By Pat Harrison

To meet the faculty associates for the Radcliffe Institute, you would have to travel from one end of Harvard’s campus to the other, from the bustling streets of the Longwood Medical Area to bucolic Observatory Hill, with stops at the Barker Center across from Harvard Yard, the shiny new Center for Government and International Studies on Cambridge Street, and the towering William James Hall on Kirkland Street. Then you would have to call Berlin, where a faculty associate is at an institute for advanced study, the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.

This broad geography symbolizes the breadth of Radcliffe’s Academic Engagement Programs (AEP), the faculty-led initiative that Barbara J. Grosz, dean of the Radcliffe Institute and Higgins Professor of Natural Sciences in Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, is building from new and existing activities. “We want to engage faculty in all disciplinary areas,” says Grosz, who served as Radcliffe’s dean of science from 2001 until 2008, when she was named dean.

 
Barbara J. Grosz
Photo by Kathleen Dooher

Under Grosz’s leadership, Radcliffe’s science program convened Harvard faculty and students in a variety of activities, including science lectures, seminars, and symposia that brought Nobel Prize–winning scientists to campus and provided students with opportunities to interact with them. Her idea was that these events could inspire students and researchers to take risks in their own work.

Since becoming dean of the Institute, Grosz has appointed six new faculty associates, all of whom are highly accomplished in their fields: Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Brigitte Madrian, Leah Price, Robert J. Sampson, Dimitar D. Sasselov, and Rosalind A. Segal. Asked how she chose the six, Grosz says she consulted faculty members who had been advisors to the Institute when Drew Faust was dean, including Homi K. Bhabha RI '05, the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities and director of the Humanities Center; Stephen M. Kosslyn, the John Lindsley Professor of Psychology, chair of the Department of Psychology, and divisional dean for the social sciences; and Theda Skocpol, the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology. She also consuted Radcliffe leaders Nancy F. Cott, Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation Director of the Schlesinger Library and Jonathan Trumbull Professor of American History at Harvard, and Judith Vichniac, associate dean of the fellowship program. “And then I networked,” Grosz says. “I networked like crazy.”

One of the people Grosz talked with was Diana Sorensen, dean of the arts and humanities in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the James F. Rothenberg Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures. The two discussed the future of the book—a conversation that eventually led to Radcliffe’s faculty associates planning an interdisciplinary conference on the same topic.

Grosz drew on all of her contacts, looking for faculty members who could use Radcliffe’s resources, its neutral turf, and its convening power to launch new programs. “What I was looking for was people who would talk across boundaries,” Grosz says. “People who would build programs at Radcliffe that, like our fellowship program, bring scholars and artists into contact with others they wouldn’t ordinarily meet.” Hoping to involve faculty from as many Harvard schools as possible, she invited people from the Harvard Medical School and the Kennedy School of Government and someone with strong ties to the Graduate School of Design.  

After she assembled the group, Grosz brought together Radcliffe’s faculty associates and the Institute’s academic leaders for a retreat in the fall of 2008 to discuss the programs they wanted to launch over the next few years. Now, a year later, their plans have been put in motion.

Why Books?

In her Barker Center office on Quincy Street, Leah Price RI '07, a professor of English, Harvard College Professor, and Radcliffe faculty associate in the humanities, spends a lot of time thinking about books. One of the youngest women ever tenured at Harvard (at age thirty-one, in 2002), she was a Radcliffe fellow when she began writing a book that she’s now completing about the ways books are used when they’re not being read. “I’m thinking about the entire life cycle of a book, from production to sale to lending, borrowing, gifting, reselling, displaying, recycling, pulping, and land fill,” Price says.
 

Leah Price
Photo by Tony Rinaldo

In planning the Radcliffe conference on the book—titled “Why Books?” and scheduled for October 28–29, 2010—Price is collaborating with Ann Blair, a Harvard College Professor and the Henry Charles Lea Professor of History, who served as a Radcliffe faculty associate in 2008–2009.

Like Price, Blair was recognized for her achievements at a young age and spends a lot of her time thinking about the book as an object. At her office on Cambridge Street, across from the Sackler Museum, Blair talks about how she used the no-strings-attached $500,000 grant she received in 2002 from the MacArthur Foundation. “The MacArthur funded a number of terms of leave,” she says, so that she could travel to Europe and conduct research on humanist reference books published in Latin between 1500 and 1700. Provisionally titled Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Era, the book will be published by Yale University Press.

Price and Blair were already a team when they began planning the Radcliffe book conference, since they coteach a graduate seminar, Methods in Book History, and serve as leaders of the Humanities Center seminar called History of the Book, along with David Hall, the Bartlett Research Professor of New England Church History at the Harvard Divinity School, and Robert Darnton, the Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and director of the Harvard University Library. 
 
Price says one reason she and Blair wanted to hold a conference on the book is that the topic cuts across intellectual and institutional lines. She lists the categories of people who need to be involved: people from the law school to think about intellectual property; people from computer science to think about digital media; people from history to think about the history of the book; people from history of science to think about the tools of knowledge, of which the book is one; literary scholars; people from the business school to think about the economics of the publishing industry; and people from sociology to think about the changing place of the book in American culture.
 
Blair and Price also want to cross the divide that separates academic departments from the museums and libraries. The day before the book conference, a series of workshops will be held for conference participants who preregister, involving field trips to Harvard conservation labs and digitization facilities, the Harvard University Press, and the Bow & Arrow Press, a student-run letterpress in the basement of Adams House. “Rather than just have talking heads, we’ll have hands-on sessions,” Price says.
 
With the exception of the conference’s opening panel about the future of the book—to be chaired by Nancy F. Cott, the Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation Director of Radcliffe’s Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America and the Jonathan Trumbull Professor of American History, and featuring Robert Darnton and Stuart M. Shieber RI '07, the James O. Welch, Jr. and Virginia B. Welch Professor of Computer Science—Harvard scholars will chair but not sit on conference panels. The goal is to use the conference to bring in new perspectives.

The conference will be diverse in other ways as well. “We’ve tried to balance it so that every panel includes someone who specializes in current issues, like digitization, and someone who specializes in past issues, like the transition from manuscript to print,” says Blair.

Gender and Space

Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, another of Radcliffe’s faculty associates in the humanities, is spending the 2009–2010 academic year at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin, working on a book about interiority in contemporary art. “So you can see that space is of vital importance to me,” she says, referring to the Radcliffe conference on gender and space that she’s helping to organize for April 15, 2010.

 
Ewa Lajer-Burcharth
Photo courtesy of Ewa Lajer-Burcharth

The William Dorr Boardman Professor of Fine Arts in the Department of History of Art and Architecture, Lajer-Burcharth is planning the conference with a committee drawn across the University—including Joanna Aizenberg RI '10, the Amy Smith Berylson Professor of Materials Science in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and the Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at the Radcliffe Institute; Mohsen Mostafavi, dean of the Graduate School of Design; and Diana Sorensen.

Lajer-Burcharth says the conference will address the ways in which gender affects how we experience, construct, and use physical and personal spaces, and how notions of space influence the way we think about gender. Divided into three areas, the conference will focus on exterior, interior, and border spaces, with two scholars from different disciplines and one artist representing each area. 

She sounds especially excited when describing the arts component of the conference. Plans call for Christine Dakin RI ’08, formerly a principal dancer with the Martha Graham Dance Company, to perform Graham’s famous Lamentation and to discuss space in dance from Graham’s time (1894–1991) to today.
 
At least two other artists will participate in the gender and space conference: Janine Antoni, who uses her own body as the measure of various architectural interiors; and the New York–based British artist Simon Lee, whose projects include transforming the interior of a city tram into a functioning pinhole camera by encasing it in black plastic perforated by hundreds of tiny holes. 

A scholar and a performer will participate in each session of the conference, in keeping with the recommendations of the Harvard Task Force on the Arts, released in December 2008, which emphasized the arts as “an integral part of the cognitive life of the university.”

Patterning in Nature

Rosalind A. Segal, a Radcliffe faculty associate in science, carries out her research on the tenth floor of a tall glass building, the Smith Laboratories Building in the Longwood Medical Area, on the main campus of the Dana Farber Cancer Institute. After earning her MD and PhD, she began her career splitting her time between clinical and research work, but now focuses on research, trying to understand how the brain develops.

Rosalind A. Segal
Photo by Martha Stewart

“We look at ways in which cues outside the cell tell cells whether to divide or not, whether to survive or not, and also whether to move or not,” she explains. “Those three things—dividing, surviving, and moving to the right place—are essential features during brain development.” Segal’s lab tries to understand how these processes occur in normal development, so that they can understand how these processes are turned on again in cancers. And they have had some success with the most common malignant brain tumor in children, medulloblastoma, or MB as Segal calls it. She and her colleagues identified a protein that’s expressed at variable levels by MB and found that it’s a good predictor of clinical outcomes. “In the sixties, the cure rate was around 10 to 20 percent,” Segal says. “Now it’s about 70 percent.”

It was Segal’s idea to hold a Radcliffe symposium on patterning in nature. “I work a lot on patterning during development, trying to find out, for example, how you pattern an embryo,” she says, “so it was something I was interested in. As planning proceeded, Segal and Radcliffe’s other faculty associate in science, Dimitar D. Sasselov, broadened the symposium’s focus to include patterns in the sky, patterns in proteins, and patterns in chemical structures. They now expect to convene developmental and evolutionary biologists, mathematicians, materials scientists, and astronomers, among others.      
 
 
Dimitar D. Sasselov
Photo by Jon Chase, Harvard University News Office

Sasselov works across the Charles River from the Longwood Medical Area, at the Harvard Observatory on Garden Street. A professor of astronomy and director of the Harvard Origins of Life Initiative, he is known as a “planet hunter,” one of several scientists on his corridor who’s looking for planets orbiting stars other than the sun. Sasselov is a member of the group that oversees the Kepler Mission, the space telescope that NASA launched in March 2009 to look for Earth-like planets.

Inviting space scientist Carolyn Porco to deliver a Dean’s Lecture at Radcliffe next spring was Sasselov’s suggestion. “Our quests have a lot in common,” he says. Porco heads the camera team for the Cassini spacecraft that has been orbiting Saturn for five years, taking pictures of the planet’s rings. “It’s thrilling,” Porco told the New York Times about the latest images. “And I want everyone to know how thrilling it is.”

Trained as a physicist, Sasselov now studies planets and geochemistry, at the point where geochemistry crosses over into biochemistry. “That’s quite a stretch,” he says of his shift in disciplines. “I still feel like a student, and that’s exciting.”
 
Perhaps because of his own experience, Sasselov is a passionate advocate of cross-disciplinary research for students. “Students are scholars of the universe when they first come here and during their first few years,” he says. “They should be excited and curious about everything, not only about natural science, but about social science and the arts and humanities. The University’s main goal is to provide a broad education for its students and young faculty.”    

Sasselov and Segal are collaborating on a Meet-the-Investigator lunch series for students. One of the lunches will feature Segal and her husband, Michael E. Greenberg, chairman of the Department of Neurobiology at Harvard, answering student questions about balancing career and family responsibilities. Segal and Greenberg are the parents of two almost-grown children—Rachel, 20, and Daniel, a senior in high school.

City as Social Science Laboratory

From Robert J. Sampson’s office in William James Hall, one has a panoramic view of Cambridge and the Boston skyline beyond. Befitting this location, studying Boston and the wider metropolitan area is one goal that Sampson and Brigitte Madrian are pursuing as Radcliffe’s social science faculty associates.
 

Robert J. Sampson
Photo by Kris Snibbe, Harvard University News Office

Sampson is chairman of the Department of Sociology and the Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences. Known for his work on the origins of crime, the life course, and the social organization of cities, for more than 20 years he has been conducting a longitudinal study from birth to death of a thousand disadvantaged men born in Boston during the era of the Great Depression. He and coauthor John Laub have written two award-winning books about this study, both published by Harvard University Press. One of their findings is that military service, along with the educational and training opportunities offered by the GI Bill, was often a turning point for disadvantaged men in improving their lives.

Like Sampson, Brigitte Madrian, the Aetna Professor of Public Policy and Corporate Management at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, conducts research that has a practical focus. Her work on household saving and investment behavior has affected the design of employer-sponsored savings plans in the United States and influenced pension reform legislation here and abroad. 
 
 
Brigitte Madrian
Photo by Martha Stewart

Together, Madrian and Sampson are working with faculty from other schools at the University to design what they’re calling City As Social Science Laboratory. “There’s a wealth of data in the Boston area that researchers and administrators in local institutions have compiled,” says Sampson. By linking different kinds of records—including medical records, crime records, census data, and information about immigration—faculty members would be able to study the city’s social problems, including poor housing, failing schools, and crime. Sampson said he and Madrian and their Harvard colleagues have very good contacts in Boston’s police department and housing agencies, for example.
 
“When you talk about experiments, most people think of a science laboratory and petri dishes and mice,” says Madrian. “But social scientists think of different types of experiments. What if you could actually go into society and change something and study how it works?” She points out that schools have often conducted this sort of experiment, by trying out new curricula. Sampson adds that Chicago has often been used as a laboratory for social issues such as crime, education, and housing, but “we think Boston is underutilized.”
 
Madrian and Sampson plan to collaborate with Nancy E. Hill, a professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education (GSE), who was named the first appointee to the Suzanne Young Murray Professorship in July 2009. The Murray professorship allows Hill to spend four semesters as a Radcliffe fellow during her first five years at GSE, and she intends to come to Radcliffe during the 2010–2011 academic year. 
 
Madrian and Sampson are also working with Sasselov and Segal to hold cross-disciplinary roundtable discussions with Radcliffe fellows and Harvard faculty members on public policy issues.  

Engine of Intellectual Innovation

When she talks about Radcliffe’s faculty-led initiatives, Barbara Grosz likes to describe the Institute as an “engine of intellectual innovation.” Thinking like a scientist, she explains her experimental approach: “Radcliffe is a place where Harvard faculty can try out new programs and collaborations. Some will work and others won’t. I don’t expect them to all be successful.”

Known for its fellowship program and its Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, the Radcliffe Institute has from its founding in 1999 included activities that involve Harvard faculty members, students, and the public. But organizing these activities under one umbrella as Academic Engagement Programs is Grosz’s innovation. One of her aims, she says, is to further President Faust’s goal of one University. “The best way to bring the parts of the University together is to engage people from the different parts,” Grosz says. “That’s what we’re doing. We’re seeding new intellectual ventures.”