Harvard Arts and Humanities

17/06/2026

New adaptation of dark, psychological thriller film premieres at A.R.T.

New adaptation of Darren Aronofsky's dark, psychological thriller film premieres at American Repertory Theater.

27/05/2026

And our final 2026 Taliesin Prize winner is Raphael Tourette, concentrator in Applied Math (CS) with a secondary in History of Art and Architecture.

"My coursework has explored the process of building, by and for humans.
The master masons of Notre-Dame raised 226 feet of stone without standardized measurement, guided only by geometry and a determination to build something greater than themselves. The cathedral was a technological advancement allowing humans to approach the divine. Its recent reconstruction prompted debate about whether France ought to preserve the edifice’s Catholic heritage under laïcité — an argument reaching the national government as well as my French family’s dinner table.

Photography handed the next generation a technology that reshaped how people understood their world. The Soviet and N**i regimes weaponized photomontage and mass-printing to systematically manufacture belief. Unlike painting, the assembled photograph claimed reality by placing the viewer inside the image, collapsing the distance between fiction and truth. The same medium, in different hands, became an instrument of refusal. In 1920s Paris, Claude Cahun staged self-portraits that shattered every category her era used to contain her, turning Surrealism's own grammar against its tendency to reduce women to objects.

Each of these builders absorbed the world deeply enough to see what it was ready for next, where their inventions became the environment everyone else lived inside. The same patterns recur in the mathematics underneath AI, where optimization and probabilistic algorithms encode human judgment into systems that can shape human thinking at scale. I study applied mathematics and computation because those are the materials of this moment, while I turn to art history to learn how to build towards human progress."

26/05/2026

Our next Taliesin Prize winner Max A. Palys! Max is a concentrator in Math and East Asian Studies.

"Every discipline I have pursued has been, at its core, a language: a way of moving meaning from one mind to another.

I first engaged in the study of natural languages, including English lyric poetry and literature accompanied by courses in Mandarin. While I found these subjects beautiful, sentences ask for thousands of interpretations, and the mode of expression felt inexact.

The desire to find a more precise expression of meaning led me to mathematics, where I studied a new symbolic and mechanical language. I hoped to use its clean logic to translate the complexity of the natural world, next studying dynamical systems and statistical mechanics. I found that even the mathematically-complete description of the Hydrogen atom left me no truer understanding than that afforded by natural language, and a distance remained.

That distance drew me to the limits of language itself. In a twist of irony, I had to understand ancient Chinese before I was able to read the Buddho-Daoist argument that language itself was permanently flawed, unable to transfer meaning any better than the Buddha holding up a single, silent flower.

If no amount or type of language can communicate truth, my decision to begin the study of Russian as a senior is wholly irrational. But the study of languages of all types, fundamentally, is the study of people, like me — people that are slippery and mechanical, clean and complex, understandable and inscrutable. And so, I keep reaching — not for truth, but for the person on the other side."

22/05/2026

Meet Frank Liu, one of the 2026 Taliesin Prize winners! Frank had a double concentration in English Honors and Molecular and Cellular Biology.

"Course selection provides a parallel to the statistical study of “sampling,” in which we infer an infinitely interconnected horizon of knowledge with an inevitably limited sample. Entering college with a sustained interest in health, I took courses in economic policy, sociology, and moral attention to illuminate the body beyond a biomechanical view.

Statistics 110/111 led me to consider the mechanism through which empirical events are inferred into a scientific narrative — and to recognize its biases. It has become central to my work in global health with my LS1b professor Pardis Sabeti, where statistical modeling addresses case underreporting to bring attention to unnoticed trends and emergent pathogens, projecting an image before our eyes, changing our minds.

Simultaneously, a chance experience — a freshman sampling of the humanities (10A/B) — blossomed into a love of literary study that complemented my late nights of writing for The Harvard Advocate.

Elaine Scarry’s graduate seminar on literary representations of labor (English 251) taught me that it takes on the language of groups, in tension with novelistic tendency to evoke experience through a singular protagonist. The tension between singularity and plurality has curious concordance with Paul Farmer’s global health mantra that “the idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that is wrong with the world”: the motivation that had drawn me across science, statistics, and literature.

Every course is a sample that refines my future projection. I say this not as retroactive serendipity but affirmation of plurality, and gratitude to all that helped represent a path I could not have imagined alone."

21/05/2026

We are delighted to announce the recent appointment of 36 fellows, including research fellows, junior fellows, and musicians-in-residence, as the 2026-27 Fellows cohort. We are also pleased to support seven project grants across our three areas of study. We look forward to welcoming them to our corner of Georgetown this September.

Find the full list of appointees and read the press release at https://www.doaks.org/newsletter/press-releases/announcing-the-2026-27-fellows-cohort-at-dumbarton-oaks.

21/05/2026

This evening’s Thursday Seminar with Ewa Lajer-Burcharth (I Tatti / Harvard University): “Drawing in the World: The Eighteenth-Century Reinvention of the Medium.”

Attend in person or on Zoom:
https://itatti.harvard.edu/event/thursday-seminar-drawing-world-eighteenth-century-reinvention-medium

20/05/2026

Congratulations to the 2026 Taliesin Prize winners: Frank Liu, Raphael Tourette and Max Palys!

We will be highlighting each student in the coming days.

There was a highly competitive pool of nominated students, but their transcript and statements stood out as exemplifying the spirit of the Taliesin Prize, with bold and creative course selections, perseverance in facing curricular challenges, and evidence of intellectual risk and discovery.

14/05/2026

Schlesinger Library’s scrapbook collection offers scholars insights into hidden stories, texture of everyday life in bygone eras.

30/04/2026

We are so excited to bring you a new educational podcast, called Ancient Greece Today!

This project is a collaboration with Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies. It brings together scholars and artists to explore the Ancient Greek world and how it is used and reimagined in the present day. It is designed to help demonstrate the continued relevance of humanistic study while also providing free resources to students and teachers far beyond Harvard.

The second episode will come out this Thursday. Learn more at https://podcast.chs.harvard.edu/. It’s available across all major podcasting platforms.

Hosted by Naomi Weiss (Professor of Classics, Harvard University), Ancient Greece Today brings scholars together with playwrights, novelists, poets, performers, and other artists to explore the ancient Greek world and how it is used and reimagined in the present day.

29/04/2026

Don't miss it! Today: Arts and Humanities on the Edge.

It is no secret that enrollment in arts and humanities courses is down, all across academia. Professors have been laid off, and whole departments have been eliminated in the past several years, as universities market their education as explicit career training, and students flock to majors that prom...