfaces that let a student roam through a virtual Giza necropolis, plunge down a tomb shaft to look around, or click on a sarcophagus to link to layers of related documents. He uses these tools for teaching in Harvard’s Visualization Center at the Geological Museum, thanks to collaborations with the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences.

“It isn’t static,” he said of the new technology of digital excavation. “It’s an immersive way to teach Giza archaeology.”

She knows that apartment well. His kitchen, for instance, is no ordinary one. His book collection extends into the room dedicated for cooking, and beside the refrigerator there’s a bookshelf stocked with J.R.R. Tolkien, a biography of Che Guevara, and “The Third God” by Ricardo Pinto.

Junot Díaz's kitchen library. "I started acquiring books as soon as I started earning my own money. I certainly wouldn't have survived my childhood without books," he said.

This glimpse into Díaz’s library and home is documented in Price’s new book of interviews and photographs, “Unpacking My Library: Writers and Their Books.” In it, Price details the reading routines and kaleidoscopic bookshelves of leading authors such as Alison Bechdel, Stephen Carter, Rebecca Goldstein, Steven Pinker, Claire Messud, Jonathan Lethem, and others.

“As a literary critic, I’ve thought a lot about authors reading, and the relationship between reading and writing. I wanted to interview people whose work I liked a lot and people who I thought would be not just interesting writers, but interesting readers,” Price said.

“It’s great to be able to go to someone’s apartment, look at their bookshelf, and say, ‘Hey, you have a copy of this; it looks like you’ve cracked the spine with repeated re-readings; what do you love about this book? How do you arrange your books? What do you do with the books you don’t want anymore? Do you sell books you don’t want? Do you give them away? Do you write in books?’”

An up-close view of Steven Pinker's and Rebecca Goldstein's volumes.

The results are revealing. “Asking people about their books is a good way of getting them to open up because it’s more oblique than asking them about themselves, and yet so much of the self comes out in which books you own,” she said.

While talking books, Díaz admitted that he has read aloud to others, but he “never had anyone read to me, really.”

“My father and I aren’t especially close,” divulged writer Lev Grossman. “He’s in the late stages of Alzheimer’s and can’t read anymore. When my parents moved out of the house where I grew up, my mother sold off his library — it was like they were breaking up his brain, the same way the Alzheimer’s was doing. I couldn’t take the whole thing, but I rescued a few volumes.”

And who knew that Harvard’s own Steven Pinker appeared in an infomercial for the shelving system he uses? “I believe in the product, so I did a hammy sales pitch, which ended up on a new website that I was only dimly aware of at the time: YouTube.”

“One of the things that also came out in these interviews is that books can both bring people together and drive them apart,” said Price. “I interviewed three couples, and they all talked in different ways about whether and how they interfile their books, what you do when you move in with someone, if you get rid of your duplicates, and, if you are, whose copy do you put out on the curb?”

Price asked each writer for his or her top 10 books — an unnerving task for anyone. “With the couples, it was interesting to see whether or not they’d put their partner’s book on their list.”

Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism James Wood's top 10 books.

Pinker’s wife, novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein, did include his hallmark tome “How The Mind Works,” but also selected “The Collected Dialogues” by Plato, “The Complete Notebooks of Henry James,” and “Middlemarch” by George Eliot, “the book that came up most often out of all the authors,” said Price.

A view of Steven Pinker's and Rebecca Goldstein's extensive library. "I grew up in a family that considered book buying a luxury for rich people. We used the public library. So I remember vividly when I started buying books ...," said Goldstein.

“For me, editing this book was a treat, because I’m used to working on dead writers,” said Price, whose primary field is the 18th- and 19th-century British novel, although she does enjoy a good detective read.

“One of the great luxuries of a book is that it hides you from the outside the world,” she said. “If you think about the phrase ‘someone who has their nose in a book,’ there’s a way in which you’re enclosed inside the fold of the pages. The book is protecting you.”

Naturally, you break into song about it.

Or so decided Franz Schubert, the 19th-century Austrian composer who set his bleak and moving 24-song cycle “Winterreise” (“Winter Journey”) to poems about lost love by German poet Wilhelm Müller. The words and music add up to an unabashed, unrelenting tribute to grief.

But the forlorn and sufferers from seasonal affective disorder can take heart. The American Repertory Theater  (A.R.T.) is offering a bright twist on Schubert’s solemn composition with its production of “Three Pianos.”

In the hands of a trio of talented actor-musicians, Schubert’s work is transformed into both a silly and soul-searching house party with, as its title suggests, three pianos, and the audience as guests. With the songs sung in English, German, and occasionally a “bad English translation of German,” according to co-creator Rick Burkhardt, the production captures a passion for the music and connects to its melancholy message using both humor and heartache.

“We were tempted to do the things we normally do, which is be amusing and sometimes lighthearted,” said Burkhardt. “But the piece also insists that we hold on to the mood — it’s a radical piece even for today. We kept getting pushed by the music in directions that were sometimes uncomfortable … it made us think about our own histories of heartbreak.”

Schubert, who died at age 31, found little critical success during his short life. Much of the buzz generated around his work was the result of a committed cadre of friends who attended regular “Schubertiads,” festive events held in private homes to celebrate, perform, and promote Schubert’s music.

It was in the spirit of those informal soirees that Burkhardt and collaborators Alec Duffy and Dave Malloy began to envision “Three Pianos” on a bitter February evening in New York City. During a party in a church, the three stumbled across copies of the somber Schubert song cycle in the choir loft. The accomplished musicians took turns singing and playing the first songs in the series on a nearby grand piano. Soon, others at the party joined in to harmonize or listen and enjoy. Before the night was out they had played through the entire work.

“We realized when we were done that we had just enacted inadvertently a Schubertiad,” said Burkhardt. “And we realized we had the potential to give that extraordinary experience to an audience.”

Throughout “Three Pianos,” the actors adopt the personas of Schubert’s friends and of the composer. They also play themselves, re-enacting their own arguments about the music and discussing the history of the work. The show comes complete with wine for interested audience members, and imaginative jazz, rock, and other interpretations of Schubert’s songs, in an effort, said Burkhardt “to give people access to this music.”

The group spent time in Vienna in 2009, visiting the homes where the composer was born and died, and some of the halls where his music was played.  Later, they read his diaries and letters and those of his contemporaries.

They found that “Winterreise” was in direct opposition to the popular romantic music of the day. Instead of being “florid and beautiful,” Schubert’s sparse and slow-paced composition was written largely in minor keys. But the poets whose work he set to music loved it.

“In our research, we came across several examples of poets saying ‘I only learned what my poem meant when I heard the setting of it,’ ” said Burkhardt. “That is a rather remarkable thing.”

With their new interpretation, Burkhardt and his co-creators hope to accomplish something similar by helping audiences connect with the work on a deeper emotional level.

“There is a history of using art and song in particular to access emotions within you that are difficult to deal with … that’s a rich history and a history that I think all of us have tapped into at some point, and I think it’s good to see what comes from publicly acknowledging that.”

“Three Pianos” runs from Dec. 7 through Jan. 8. For more information, visit the A.R.T. website.

“I’ve been hearing about the ceramics studio for a long time, so I’m excited to come and visit,” Faust said. “This is a perfect example of the way the arts can meld into the undergraduate curriculum and serve as an important teaching tool for the big questions that archaeology and anthropology pose.”

The class, part of the College’s General Education curriculum, is a collaboration between the Office for the Arts and Department of Anthropology. It focuses on teaching undergraduates the basic principles of anthropology and archaeology. Associate Professor of Anthropology Rowan K. Flad, the course leader, told Faust that he brought his class to the studio so that students could get firsthand knowledge of the ways that ceramics were produced at different times in different parts of the world.

“Students involve themselves in different aspects of ceramics production,” he said. “The idea is to give them a sense not only of how pottery is made, but also of how the different methods can be observed in anthropological terms.”

Flad was assisted by Matthew J. Liebmann, an assistant professor of anthropology, who noted that the visit to the ceramics studio was not the first hands-on experience students had had in the course.

“Everybody in the course has a little archaeological experience because they all took part in an excavation in Harvard Yard,” he said. “So everybody has been in the dirt at least one day.”

Faust watched with interest as small groups of students — most taking their first-ever anthropology course — moved between six different stations to learn how ceramics were made hundreds of years ago in Asia, South America, and Western Europe. At one station, students learned to identify the region from which a piece of ceramics came by the type of clay found there. At another, they learned from a Peruvian potter how potters from that country paddled pieces to make them smooth and round.

Yvette Wowolo ’15 was handling and analyzing ancient ceramics from China and Iran when Faust came by. Wowolo was too busy with an in-class assignment to say hello, but said there were some things she’d tell the University president about her experience in class if she could.

“I’m learning a lot about where we come from,” she said. “By looking at this pottery, I learned what kind of materials the pieces are made from, where the materials were found, and how they’re actually formed. It’s all about how we became who we are today.”

That entanglement is the point of “Harvard and Slavery: Seeking a Forgotten History,” a booklet launched on Wednesday by the Harvard and Slavery Research Project. Involved were 32 students, one faculty historian, and a graduate student. “The history of slavery,” write authors Sven Beckert and Katherine Stevens, “is also local history.”

The 34-page study packs into its economical format details of what will be historical surprises to most readers. It reports that three Harvard presidents owned slaves; that slaves worked on campus as early as 1639; that among the first residents of Wadsworth House (built in 1726) were two slaves, Titus and Venus; that slave labor often underwrote the success of Harvard’s early private benefactors; and that the connection between College donations and slave-related industries persisted until the Civil War.

Beckert, who has taught a seminar on Harvard and slavery, is the Laird Bell Professor of History. Stevens is a graduate student in the History of American Civilization program.

In her research, Jennifer Dowdell (center), an A.L.B. candidate, focused on Peter Chardon Brooks, a major donor to Harvard just before the Civil War.

In an email, Beckert said his students — from both Harvard College and the Harvard Extension School — “have spent many hours working in Harvard’s archives to untangle the historical relations between Harvard University and the institution of slavery.” The results include the booklet, funded by the Office of the President; a website; a series of student videos; a video-assisted walking tour; links to parallel projects at Brown University, the College of William and Mary, and other schools; and citations for 25 student papers.

“One thing that struck me is the persistent selectivity of historical narrative,” said A.L.M. candidate Robert G. Mann, who this year is a special student at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. History often ignores issues that societies themselves ignored in their own times.

Mann’s paper and video concern James Perkins, a generous donor to Harvard in the 19th century, whose businesses included slave trading. In his history of Harvard, Josiah Quincy III, who was president of Harvard from 1829 to 1845, wrote that Perkins “was formed on the noblest and purest model of professional uprightness; without guile and without reproach.” Said Mann in an email, “Standards change, and the slave trade was once considered a legitimate form of commerce.”

Brandi Waters, an A.L.M. candidate in history, wrote a paper and starred in a video about the role of Harvard’s Warren House in the Underground Railroad that transported and hid escaped slaves. (A trapdoor led to a tiny, hidden basement bedroom.) “The most surprising elements of this history are in the details,” she said.

But being part of this research project also inspired Waters as an African-American student. “Having empirical evidence that my ancestors’ unfree efforts were foundational to the creation of Harvard’s dominance, that it wasn’t possible without them,” she wrote in an email, “helps me find my place in what’s typically known as a history of great men.”

One of those men was the subject of a paper by Jennifer Dowdell, an A.L.B. candidate. It focused on Peter Chardon Brooks, a major donor to Harvard just before the Civil War. She said he retired at 36 on profits from commodities linked to slave labor in the West Indies, including tobacco, sugar, molasses, and cotton. “As we celebrate the 375th anniversary,” wrote Dowdell in an email, “let’s not forget the importance of recognizing our history at this prestigious University and acknowledging that a portion of that privilege came from the work and lives of slaves.”

Slaves died tragically nearby too. Harvard Extension School student Jim Henle wrote about the execution of slaves “Mark and Phillis” in 1755. He was hanged, and she was burned at the stake — so close to the College that smoke from the fire drifted over Harvard Yard. Henle’s video at the site of the former “gallows lot” in North Cambridge is an example of the largely forgotten local spaces involving slavery.

Alexa Rahman ’12, a history concentrator with a secondary in economics, wrote a paper and did a video on Edwin Farnsworth Atkins. Atkins’ onetime slave plantation in Cuba, called Soledad, was donated to Harvard as a botanical research station. It’s “now a popular tourist site,” she wrote in an email. But it was also the locus of an early, uneasy rumination on slave-trade legacies. Harvard botanist Oakes Ames (1874-1950) visited the site of the Harvard Experiment Station in 1903. He was inspired by the tolling of a plantation bell to muse on the “awful reality” of the slavery that had ceased there just 15 years before.

“This essay has been an effort to hold Harvard, and all of us who enjoy its unparalleled intellectual resources, in the uneasy moment of the bell,” the booklet says, “and not slip too quickly into the calming righteousness of moral hindsight.”

The Harvard and Slavery Research Project involved 32 students, one faculty historian, and a graduate student.

Don’t forget the laptop. If you are at Harvard in any capacity, chances are you write at least occasionally for a living. And all around you are people who do it all the time.

Hey presto: the Harvard Writers at Work lecture series, a program now in its third year. The intent is to “explore the power of writing at Harvard, and beyond,” said Thomas Jehn, Sosland Director of the Harvard College Writing Program, a series co-sponsor.

The other sponsors are the Harvard Review, the Program in General Education, and the Harvard Extension School. Speakers since 2009 have included writing luminaries Paul Harding, Jill Lepore, and Tracy Kidder.

This fall’s offerings so far: a panel of three high-speed travel writers (they traveled to Harvard for the event); Harvard Internet whiz Jonathan Zittrain; and the power-writing duo of Jerome Groopman and Pamela Hartzband, who both work at Harvard Medical School.

On Friday, pioneering literary journalist Gay Talese will talk with Esquire magazine writer-at-large Chris Jones about narrative journalism. It’s the last Harvard Writers at Work event this fall, and is co-sponsored by Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism. (See you at 2 p.m. Friday in Boylston Hall’s Fong Auditorium.)

Traveling for a living

Jehn introduced the first lecture of the season, an Oct. 4 panel of travel writers. “There’s a selfish reason,” he said, explaining the topic. “I don’t get out much.”

The writers certainly do. Josh Dean, a Brooklyn, N.Y., freelancer, has snowboarded in Iran and played World Elephant Polo in southern Nepal. Danielle Pergament, a magazine writer living in New York, has posted stories about Italy (where she once lived), Patagonia, Maui, Mexico, and more. Adam Sachs is a New York travel and food writer whose occupational destinations have included Paris, Tokyo, Tasmania, and Easter Island.

But glamour did not come first. All three described their origin stories as travel writers and a common thread was: First, you pay your dues. Sachs started as a fact checker at Condé Nast Traveler. Dean, a graduate of Wittenberg University (“It’s the Harvard of southwestern Ohio,” he said), started for a teen magazine writing shorts about Brittany Spears and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It was, he said, “timeless work.” Pergament — now a frequent contributor to The New York Times — aspired be a travel writer, but “my dues were (to be) a beauty and fashion writer for way longer than I wanted.”

Even now the glamour of travel writing has its downside, she said: It’s work. “You’re always thinking of a new angle,” said Pergament, “even if you’re at a spa in the most beautiful place on Earth.”

There are other pitfalls. “There’s probably no genre,” said Dean, “that lends itself more to bad writing.” For one, beauty and ease get in the way. “There’s nothing harder to write about than a perfectly nice day at the beach,” said Sachs. “There’s no narrative.”

But all three writers agreed on a solution: Write about people. “Stories are always about people,” said Dean, “even though they’re about places.”

On the darker side

Lawyer and digital futurist Jonathan Zittrain, in an Oct. 6 Thompson Room lecture, had a darker take on modern writing: Too much of it, increasingly, is done by someone else, he said. And that someone else might even be software. His talk, aptly, was “The Future of Writing — and How to Stop It.”

Zittrain, co-founder and co-director of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, pointed to a British academic writing service that sells finished papers outright. “You have found it!” the company website enthused on a screenshot. “It’s time to lean back and relax.” Go very far this way, Zittrain said, and getting through college will require just drinking a few beers and taking long naps.

Aside from outright fraud, there are Internet-based services that will vet your school paper for plagiarism and others that will edit your work line-by-line, tightening and correcting. “It’s somehow different than spell-check,” said Zittrain. “More and more of what we do [as writers] will be mechanical.”

Even literally. One site, www.sagrader.com, gives immediate automated feedback on submitted written work, all thanks to artificial intelligence. “It suggests the world we are getting into,” said Zittrain. “That’s the future of writing that terrifies me.”

But “there is still a here here,” he said. “There is still hope.” One sign is Wikipedia, the cloud-edited information source so often maligned in academic settings. “It’s a travesty that an academic sees Wiki as a source of plagiarism, and nothing else,” said Zittrain. Instead, Wiki compiles points of view and promotes a busy intellectual exchange. “It’s peer review,” he said, “in a way that peer review in scholarship has fallen behind.”

There are systemic problems behind bad academic writing or Internet abuses of the same, said Zittrain, including the quality of writing assignments, and the low expectations for creativity and genuine communication such assignments imply. Maybe bringing back small seminars is one solution — intimate settings in which a lack of clarity stands out, along with cheating, he said. “That’s where plagiarism gets neutralized.”

A doctor’s opinion

Doing the hard work of writing is no issue for the two authors featured in the most recent series lecture — a Nov. 14 look at collaboration in the Thompson Room.  Jerome Groopman and his wife, Pamela Hartzband, both teach at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. (He is the Dina and Raphael Recanati Professor of Medicine; she is an assistant professor of medicine.)

They co-authored the recent “Your Medical Mind” (Penguin Press, 2011), which explores the decision dynamics between doctor and patient. (Are you a minimalist about treatment, or a maximalist who wants everything, and fast? Are you aware of how stories — anecdotes of illnesses and outcomes — influence you and your physician?) They have also co-authored studies in the New England Journal of Medicine. As writers, they illustrated authorial collaboration in the presentation itself, a seamless back and forth from one voice to another.

They made collaboration sound like fun: daily walks to talk over the shape of a chapter; her initial detailed outline; his first draft — and their alternating drafts after that. The many drafts toned down his expansive writing, and filled out her terser approach — in the end producing a book with “an intermediate style,” said Hartzband. Before any writing began, they also shared research tasks and co-conducted the lengthy interviews the book required. “There was a lot of togetherness in this,” she said.

In the writing game, even a power couple has to pay dues — just like the trinity of travel writers from the first series lecture. Before his first book was published, said Groopman, 11 agents turned him down. One wrote back, he said, “Dr. Groopman, you are no Michael Crichton, you are no Oliver Sacks.” Today, his story count with the New Yorker — a writer’s writer magazine — is 64.

One key to success, said Groopman, was “rewrites with my expos instructor.” He looked over at his wife.

“Everything suddenly fits into what I’m writing,” Grossman told a packed Science Center Tuesday night. “When I write about love, all the world is in love. When I write about jealousy, everyone is jealous.

Grossman, the internationally known author of eight novels and two nonfiction works, described the strange alchemy that occurs during writing, how authors are “fed” by their characters, and how sentences that they didn’t know were inside them emerge on the page.

Grossman, who is also a prominent peace activist, discussed his latest novel, “To the End of the Land,” whose U.S. edition was published last year. Grossman opened his talk by describing the book, which was acclaimed in a New York Times review by writer Colm Toibin, who wrote: “To say this is an antiwar book is to put it too mildly, and in any case such labels do an injustice to its great sweep, the levels of its sympathy.

“To the End of the Land” tells the story of Ora, a mother whose son Ofer has enlisted in the military. She had planned a hike with him in Israel’s north when his three-year enlistment ended, but at the last moment he re-enlisted, volunteering for a major offensive. Ora is stricken, and decides to avoid any painful notification of his death by going on the hike anyway, taking along Ofer’s father, Avram, the love of her life, but a man broken by his experience as a POW during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. As they walk, she tells Avram about her son’s life, in which he had been uninvolved.

“I believe books are much more clever, courageous, and generous than their writers,” Grossman said.

Grossman began writing the book in 2003 and was almost done with it in 2006, when his own suffering melded with his character’s fears. His youngest son, Uri, was killed during the Second Lebanon War.

The heart of writing, Grossman said, is getting to know a book’s characters intimately, in a way that is impossible with other human beings. Even when it comes to those with whom we are most intimate, we shy away from complete knowledge, Grossman said. With our children, we avoid the darker corners of their characters; we may know our lovers better than others, but still not completely.

“To me, the heart of writing is the privilege of knowing other people from within,” Grossman said. “Usually, we are quite protected from the other. … We develop an instinct of not being totally exposed to the hell within the other.”

Writing a novel involves creating a suite of characters whom you know so intimately that they become like a family you’re hiding during wartime and to whom you take food and news daily. The whole of a book, he said, somehow becomes greater than the writer.

“I believe books are much more clever, courageous, and generous than their writers,” Grossman said.

Grossman wrote about a family, he said, because he has always been fascinated by the concept and believes it is the unit where the most important moments happen — not in the corridors of power but in kitchens, bedrooms, and children’s rooms.

The setting of the book is in Israel’s north, which some people view as dangerous. But Grossman said the only danger there is from animals. To look around at nature, he said, is to understand how permanent the Earth is and how temporary humans, their wars, and their problems are.

“You realize how terrible it is that we’re wasting our time and wasting our lives on something that could and should have been solved years ago had we been more courageous,” Grossman said.

His appearance was sponsored by the Center for Jewish Studies and co-sponsored by the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. He was introduced by Shaye Cohen, Littauer Professor of Hebrew Literature and Philosophy and director of the Center for Jewish Studies.

In 1972, President Richard Nixon traveled to the People’s Republic of China to meet with Chairman Mao Zedong. Pundits largely agree that while nothing extraordinary happened during the ceremonial trip, the visit amounted to a diplomatic revolution, ending 25 years of isolation between the two countries.

For unconventional theater director Peter Sellars ’80, it was a story destined for the stage.

On Tuesday, Sellars, along with musician and composer John Adams ’69, A.M. ’72, and poet and librettist Alice Goodman ’80, reconnected at the American Repertory Theater (A.R.T.) to discuss their 1987 groundbreaking work “Nixon in China,” an opera based on the famous visit.

Harvard President Drew Faust moderated the afternoon conversation, which is part of a yearlong series of events marking the University’s 375th anniversary.

As part of Harvard’s engagement with the arts, the discussion offered an important way to bring some distinguished alumni back to campus to share insight from their lives and accomplishments, said Faust, “and to have all of us be able to celebrate their connections to Harvard.”

“ ‘Nixon’ was for us an anti-opera. None of us were opera insiders,” said Sellars, who first floated the idea of creating a work based on the visit with his friend Adams. But the contemporary composer was wary of the subject matter, worried there was no way to write about the president without taking a satirical approach.

“I didn’t think that it would be possible to write an opera about Richard Nixon that wasn’t in the tonality of late-night TV stand-up comics,” Adams told the crowd.

But though the work was ultimately infused with humor, poking fun at both Nixon and the notion of grand opera, it also captured a profound humanity, exploring the emotional depths of its characters and the mythic status of the visit. It was the perfect story, said the composer, because it addressed a critical point in history, a coming together of two nations who saw the world in fundamentally different ways, one based on a market economy and the other a social welfare state.

Adams, who went on to tackle another moment in history with his next opera, “The Death of Klinghoffer,” which recounts the 1985 murder of an American Jew by Palestinian terrorists, said he was thankful to have taken a chance with Sellars.

“I am so glad we did ‘Nixon in China’ because, as is the case with the opera that followed it … each time these operas come back and are produced somewhere in the world, the world manages to change enough to make the opera seem even more relevant.

Though reviews of the original production were decidedly mixed, and in the years that followed some critics argued that the opera had largely disappeared from the public cultural consciousness, the production, which pushed the theatrical and musical limits of conventional opera, has had a lasting impact. It finally made it to the grand dame of opera houses, the Metropolitan Opera, in February, a rite of passage for any work destined for the operatic canon. Faust called the work iconic.

“This is now for the ages, this opera,” Faust said.

Diane Paulus, the artistic director of the A.R.T. who introduced the discussion, said “Nixon in China” was “an inspiration to a whole generation of us who believed opera could be great theater.”

Sitting on the same stage where he first directed a production for the nascent A.R.T. in 1980 as an undergraduate, Sellars mused about the vital importance of art making and finding one’s own creative path.

He attended Harvard, he said, specifically because there was no theater department, arguing that the art form doesn’t truly belong within an institutional confine. Instead, Sellars said he took chances at Harvard, collaborating with students, working with the A.R.T. and charting his own theatrical course.

“You will never see the world as clearly as you see it right now,” said Sellars, who urged the undergraduates in the audience to welcome failure. “If you avoid risk, you are actually avoiding your own life.”

Goodman said her artistic days at Harvard gave her “a sense that you could do it, that you should do it, and that it was worth taking the risk on. Harvard gave me that, and gave me friends to talk about it with.”

Adams lauded Harvard’s administration for its widening embrace of the arts. “The arts and the kind of practicality of the arts are beginning to be honored,” he said, “and I think that’s a wonderful thing.”

Today, he is not read as much, but Russell Re Manning wants to do something about that. For one thing, the University of Aberdeen scholar wants to update Tillich’s theology of art and culture. That requires “re-enacting” threads of thought that were shaped by Weimar Germany eight decades ago to make them resonate in the 21st century, said Re Manning, who delivered the fall’s Paul Tillich Lecture at the Memorial Church at Harvard on Nov. 14.

The list of Tillich lecturers since 1990 includes Edward O. Wilson, the Rev. Peter J. Gomes, and President Emeritus Nathan M. Pusey, who brought Tillich to Harvard as a University Professor (1954-62). While in Cambridge, Tillich published his three-volume magnum opus, “Systematic Theology.”

Starting in 1919, Tillich created a diverse canon of work. One of his legacy ideas was that theology should only be seen in dialogue with science, culture, and art. That was a radical concept following World War I, when religion largely denied the validity of culture, and when culture in turn widely denied the viability of religion.

Into these divided worlds, Tillich introduced the idea that culture and religion are within each other. His “existential concept of religion” eliminated the gap between the sacred and the secular. Tillich called religion “the state of being grasped by an ultimate concern.” In turn, he said, culture was “the form of religion” which, era by era, expresses “intimate movement of the soul” as art. To this end, Tillich famously referred to Picasso’s “Guernica” as “the greatest Protestant painting after 1900.” In his “Theology at the End of Culture” (Peeters, 2005), Re Manning said Tillich saw this explicit war painting as a protest against the way humans are simultaneously  estranged from the divine (genocide) and embrace it (art).

Tillich’s “mediating” theology of culture called for a creative engagement with science and art, said Re Manning — though he suggested that a line should always exist between the sacred and the secular. There is a danger in religion endorsing any culture, as when Tillich apprehended “the religious significance of National Socialism,” he said. The philosopher — who served as a German Army chaplain during World War I — recognized the religionlike fervor of the Nazi state early on. In 1933 he was the first non-Jewish professor to be banned from a German university.

But Tillich, a Lutheran with a taste for German high culture, still developed a relationship with “a staggeringly broad” range of products, said Re Manning, including German expressionism and its low-culture flirtations with horror, absurdity, and insanity.

In the Weimar period, said Re Manning, the secular world was amid “a headlong rush to modernity,” while religion was pushed into a “defense against culture.” Tillich, he added, was interested in finding a common ground, his “cultural theology.”

It was conceived during the 1920s and ’30s, when a central problem was a separation between culture and religion, said Re Manning. After World War II came the “death of God” and a rejection of all claims that religion might have on culture. It was “not an invitation to new meaning,” said Re Manning, but “a blank soullessness [in which] all is surface.”

By 1965, when Tillich delivered his last lecture on theology and art, the aging philosopher “appears somewhat stunned” at the creative process in the age of Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and other artists who seemed to offer “a wisdom that ignored wisdom.” The music of the time, too, “denies the muses,” said Tillich, who thought it seemed more a collection of noises than art.

What was left, he said in 1965, was “a whole cemetery of dead categories in art,” along with “a kind of metaphysical dizziness.”

In the 21st century, it is necessary to “go beyond Tillich’s own formula” in order to describe the intersections of theology and art, said Re Manning. In this era, he sees a turning away from “the dominant trope of post-modern irony” and “a new seriousness emerging.” The new seriousness has to confront what Re Manning called “the only imaginable reality left,” post-industrial capitalism. That confrontation — manifested in the Occupy movements around the world — points to a fundamental confusion: Among the many international crises — over development, the environment, and markets — capitalism is “simultaneously implicated as both cause and solution,” said Re Manning.

This is a “culture without a future,” he said. So what role is there for religion? For Tillich, the future was socialism, said Re Manning, but for us there seems only to be “the endlessly repeating future” of capitalism.

So today, employing the tools that Tillich left behind, religion might call on its utopian dimension, said Re Manning, as a philosophical way of responding to the inevitability of capitalism, and as “an escape from the embrace of the present.”

In a 1956 lecture, Tillich outlined his own thoughts on utopia, calling it a state of being “always suspended between possibility and impossibility.” Today, we might think of it as hope. That’s a state of being religion has always provided.

“More than 80 percent are illiterate,” he said of his compatriots. “Most of the people never heard of the term ‘architecture.’ [They think] maybe it’s a kind of food.”

Kéré, who delivered a Dean’s Diversity Initiative lecture Nov. 10 at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), uses architecture to explore local building techniques, sustainable materials, and climate-appropriate design. Not surprisingly, he sees education as the way out of poverty, and building the right schools as a step in that direction.

To make clay bricks from local soil, architect Diébédo Francis Kéré added a strengthening mixture of 6-to-8 percent cement. Here is a traditional clay floor.

Schools in West Africa and elsewhere should not be technical transplants of Western styles and materials, said Kéré, but a blend of modern and traditional techniques that empower local populations and sustain local resources.

Illiteracy is a fact of life in Burkina Faso; so is poverty. People can’t afford technical help when building, said Kéré — “they just copy the new house in the neighborhood.” At the same time, regarding the built environment, expectations are low. “People in this part of the world are happy,” he said, “when you build them a wall that is strong and stands up in the rainy season.”

In a land of clay houses, many of them built in a few days, repairs have to be made after every rainy season. Meanwhile, modern additions such as roofs of corrugated tin are not good performers in West Africa’s torrid climate. Kéré showed a slide of a typical primary school, a rectangle of clay topped with a tin roof. “I myself have sat in a building like this with 120 other children,” he said of his boyhood. “This is not a place to teach people, but more a place to cook bread.”

Kéré came to architecture with other ideas, and an impulse to blend the sensibilities of the old and the advances of the new. As a third-year student in Berlin, he designed a primary school in Gando, a village of 3,000. To make clay bricks from local soil, he added a strengthening mixture of 6-to-8 percent cement.

The roof was tin, but rode sail-like on a lattice of steel bars. Its wide overhangs protect clay walls from rain and let hot air rise and cool breezes circulate. The tools required for the metal work were simple: handsaws, a small welding machine.

Kéré came to architecture with an impulse to blend the sensibilities of the old and the advances of the new.

The floors were traditional stamped clay impregnated with natural oils. To make the pebblelike soil smooth and flat, the women of the village spread it on the floor and beat it for hours into a sandlike consistency. Local drummers, a regular part of construction crews, marked a rhythm. With the right beat, said Kéré of the floor makers, “the weakest and the strongest are the same.”

Local workers using local materials built the school in nine months, at a cost of less than $30,000. Ten years later, said Kéré, the robust structure looks like it did on the first day. The design won an Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 2004, inspired local imitators, and made the village famous. “The people are proud — really proud,” he said. “That’s what you can do with a little project.”

Few design projects “leave a true mark,” said GSD Dean Mohsen Mostafavi. Kéré’s Gando primary school is one of them. He called it a bridge “between the cultures of the West and the cultures of Africa.”

At Gando, Kéré did more than design and supervise, added the dean — he “created the organizational circumstances for raising the money.” Financing was a key problem, so in 1999 Kéré set up a nonprofit called, in translation, “Bricks for the Gando School.”

In 2006, Kéré received 70,000 euros to build a secondary school in Dano, a Burkina Faso market town known for weaving and pottery. “When you have a project like that, a tiny budget, you need people who can fight,” he said in praise of his local staff, “who can go to the market and buy more with less.”

For that project, he used another local material — laterite, an iron-rich soil that is harvested soft, spaded into brick shapes, and sun-dried into rusty-red building blocks.

He convinced the local elders that having an open-air school would not only circulate cool air, but it would be open “even for the ancestors,” said Kéré. Building in other cultures requires “more than building regulations,” he said, including listening, respect, and a feel for local materials.

Sometimes, projects have to happen very fast. In 2009, Kéré was commissioned by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture to be lead architect for the National Park of Mali in the nation’s capital, Bamako. “We had little time to make this complicated project,” he said — on a rocky 250-acre site. “You have to fight . . . and not look for the easy way.”

When he arrived in Mali, everyone had already settled on building everything with concrete. Kéré said, “Let’s go to the market. Let’s see what we have.” He designed a museum of local clay and rock, with bricks manufactured on-site.

The park today has a sports center, gardens, and a restaurant open to the air and light, Kéré-style. It’s Mali’s biggest tourist attraction, and a rare segment of green space in a fast-growing city of one million.

Kéré, who also teaches at the Technische Universität Berlin, has done projects all over the world — a garden in China, a girls’ school in India, school prototypes in Yemen, projects in Switzerland and Spain, even an “opera village” just outside Burkina Faso’s capital, Ouagadougou. But his architectural principles stay the same — “more for less,” the name of a conference in Spain he spoke at last year.

Mostafavi, who created the diversity initiative in 2008, said there is a growing interest at Harvard in “activist practice” by architects “that make a big change in the world.

In a land of clay houses, many of them built in a few days, repairs have to be made after every rainy season.

The Harvard theoretical physicist, an authority on both the study of the minute, such as the building blocks of matter, and the massive, like the makeup of the universe, has written works that help to demystify the worlds of cosmology and particle physics.

Now the dark-matter guru is illuminating science with art.

In “Measure for Measure” a new exhibition at Harvard’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Randall and eight Los Angeles-based artists dive into the artistic and scientific notion of scale.

The concept is central to the role of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a mammoth ring of superconducting magnets buried underground on the French-Swiss border, whose goal is to unlock secrets of the universe by smashing together subatomic particles. Much of Randall’s own theoretical work involves the LHC. She describes the giant machine’s relationship to scale in her recently published “Knocking on Heaven’s Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World.”

“The question is how do you get good art while thinking about real scientific themes,” said Harvard Professor Lisa Randall (far right). “The idea I had was to come up with a theme that would resonate with both artists and scientists. Of course, artists are thinking about scale all the time, and so are we.”

It was while Randall, the Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science, was finishing her new book that the Los Angeles Art Association asked her to curate a show. Randall chose to develop the exhibition around the idea of scale, a subject much on her mind, and a vital concept for artists and scientists alike.

“The question is how do you get good art while thinking about real scientific themes,” said Randall. “The idea I had was to come up with a theme that would resonate with both artists and scientists. Of course, artists are thinking about scale all the time, and so are we.”

Randall curated the show with artist Lia Halloran, asking contributors to develop works that examined scale. The resulting exhibition features contemporary works that include a video installation, photography, and a social experiment involving cupcakes.

The show debuted at the Los Angeles association and then moved to the Guggenheim Gallery at Chapman University.

This isn’t Randall’s only foray into the art world. Two years ago she collaborated on her first opera with the Spanish composer Hector Parra, who asked her to write a libretto based on her theory of extra dimensions to the universe.  The result, “Hypermusic Prologue: A Projective Opera in Seven Planes,” premiered at the Pompidou Center in Paris in 2009.

“I see art not so much as teaching science but maybe making people aware of scientific ideas and intricacies,” said Randall. “Within this new show, there are themes and ideas that are resonating and can really make people think more broadly about art and science.”

For David Rodowick, the show’s collaborative nature represents an important innovative direction for Harvard. “I am interested more and more in opening the Carpenter Center to collaborations with other parts of the University,” said Rodowick, who is director of the center and is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies. “One of the things we should be doing at the Carpenter Center is framing art within broader dialogues.”

Each piece in the new exhibition engages viewers in dynamic, sometimes difficult ways.

Barbara Parmet’s work, “Redwood With Floating Pine Needles,” challenges the notion of scale with a dizzying photograph of a giant Redwood tree that extends from floor to ceiling.

Adding her clever twist on scale is the work of artist Susan Sironi, called “Actual Size: A Self Portrait in Four Parts.” Using classic tales that play with scale, like Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and Jonathan Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels” as her base, Sironi carved into the books tracings of her hand and foot, her profile, and a cross section of her neck.

Perhaps the most surprising take on the show’s theme is the work of Elizabeth Tobias, who explored the concept of economic scale. Over several months, Tobias hit the streets of Los Angeles, asking people to jot down on an index card their thoughts on hunger and poverty in return for a cupcake.

The result of her efforts, “The Cupcake Project,” is housed in a yellow emergency tent on the center’s first floor. The space is softly lit with pastel Chinese lanterns, from which hang those index cards. The gentle tone of the presentation is in sharp contrast to the hard message of the work. One card reads, “My sister is homeless and has a 9-year-old that does not get cupcakes even on her birthday.”

The show, on view through Dec. 22, is made possible with support from the Provostial Fund for Arts and Humanities at Harvard University.

Despite civil wars in Africa and the Mideast, ongoing strife in Afghanistan, and the barrage of local and national crimes reported on the nightly news, people are living in a much more peaceful era than they might think.

“During the thousands of years humans spent as hunter-gatherers, the average rate of violent death was higher than the worst years of World War II, and about five times higher than the rate of death from all wars, genocides, and human-made famines in the 20th century,” said Pinker, the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology and Harvard College Professor.

“Believe it or not … today we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species’ existence,” wrote Pinker in his latest book, “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined,” which takes its title from that age-old dichotomy: the devil on one shoulder, whispering temptation, enticing us to act on sinister urges, and the angel on the other shoulder, holding us back with caution and consequence.

“Human nature is extraordinarily complex, and includes both bellicose and peaceable motives. Outbreaks of violence or peace depend on which is more engaged in a given time and place,” said Pinker. “Among the better angels of our nature — the psychological faculties that caused violence to decline —  are self-control, empathy, and a sense of fairness.”

But, Pinker added, “My most surprising discovery was that the most important better angel may be reason: the cognitive faculties with which we understand the physical and social world. It was an ironic discovery, given that cognition and language are my research specialty.”

What historical forces have been engaging these better angels? Pinker cites “the outsourcing of deterrence and revenge to a disinterested third party, including the police and court system; the growth of commerce, which replaces zero-sum plunder with positive-sum trade and reciprocity; the forces of cosmopolitanism, such as mobility and literacy, which encourage people to take other vantage points and hence consider their interests; and the growth of education, public discourse, science, and abstract reasoning, which discourage parochial tribalism and encourage people to treat violence as a problem to be solved rather than as a contest to be won.”

To put this all in context, Pinker shows that homicide rates in Europe have declined 30-fold since the Middle Ages. Human sacrifice, slavery, punitive torture, and mutilation have been abolished around the world. And, he said, “Great powers and developed countries have stopped going to war. And in the world as a whole, deaths in warfare may be at an all-time low.”

In his research, Pinker’s favorite discovery was learning that “every category of violence — from deaths in war to the spanking of children to the number of motion pictures in which animals were harmed — had declined.” That, he admitted, “makes the present less sinister, the past less innocent.”

He believes that “forms of institutionalized violence that can be eliminated by the stroke of a pen — such as capital punishment, the criminalization of homosexuality, the callous treatment of farm animals, and the corporal punishment of children in schools — will continue to decline, because decision-making elites will continue to be swept by the humanitarian tide that has carried them along for centuries.”

Pinker is now working with graduate student Kyle Thomas on a new project, studying “common knowledge,” the state where two people not only know something important, but each knows that the other knows that he knows it, ad infinitum.

“My next book project will be a style manual for the 21st century — a competitor to Strunk and White that will incorporate insights from modern linguistics and cognitive science,” he said.

“But ‘Better Angels’ made me appreciate the forces of civilization and enlightenment which have made our lives so much more peaceable than those of our ancestors: the police, a court system, democracy, education, literacy, commerce, science, the Enlightenment, and the forms of secular humanism that grew out of it — which are easy to take for granted.”

Leaning on a walker, Updike chatted with Morris and her assistant while they packed cartons in his upstairs study. Into one box went the unfinished novel from his writing desk.

Updike had wanted to know that the outward signs of his literary ardor — decades of handwritten drafts, typescripts, galleys, and research files — would survive him. And he knew death was near. “Old age,” he had written in a short story, “arrived in increments of uncertainty.”

But there was no uncertainty about what should happen next at Houghton, the first building at an American university that was designed to house rare books and manuscripts. For decades, Houghton had been collecting the material now known as the John Updike Archive, which will be fully cataloged and ready for researchers by next summer.

In the end, the lives and thoughts of literary greats live on through their work and papers. Houghton and other Harvard libraries carefully tend the records left by dozens of prominent authors, providing pivotal research material for scholars.

The largest University repository is the Harvard University Archive, home to thousands of cubic feet of material, from doctoral dissertations and annual reports to books, maps, photographs, paintings, and artifacts. In addition, Baker Library at the Harvard Business School has about 1,400 collections of business manuscripts dating back to the 15th century. Radcliffe’s Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America has more than 2,500 manuscript collections. Harvard Law School’s historical holdings include 2,000 linear feet of legal manuscripts, some more than 800 years old.

But it is fair to say that Houghton is the mother ship for Harvard’s literary collections. Its 20th century holdings alone include the papers of T.S. Eliot, Thomas Wolfe, E.E. Cummings, Robert Lowell, John Ashbery, and Leon Trotsky. From the century before come world-class collections from Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and all of the creative James progeny: Alice, Henry, and William.

The point of such avid collection is scholarship. Houghton alone registers approximately 5,000 scholarly visits a year. In a hushed reading room, researchers — half of them Harvard faculty and students — pore over manuscripts, rare books, and letters that yield clues to literary creation.

But before that can happen, a busy and expert hive of specialists goes to work on the raw material that needs cataloging. Houghton typifies the intricate, difficult, time-consuming effort of processing and conserving rare documents, books, and other artifacts. That process begins the moment material arrives (sometimes haphazardly) in cartons, and continues until it is archived and housed in acid-free boxes.

“The refuse of my profession”

Updike ’54 began depositing papers at Houghton in 1966, just seven years after his first book was published. He later wrote of “the library’s meticulous, humidified care” for what he called “the refuse of my profession.”

That early “refuse” included James Thurber-like drawings, plays, proofs, and manuscripts, along with a paper written for a Harvard English class. It was about a former high school basketball player, and foreshadowed “Rabbit, Run,” the 1960 novel that catapulted Updike to fame. (He got an “A.”)

The author delivered a carton or more of material every year, said Morris. Other writers have a harder time parting with anything, and even stop by Houghton to visit their own papers. “Their archives,” she said, “are an extension of themselves.”

In their final visit to Updike’s house, Morris and an assistant retrieved the author’s Harvard Lampoon collection, some sketches he did in a postgraduate year at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford, U.K., a box of recent correspondence, and all the multilanguage first editions of his books, which the meticulous Updike had neatly shelved in the order in which they appeared.

Very large literary collections destined for Houghton — Gore Vidal’s, for example — go straight to the Harvard Depository, a 25-year-old facility in Southborough with the capacity to shelve 3 million linear feet of material. One room there is often used to stack and store literary papers while experts begin the intake process they call “accessioning.”

But for the last of the Updike material, Morris and her assistant simply rented a Zipcar, drove to the author’s home, and spent the morning packing — but not before they had photographed the books as shelved.

Each collection starts with a doorway

Large or small, a literary collection first enters Houghton through a doorway across from Widener Library. In a copy room just inside, Morris and others make a rough estimate of what the collection includes. Boxes may then get moved a few feet to Morris’ offices. Lining a hallway there earlier this year, packed into archive-quality Paige boxes, was a trove of material from Andrei Sakharov, the Soviet dissident and physicist.

Through a door on the other side of the copy room is the office of Melanie Wisner, Houghton’s accessioning archivist, an expert on the first overview of a new archive.

“It’s order-making,” she said of the intake process, which includes writing a “box list,” entering it on a spreadsheet, and filing the collection in preliminary folders. Categories of order-making include correspondence, manuscripts, and materials related to research, biography, and photos. Wisner called the process an archive’s first “rough sort.” But Updike was so neat, she said, that “there was little to do.”

Accessioning means making initial judgments about what material is fragile and requires technical conservation. It also means being an author’s advocate, by identifying material that might be very private.

Privacy at Houghton is plentiful two floors below, in the sub-basement with its thousands of feet of shelving. Far back in the dark stacks — beyond the Theodore Roosevelt collection and the wide boxes of John James Audubon originals — shelves of Updike material await formal cataloging. Morris opens a box containing a complete set of the Harvard Lampoons from the year when Updike was editor (1953-54). Another box contains neat manuscript folders of his art reviews.

Nearby, up one ramp, is a large, well-lit space. Tables there are lined with open cartons and manila folders from the Updike archive. Jennifer Lyons, Houghton’s manuscript and visual resources cataloger, is looking at manuscript pages from “Rabbit at Rest,” the final novel of Updike’s famed Rabbit Angstrom tetrology. Lying nearby is what seems like an unlikely addition to literary scholarship: an empty, 99-cent bag of Keystone Snacks corn chips.

“He was a meticulous person in his research,” said Lyons, who started on the collection in July 2010. She pointed out other examples of the kind of studying Updike did to make his work shine with reality: reams of material about Toyota dealerships (the source of Rabbit’s prosperity), an outline of state license plates, and medical literature on heart disease (the cause of Rabbit’s death).

Updike was deeply involved in every detail of his final literary products, said Lyons. As a young writer in 1959, he even offered to design the cover for “The Poorhouse Fair,” his first novel. (The publisher graciously declined.)

The two-year task of cataloging the Updike material has been comparatively “fast and furious,” said Lyons. In the end, scholars will get a database of all the material related to his novels, poetry, essays, correspondence, and photographs. Archivists call this a “finding aid,” which lists folder-by-folder details. Such aids are not meant to be the granular details of everything, said Morris, but “a minimum level of description for a literary collection.” Discovery is up to researchers, she said, but synthesis is the responsibility of the archivists. They must be interested enough to do the work, but not fascinated enough to be stalled by every detail. Lyons said she might read more Updike one day, but for now “I go home and read something else.”

Twelve shelves of Updike’s books

Down another Houghton corridor is an example of the end point of an archivist’s exhaustive processing: 12 shelves holding a selection of the 1,357 books that Morris retrieved from Updike’s personal library. (Others, largely foreign-language and later editions, are stored at the depository.)

Some materials are housed in acid-free boxes, as part of what archivists call “end-processing,” the final step to assure that a literary artifact is protected, housed, bar-coded, and ready to hand over to a researcher. Other books have polypropylene jackets to protect fragile, first-edition covers. Still others are just coded and shelved, like the books Morris took off Updike’s writing desk. Those included his dictionary, two volumes on St. Paul (the subject of an unfinished book), and a book he had just reviewed, complete with annotations.

Elsewhere on the shelf are two of Updike’s books from his undergraduate years, one Melville and one Shakespeare. Houghton has both the teaching copy of “King Lear” used by celebrated Harvard English Professor Harry Levin (1912-1994) and Updike’s student copy from the same class. Both books have extensive marginalia. For a scholar, that could prove a perfect storm. Through such parallel artifacts, said Morris, “You can see the intersection of lives.”

On one shelf is Updike’s first-edition copy of “Rabbit, Run” (1960), an expurgated edition that he reworked for the British edition that allowed him to restore original passages about the euphoria and celebration of sex. Most of these additions and changes appear in Updike’s handwriting in the margins. Others are passages he typed and pasted onto relevant pages. Both provide a window onto the author’s creative process. “You can see what he’s adding back in,” said Morris.

Back upstairs, near the door where the material arrives, is the room where the process is completed. It’s the spacious realm of curatorial assistant Vicki Denby, Houghton’s resident expert on end-processing. Hers is a world of acid-free folders and stacked flip-top Hollinger boxes, in which most literary papers are finally “housed,” the term that archivists use when precious papers are finally snug and safe. Like houses, the boxes have addresses — bar codes these days — that allow staffers to find requests, and record who made them.

Looking up from one box, Denby said, “It’s a lot of work.”

Treasure trove

The lives and thoughts of literary greats live on through their papers, like in Houghton's Library's John Updike Archive. Updike began depositing in Houghton in 1966, just seven years after his first book was published.

John Updike

Leslie Morris, the curator of modern books and manuscripts, helps oversee the John Updike Archive. Once cataloged, his papers will be ready for researchers in the summer of 2012.

Revisionist history

Revisions, notes, and strikeouts are just many interests in this Updike volume.

A 'neat' man

Melanie Wisner, Houghton’s accessioning archivist, is an expert on the first overview of a new archive. Updike was so neat, said Wisner, “there was little to do.”

Literary criticism

An up-close view of one of Updike's many papers.

RWE

“He used his journals,” said Curator of Modern Books and Manuscripts Leslie Morris, “as his quarry.” That's Ralph Waldo Emerson, of course.

Precious and fragile

Then there are the commonsensical restrictions on archival materials, “in many cases because of fragility,” said assistant curator Heather Cole. That concern includes items at Houghton that predate Christ.

Journal entries

A handwritten journal entry by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Meticulous

“He was a meticulous person in his research,” said Jennifer Lyons, Houghton’s manuscript and visual resources cataloger, of John Updike. Lyons has reams of material devoted to Toyota dealerships (the source of Updike's character Rabbit’s prosperity), state license plates, and heart disease.

'A lot of work'

Curatorial assistant Vicki Denby works near stacks of acid-free folders and flip-top Hollinger boxes, where most literary papers are finally “housed” — a term archivists use to express the snug safety of precious papers. “It’s a lot of work,” she said.

Photo slideshow: Collected works

Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer

Houghton’s physical antecedent was Harvard’s fabled “Treasure Room” at the Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library. This grand exhibition space opened in 1915, in what is now the Periodicals Reading Room. Literary and historical gems went on rotating display there, including quarto editions of Shakespeare and first-edition works by John Milton.

The Treasure Room was expanded in 1929 when gifts of rare books to the University seemed to come in a sudden flood. But by 1938 Harvard library director Keyes D. Metcalf was lobbying for a separate space for Harvard’s rarities, in part of his campaign to decentralize collections and to stem growing pressures at Widener.

When Lamont Library opened in 1949, one underground level was given to the ever-growing Houghton. And when the Nathan Marsh Pusey Library opened in 1976, Houghton acquired even more space. Today, staffers freely traverse the underground portions of this triumvirate of libraries, moving up lighted ramps from one secure space to another. (There are also underground connections to Widener.)

This modern expansion of Harvard’s collection capacity, from 1942 on, resulted in today’s locked-down, climate-controlled warren of literary treasures at Houghton. There are rooms devoted to paper artifacts from poets John Keats, Emily Dickinson, and Amy Lowell, as well as a suite of materials related to 18th-century English essayist, logophile, and literary critic Samuel Johnson.

In Houghton’s deepest sub-basement, thousands of feet of shelves are lined with neat black boxes — the resting places of eye-popping literary treasures, including the Emerson family papers. Leslie Morris, Houghton’s curator of modern books and manuscripts, carefully opened one slipcase box earlier this year. Inside was the 1856 journal of Ralph Waldo Emerson, its pages alive with bold handwriting. Some passages were crossed out, a sign they had been mined for literary product elsewhere. “He used his journals,” said Morris, “as his quarry.”

***

Each generation of literary materials presents its own challenges, said Morris, who led Harvard journalists on a private tour of Houghton. Keats, for instance, wrote with “iron gall” ink, whose corrosive chemical profile, as acidic as lemons, can eat holes through paper. This ink formulation, in use from the 12th through the 19th centuries, can degrade over time or even destroy a manuscript.

A more modern challenge is the fragile chemistry of fax paper. It’s a signature problem in the voluminous Gore Vidal papers now housed at Houghton. To this day, the prolific author refuses to use email, and over the years has sent and received volumes of faxes. But facsimiles quickly fade, said Morris, and there is no reliable way to recover these “fugitive” images, except to copy what is still readable.

The Vidal collection, one of Houghton’s largest 20th century holdings, arrived over the past decade in 400 cartons and took almost five years to process. It contained a reminder of another major challenge for contemporary archivists: film, videotape, and audiotape. The Vidal archive includes thousands of feet of magnetic and electronic material in a span of formats, some of them archaic. It’s an issue that archivists grapple with increasingly.

By contrast, the John Updike papers include little such material, and could be mistaken for papers from an earlier era. The author himself packed and labeled his yearly donations in neat cartons. “He could have been an archivist,” said Morris. “He was very organized in his habits.”

 ***

Modern literary archives also have their minor challenges. Take a humble, but potentially ruinous, issue like a favorite brand of transparent tape. Some brands dry and flake off as they age; others turn gummy.

Earlier this year Houghton archivists sent a batch of at-risk Updike pages to Harvard’s Weissman Preservation Center. Experts there try to fix or control the runaway chemistry of tape, glue, paper, and photo surfaces.

There is a further modern challenge for archivists: the fate of the computers and word processors on which much of today’s literature is produced. Pioneering archivists at Emory University have author Salman Rushdie’s old Mac computers, and are exploring ways to mine text documents, emails, and other artifacts of data. It’s the kind of digital archaeology that one day will be a common archival pursuit.

Updike wrote first drafts of his fiction in longhand. He had a computer too, but it’s not in the archive, said Morris. “Mrs. Updike continues to use it.”

Other archival challenges are timeless, including an author’s wish for privacy, and the restrictions that grow out of that wish. The Vidal archive is an open book, for instance, with two exceptions: A World War II diary requires special permission to see, and there is a 10-year moratorium on the author’s financial records.

There are also a few common sense restrictions on archival materials, “in many cases because of fragility,” said Houghton assistant curator Heather Cole. That includes items that predate Christ, like the extensive collection of documents on papyrus. It also extends to the John Keats manuscripts and to the Emily Dickinson family books that are printed on brittle stock.

When the originals are too fragile to handle, “we like to have a surrogate available,” said Cole — often a digitized version. But this is not always possible. Why? That reveals the ultimate challenge to archivists everywhere: staff time and money.

In receiving new material, archivists often have to winnow collections for irrelevant material. “We try to see it doesn’t come in the door,” said Morris, who turned down Vidal’s receipts for dry cleaning. “Sometimes all that noise in an archive can drown everything out.”

Some of the noise gets through, however, in Houghton’s minor collection of artifacts — including jewelry, spectacles, even pulled teeth. The library has a teacup of Dickinson’s, a pair of magician Harry Houdini’s handcuffs, and a pencil made at the factory owned by the family of author Henry David Thoreau. It has author-related coins, buttons, glass, and statuettes, all of which arrived as separate gifts. Some of these artifacts wind up in Houghton’s “Z closet,” the space for odds and ends named after Houghton’s standard cataloging designation for non-paper materials.

Others are shelved in boxes, including the library’s extensive collection of death masks — providing a way of seeing authors through more than their manuscripts. Should they chose, scholars can ask to view, among others, those of James Joyce, William James, and Walt Whitman (whose beard and chest are included).

The recent report (“National Study of Artist-Endowed Foundations”), by the Aspen Institute’s Program on Philanthropy and Social Innovation identified some 300 such foundations holding close to $3 billion in assets, half of them created in the past 15 years.

Artist-endowed foundations are a burgeoning force influencing the global art world, says Christine J. Vincent, who authored the study. They not only award grants to nonprofits, artists, and scholars and provide stewardship for art collections and archives, but also manage artist residencies and art and cultural programs.

“This is a terrifically dynamic field,” said Vincent. “More and more of these foundations were being created and it became useful to have a body of knowledge that will help the next generation make the most of its donors’ generosity.”

The study found that the top 30 artist-endowed foundations disbursed $52.5 million in 2008, which compared favorably with the long-established John S. and James L. Knight Foundation ($55.3 million) and the Ford Foundation ($54.1 million).

The foundations of deceased artists have been growing despite the economic downturn in part because more than 60 percent of those holding at least $1 million in assets are tied to artists who were not survived by children. The foundations fall into two strong patterns, Vincent said, ones that focus on supporting individual artists and those that are responsible for a flow of artwork to museums.

Joining Vincent on a panel at the Sackler Museum Tuesday were Jack Cowart, executive director of the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation; Jack Flam, chief operating officer of the Dedalus Foundation; Carolyn Somers, executive director of the Joan Mitchell Foundation; and Pollock-Krasner Foundation CEO Charles C. Bergman, who also played a key role in the Aspen study.

The panel was moderated by Marion R. Fremont-Smith, a lecturer at the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations, which sponsored the event along with the Harvard Art Museums and the Department of History of Art and Architecture.

The panel was moderated by Marion R. Fremont-Smith (left), a lecturer at the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations, which co-sponsored the event. Jack Flam (center), chief operating officer of the Dedalus Foundation, and Pollock-Krasner Foundation CEO Charles C. Bergman (right) were also panelists.

Cowart said the Lichtenstein Foundation was chartered in 1998 and was separate from the estate of Roy Lichtenstein, who died in 1997, leaving a wife and two sons. The foundation’s charter called for it to provide public access to the prolific artist’s work. It is endowed with 10 paintings. The foundation runs a “perpetual deficit,” Cowart said, which seemed routine until the recession of 2008, which forced it to be “obsessive compulsive” to stay afloat.

Many of the foundation leaders said they spend a lot of money and effort vetting and authenticating works that are said to be created by the endowing artist.

The Joan Mitchell Foundation, which had to wait 10 years after Mitchell’s death to receive the full bequest, has been expanding at a brisk clip. After Hurricane Katrina, the foundation provided emergency grants to individual artists totaling $500,000 over the first few years. By last year, Somers said, the foundation had gone from 1.5 to 16 staff positions, and also boasted a $7 million budget. It has provided free art classes to middle schoolers, some grants to organizations, and established a residency for artists in New Orleans.

Flam, whose Dedalus Foundation was the oldest represented — it just celebrated its 30th anniversary  — said that many foundation board members were close to the late artists, as he was to Robert Motherwell. Five of the six members of the Dedalus Board were picked by Motherwell.

“I was a close friend and knew the kinds of things he was interested in,” said Flam, an art historian. In order to make sure the board stays relevant — not just familiar with the artist — it recently added a 33-year-old member.

“When someone’s alive they convey certain ideas,” Flam said. “Afterward you have to imagine standards that you strive for.”

Diedra Harris-Kelley, co-director of the Romare Bearden Foundation in New York and Bearden’s niece, said exhibits like this one, mounted in the Neil L. and Angelica Zander Rudenstine Gallery at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, allow viewers to gain an intimate understanding of his work.

“Small shows like this one help us to really get at the heart of his work as an artist. It has a focus that allows us to peel away some of the layers,” Harris-Kelley said during the Wednesday discussion, which was moderated by Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Alphonse Fletcher Jr. University Professor and director of the Du Bois Institute. “Bearden took collage to a new level, and it’s his own stylish way of putting those parts together that carries so much soul.”

"Color and Construction: The Intimate Vision of Romare Bearden" panelists included Mary Schmidt Campbell (from left), Patricia Hills, Diedra Harris-Kelley, and Jacqueline Francis.

Fellow panelist Mary Schmidt Campbell, dean of the Tisch School of the Arts and author of “Memory as Metaphor: The Art of Romare Bearden, 1940-1987,” agreed. “Bearden wasn’t just an artist, but a memoirist,” she said. “He had to find a way to reconcile the images from his past with the images that surrounded and defined African-Americans visually. Like a true modernist, his goal was to compel people to see differently. He understood profoundly that to see was also an act of knowing, and that if we can see differently, we can know differently.”

Patricia Hills, professor of the history of art and architecture at Boston University and contributor to the “Romare Bearden, American Modernist” exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, discussed Bearden’s love of jazz, which had a powerful effect on his work. Speaking of Bearden’s friendship with fellow artist Stuart Davis, who “taught Bearden to listen to the intervals in the music of Earl Hines,” Hills observed that Bearden said he found the concepts of intervals interesting “‘because they reinforce more solid forms and objects. But by doing this, it is the spacing of what you leave out that makes what is in there, there.”

"Early Carolina Morning," 1978, collage on board. Image courtesy of the Bearden Foundation

“Bearden led the way,” Hills said. “He created a vibrant, syncretic art by amalgamating cubism with our other cultural legacies: world images that stimulated the mind, creative quilts that comforted the body, and the improvisation of jazz that captured the music of the soul.”

Jacqueline Francis, senior lecturer in visual and critical studies and in painting and drawing at the California College of the Arts, selected one of Bearden’s few sculptures for discussion. In examining “Mauritius,” a mixed-media sculpture made for a 1969 group exhibition that included works by Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, and Saul Steinberg, Francis highlighted Bearden’s deconstruction of a warrior.

"Mauritius," a rare example of Bearden sculpture, was exhibited in a 1969 group show at Cordier and Ekstrom Gallery in New York. Pictured is the top portion of the sculpture, which rests on a blue base.

“He disrupts the verticality of the memorial statue, breaking down the figure, reducing the human form to simple geometry and making it decorative with these primary colors,” she said. Recalling Bearden’s military service in World War II, Francis speculated that “Bearden must have been musing about sacrifice and death across eras and spaces, including his own. Notably, there are no weapons in the hands of ‘Mauritius.’ And while the yellow triangle block might represent a spear or an arrowhead, it might also stand in for a shield.”

More information on the exhibit.

The reason? Superstar Lang Lang was in the house — not to perform (that would happen the day after, at Boston’s Symphony Hall), but to teach. Or, as he put it soon after he hit the stage, to “engage in a heart-to-heart conversation through music.”

Hailed by The New York Times as “the hottest artist on the classical music planet,” the 29-year-old presided over a master class featuring three Harvard undergraduate players. His bespoke, metallic-blue suit may have shouted “rock star,” but his coaching and encouragement of his pupils demonstrated a serious passion for the great works in the piano canon.

The master class — sponsored by Harvard’s Office for the Arts’ Learning From Performers program and Celebrity Series of Boston — featured Tania Rivers-Moore ’15, George Fu ’13, and Allen Yueh ’13 performing works by Beethoven, Prokofiev, and Liszt, respectively. Each performance elicited a range of responses from the teacher.

“More intensity,” Lang Lang coaxed Rivers-Moore. “Slightly darker,” he encouraged Fu. “Don’t think too much,” he admonished Yueh.

Throughout, his teaching was punctuated with extravagant gestures, sudden leaps to the keyboard to demonstrate passages, and, above all, a keen sense of humor. When Fu informed him that he is concentrating in economics, Lang Lang, clearly stunned by his performance, asked incredulously, “How did that happen?”

By the time of the event’s question-and-answer period, it was obvious that this extraordinary performer had won over his audience anew — and, perhaps, had shown them a different facet of his personality. When asked what his experience has taught him about the meaning of life, he replied, “For me, making music is a real joy, and it’s also a responsibility. We must share our love of music with young people.”

Thomas Lee, director of programs and communications, Learning From Performers, Office for the Arts at Harvard

But this poem’s radical and transformative ideas survived what could have been a full-blown campaign against it, said Greenblatt in an Oct. 26 lecture. One reason is that it was art. A tract would have drawn the critical attention of the authorities, who during the Renaissance still hewed to Augustine’s notion that Christian beliefs were “unshakeable, unchangeable, coherent.”

The ancient poem that contained such explosive ideas, and that packaged them so pleasingly, was “On the Nature of Things” (“De Rerum Natura”) by Roman poet and philosopher Titus Lucretius Carus, who died five decades before the start of the Christian era. Its intent was to counter the fear of death and the fear of the supernatural. Lucretius rendered into poetry the ideas of Epicurus, a Greek philosopher who had died some 200 years earlier. Both men embraced a core idea: that life was about the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain.

“The return of this poem is the Renaissance at its most radical,” said Greenblatt, who is Cogan University Professor of the Humanities and the author of “The Swerve: How the World Became Modern” (Norton, 2011). His crowded lecture, “Aesthetic Toleration: Lucretius and the Survival of Unacceptable Ideas,” was delivered at the Barker Center and was sponsored by the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard. (Respondents to the lecture were Ann Blair, Henry Charles Lea Professor of History, and Robert Darnton, Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor.)

Among the most stunning ideas Lucretius promoted in his poem was that the world is made of atoms, imperishable bits of matter he called “seeds.” All the rest was void — nothingness. Atoms never disappeared, but were material grist for the world’s ceaseless change, without any creator or design or afterlife.

These ideas, “drawn from a defunct pagan past,” were intolerable in 15th-century Europe, said Greenblatt, so much so that for the next 200 years they had to survive every “formal and informal mechanism of aversion and repression” of the age.

“A few wild exceptions” embraced this pagan past explicitly, said Greenblatt, including Dominican friar Giordano Bruno, whose “fatal public advocacy” of Lucretius came to an end in 1600. Branded a pantheist, he was imprisoned, tortured, and burned at the stake.

But the poem itself, a repository of intolerable ideas, was allowed to circulate. How was this so?

Greenblatt offered three explicit reasons:

— Reading strategies. In the spirit of commonplace books, readers of that era focused on individual passages rather than larger (and disturbing) meanings. Readers preferred to see the poem as a primer on Latin and Greek grammar, philology, natural history, and Roman culture.

— Scholarship. Official commentaries on the text were not intended to revive the radical ideas of Lucretius, but to put the language and imagery of a “dead work” in context, “a homeostatic survival,” said Greenblatt, “to make the corpse accessible.” He showed an image from a 1511 scholarly edition of the poem, in which single lines on each page lay “like a cadaver on a table,” surrounded by elaborate scholarly text. But the result was still preservation. “Scholarship,” he said, “is rarely credited properly in the history of toleration.”

— Aesthetics. A 1563 annotated edition of the poem acknowledged that its precepts were alien to Christian belief, but “it is no less a poem.”

“Certainly almost every one of the key principles was an offense to right-thinking Christians,” said Greenblatt. “But the poetry was compellingly, stunningly beautiful.”

Its “immensely seductive form,” he said — the soul of tolerance — helped to make aesthetics the concept that bridged the gap between the Renaissance and the early modern age.

Michel de Montaigne, the 16th-century French nobleman who invented the art of the essay, helped to maintain that aesthetic thread. His work includes almost 100 quotations from Lucretius. It was explicitly aesthetic appreciation of the old Roman, said Greenblatt, despite Montaigne’s own “genial willingness to submit to Christian orthodoxy.”

In the end, Lucretius and the ideas he borrowed from Epicurus survived because of art. “That aesthetic dimension of the ancient work … was the key element in the survival and transmission of what was perceived … by virtually everyone in the world to be intolerable,” said Greenblatt. “The thought police were only rarely called in to investigate works of art.”

One irony abides. Epicurus himself was known to say, “I spit on poetry,” yet his ideas only survive because of it. Lucretius saw his art as “honey smeared around the lip of a cup,” said Greenblatt, “that would enable readers to drink it down.”

The Roman poet thought there was no creator or afterlife, but that “should not bring with it a cold emptiness,” said Greenblatt. “It shouldn’t be only the priests of the world, with their delusions, who could convey to you that feeling of the deepest wonder.”

Solti, a Hungarian best known for conducting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, is widely regarded as one of the greatest conductors of the 20th century, earning the record for most Grammy Awards before his death in 1997.

But as the musicians and scholars from Harvard and Greater Boston who gathered at the Loeb Music Library on Wednesday (Oct. 26) would attest, the archives are much more than a boon for historians. They also represent an insight into the art and science of conducting, thanks to Solti’s extensive and meticulous notetaking on his many scores.

“He loved to share what he was doing,” said Lady Solti (left), “and the thought that these scores would be shared with young people, with young musicians, and eventually with musicians all over the world, that would have been his dream.” Lady Solti was joined by Robert Dennis (center), recordings librarian, and Helen Shenton, executive director for the Harvard Library.

And thanks to Harvard, those browned pages are already being digitized and put online for budding conductors around the world.

Whether Solti was studying a new score or preparing for a performance or recording of a score he already knew, he always purchased a new copy and annotated it extensively. As a result, the collection has elicited equal parts excitement, awe, and trepidation for the librarians and scholars who have set out to catalog and study it.

“All of us agree these are the most marked-up scores we have ever seen,” said Sarah Adams, Loeb’s acting Richard F. French Librarian and acting curator of the Archive of World Music. The cocktail hour honored Solti’s widow, Lady Solti, who was visiting the archives’ new home at Harvard for the first time.

This past summer, the library began to digitize the scores for scholars, students, conductors, and musicians.

“We’re already seeing a stream of visitors who would like to come and consult the scores, and more often than not they’re interested in seeing very particular passages to see what Solti did in that instance,” Adams said.

The archives — the first full ones from a conductor to be housed at Harvard — represent a shift in thinking for Harvard Library, said Thomas Kelly, Morton B. Knafel Professor of Music.

“This University is finally beginning to understand the importance of performance in the study of the performing arts,” Kelly said. “Mostly we have scores that are there waiting to become music. Now we have scores … that have become music.”

Harvard’s ability and eagerness to put the scores online for a global audience was the deciding factor in finding the Solti archives a home, Lady Solti said. The Solti family agreed they should work with a university that could digitize the archives, and in 2008 they began talks with library staff at Harvard.

Finally, after being gathered from locations around the world, being classified and boxed in the Soltis’ London apartment, and getting mixed up again in a moving company mishap, the papers arrived at Harvard this past spring.

“It was all fraught with great excitement,” Lady Solti said with a laugh. “These scores were like my baby. It’s very difficult for an old nanny to hand over her child.”

The reception marked not just the acquisition of the papers and Lady Solti’s visit, but also the opening of an exhibit at the library, “Music first and last: Scores from the Sir Georg Solti Archive.” The exhibit displays his scores (and his famed red pencil) alongside his surprisingly candid reactions to the performances.

Most of his thoughts — his “fears and anxieties” over a Schoenberg piece; his feeling of being haunted by Mozart during a performance at St. Stephen’s Cathedral, where the composer’s funeral was held — were taken from his memoirs, said Robert Dennis, recordings librarian at Loeb, who curated the exhibit with the help of the Weissman Preservation Center.

“There was no pretense at all,” Dennis said of the writings of Solti, whom Harvard awarded with an honorary degree in 1979. “He was a mensch — you could tell he just loved working with people.”

The crowd was full of musicians, professors, and scholars from around Boston, who turned out see the scores in the flesh and to meet the guest of honor. Hugh Wolff ’75, head of orchestras at the New England Conservatory, called the exhibit a fascinating teaching tool.

“My students will be coming out here,” Wolff said.

Solti’s scores show students firsthand that conducting is not just an artistic act but a highly intellectual undertaking as well, said Federico Cortese, a senior lecturer on music who is using the Solti materials for a course on Verdi’s “Falstaff.”

“It’s very humbling but also very inspiring,” Cortese said. “There’s always something exciting about seeing the work of a great man, whatever the field.”

Harvard students have already begun to take advantage of the collection. Matt Aucoin, a Kirkland House senior who turned up for the reception, grew up listening to Solti’s recordings. Now, he said, he’s studying Solti’s marked-up copy of Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro,” which he will conduct for the Dunster House Opera Society’s production next spring.

“His notes are immensely practical,” Aucoin said, like those of “someone who had never seen or heard it.”

The finding wouldn’t surprise diehard fans of Solti, who once told an interviewer he liked to wait at least 10 years before returning to a piece he’d already conducted, according to Helen Shenton, executive director of the Harvard Library. Even then, Solti said, he would never rely on his old notes.

“That’s the only way to keep it fresh,” Shenton quoted for the crowd. “A piece you play again and again is a Xerox copy.”

For young conductors now studying Solti’s work, the continual joy of the discovery seemed to come through on the page.

“It’s a thrill,” Aucoin said.

That sort of student engagement with his aging, hash-marked scores is exactly what Solti would have wanted, his widow told the crowd.

“He loved to share what he was doing,” she said, “and the thought that these scores would be shared with young people, with young musicians, and eventually with musicians all over the world, that would have been his dream.”

Whatever the cause, the mythic U.S.-Mexico border draws millions of people to it each year. It’s the most frequently crossed international border in the world, and is one of the most intriguing unseen lines in history.

Just ask Rachel St. John. In her new book, “Line in the Sand: A History of the Western U.S.-Mexico Border,” the Harvard associate professor of history traces the border’s origins to its modern-day consequences.

The eastern U.S.-Mexico border was easy to establish: the Rio Grande forms a natural divide. But after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the Mexican-American War in 1848, diplomats gathered with maps to configure the western border. According to St. John’s research, they drew arbitrary lines, following no existing geographical feature, but connecting a few known spots like El Paso, the Gila and Colorado rivers, and San Diego Bay.

Armed with maps and equipment, a U.S.-Mexico boundary commission next set out into the barren and inhospitable desert with the task of formally surveying and demarcating that part of the border.

“There’s this idea that you can draw a boundary line on paper,” mused St. John, “but that’s much harder to put into effect when you get on the ground.”

Some of the men’s maps proved incorrect, which spurred on-the-spot compromises — just another added stress in addition to contending with everything from heat and rough terrain to getting lost, Apache attacks, and sometimes death.

“The one part of the boundary line that corresponded to a natural geographic feature, the Gila River, was made obsolete by the renegotiation of the border in the Gadsden Treaty of 1953,” wrote St. John. “From that point on, with the exception of a small stretch of the boundary line that runs along the Colorado River, the western border was made up of a series of imaginary lines.” Finalized in 1854, “the boundary line as it exists today was in place,” she said.

But what St. John finds remarkable is the shift in the border’s meaning over time.

“When the border was first drawn, the government thought, ‘No one’s ever going to come out here. This is the middle of the desert — who cares what happens,’” she said. “But there’s a massive change in economics that begins in the U.S. and spreads into Mexico in the late 19th-century. And as you have the development of this capitalist economy, the border takes on different meanings.”

Cattle ranching and mining became big industries, and a railroad was built on the U.S. side. The exchange of goods prompted the U.S. government to send customs agents to the border, and, said St. John, “It’s really the change in the economy that causes the government to care about maintaining the border.”

According to St. John, most people assume today that the border is there to regulate the movement of people, “but the sense from both the U.S. and Mexican governments that they needed to regulate the movement of people is a 20th-century phenomenon.”

The first people who the U.S. government wanted to control weren’t Mexicans, but Chinese immigrants, St. John discovered. “I find it really interesting that during the first decade of the 20th century, you have Chinese immigrants disguising themselves as Mexicans so they can cross the border.”

St. John grew up in Southern California, and as a teenager sometimes trekked to Tijuana herself. “I remember one day thinking, ‘It’s really interesting how the border is one way on this side, and on the other side it’s totally different,’” she recalled.

The border now is political, policed, and unpredictable. “All the attention on the border, in some ways, is not a very effective way of dealing with larger problems of managing immigration and other smuggling. Many people in the U.S. without proper documentation entered legally and overstayed their visas. This emphasis on building a wall doesn’t necessarily match up with the issues people are trying to address,” said St. John.

“But one thing studying the border has taught me is that it hasn’t always meant the same thing, and so it’s very possible that in the future it won’t mean the same thing,” she noted. “At no time that I’ve seen does anyone want a totally closed or open border. It’s all about creating a border that’s a force field — it lets in the things you want and lets out the things you don’t.”