Radcliffe
Institute
For
Advanced Study
The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University—known as Harvard Radcliffe Institute—is one of the world’s leading centers for interdisciplinary exploration. We bring students, scholars, artists, and practitioners together to pursue curiosity-driven research, expand human understanding, and grapple with questions that demand insight from across disciplines.
By the Numbers
Highlights: Women, Gender, and Society
Events
Harvard Radcliffe Institute Announces 2021–2022 Fellows
The Institute will welcome the 2021–2022 class to Cambridge for a year of in-person research, writing, and interdisciplinary exchange. The class was drawn from a wide pool of international applicants, and the acceptance rate was 2.4 percent.
News & Ideas
Follow Us
This year marks the 50th anniversary of Eileen Southern’s The Music of Black Americans: A History (W. W. Norton, 1971), a now legendary text that reveals an open-minded attitude that was exceptional for its day, placing Black concert traditions alongside popular music, ragtime, jazz, and, in its third edition, hip hop. More than that, The Music of Black Americans inspired Black music studies, a field of research that has continued to expand in the 21st century. In 1976, Southern (1920–2002) became the first African American woman tenured in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. She played an important institutional role at Harvard, where she was central in developing the Department of Afro-American Studies (now African and African American Studies), serving as an early chair, and was on the faculty of the Department of Music, where she taught courses on Black music and Renaissance musical notation. This image shows the front page of the Spring 1976 issue of the Afro-American Studies at Harvard newsletter, which announced Southern’s chair appointment. On 11/15, we’ll explore Southern’s legacy in the first of two one-hour webinars. Link to event in bio.
In honor of National Poetry Day, Harvard Radcliffe Institute would like to look back to our exhibit titled “A Language to Hear Myself”: Feminist Poets Speak. It featured five literary giants—June Jordan, Eve Merriam, Honor Moore, Adrienne Rich, and Jean Valentine—who used poetry as a platform for protest and self-expression, and to explore the politics of gender. Today we celebrate poetry as an art form and as a mode of activism for marginalized communities. A link to the digital version of the exhibition is in the bio. Accessibility Description: Image 1: June Jordan smiling, sitting down in grass Image 2: Eve Merriam promotional flyer Image 3: Portrait of Honor Moore smiling Image 4: Portrait of Adrienne Rich smiling Image 5: Portrait of Jean Valentine smiling All images courtesy of the Schlesinger Library, which houses the papers of all five poets
A new article in the New Yorker, “How the Real Jane Roe Shaped the Abortion Wars,” looks at the complicated life of Norma McCorvey. The Joshua Prager Collection on Norma McCorvey and Roe v. Wade is housed in our Schlesinger Library. Here, some photos from the collection. (Photo 1) McCorvey with Flip Benham, a born-again-Christian lay minister and militant anti-abortionist, who is mentioned in the article. (Photo 2) A roadside billboard in Indiana advertises the Tippecanoe County Right to Life Banquet, which featured McCorvey ca. 1995–1998. In our bio, a link to the collection’s catalog entry.
