July
July 22–25
Surrealism and Non-Normative Sexualities
Humanities
Brad Epps (Romance Languages and Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Harvard University)
The omnipotence of desire is surrealism's sole article of faith—so contended André Breton, self-appointed pope of the movement. Surrealism, under Breton and others, claimed to emancipate human desire and wasted no opportunity to express its contempt for the inhibitions wrought in the name of the church, state, and family. Alongside such liberational rhetoric, Breton's notorious tirades against homosexuality and other non-normative sexual identities and practices sit awkwardly and raise important questions about the “nature” of liberation, avant-garde experimentation, and radical critique. While the broad topic of surrealism and sexuality has received considerable attention, scholars have tended to shy away from surrealism's fraught relationship with “perverse” sexualities—homosexuality principal among them. The skittishness and silence are regrettable, because surrealism, despite Breton's intolerance, did attract a formidable array of queer artists and writers, particularly as it wrenched itself away from Breton. Indeed, these “other” surrealists were demonstrably connected with surrealism’s cultural reception in Great Britain, the United States, Spain, Mexico, Germany, Australia, and elsewhere. Long after surrealism's heyday in 1920s France, these artists and writers nurtured the development of surrealism, often laying the groundwork for creative negotiations of the body, gender, and sexuality by subsequent generations of artists (notably experimental filmmakers, body and performance artists, photographers, etc.). Desirous not merely to recuperate a welter of alternative desires at play in surrealism, but also to push at established disciplinary and national boundaries, we propose to bring together a diverse but coherent group of scholars from around the world—and at various stages of their careers—who work on surrealist literature, film, and art and/or on gender and sexuality, to redress the inattention and fragmentation of this important topic.
August
August 3–7
Nocturnal Histories: Witchcraft and the Shamanic Legacy of Pre-Christian Europe
Humanities and Social Science
Stephen A. Mitchell RI ’05 (Scandinavian and Folklore, Harvard University)
Neil Price (Archaeology, University of Aberdeen, Scotland)
2009 will mark the twentieth publication anniversary of Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg’s landmark study Storia notturna, translated as Ecstasies: deciphering the witches’ Sabbath. This work transformed the study of European witchcraft, discussing the phenomenon from the gendered perspective of its practitioners rather than merely its persecutors. Its core thesis—that much of the Christian faith in Europe was underlain by centuries-old strata of pre-Christian cults and essentially shamanic practices—set the agenda for two decades of subsequent research. With Ginzburg himself as guest of honor, this seminar aims to bring together historians, archaeologists, students of religion, folklorists, and literary scholars to discuss the current state of thought around this fundamental subject, and to map out a new trajectory for the future of witchcraft studies.
August 23–25
History of Reading across Cultures: The Jewish Book and Its Readers in Early Modern Europe
Humanities and Social Science
Magda Teter RI ’08 (History, Wesleyan University)
Rachel Greenblatt (Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University)
Today we are witnessing “an information revolution.” New technology, the Internet, has provided us with new ways to disseminate information. The information revolution of today has made us learn to cope with, what Ann Blair has called in another context, “the information overload.” We read differently on-line than from books, and new technology forces us to develop new skills to process information. But centuries earlier, Europeans faced their own “information revolution” that forced them to learn how to cope with “the information overload” of their time—the printing press. With better access to texts, a new group of readers emerged, adapting old techniques to new conditions, or developing new skills to process the information. This subject has been studied by cultural historians of Europe; this workshop seeks to connect them and their findings with scholars of Jewish cultural history. Ironically, we know little about how “the people of the Book” read in the premodern era. This workshop seeks to examine how Jewish readers coped with this new development and what the areas of direct or indirect interaction between Jewish and Christian readers were. What did they read and how did they process available information? We seek to form collaborative interaction among scholars of Jewish history, early modern history, and literature and to facilitate cross-fertilization of ideas among them.
December
December 3–4
Theory and Field Experiments in Political Economy
Social Science
Rohini Pande (Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School)
Asim Ijaz Khwaja (Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School)
Political economy is a fast-progressing field in economics that analyzes political actions as the result of economic choices by agents in the political sphere. Robust theories that allow us to predict the actions of individuals in political institutions will make it possible for us to devise ways to improve these institutions by reducing corruption, widening participation in the political process, and allowing better and more effective representation of voters. However, uniting theory and empirical work to produce robust scientific evidence is one of the most difficult challenges in economics. Unlike in the physical sciences, laboratory experiments in economics often have limited relevance because the artificiality of the situation and constant observation can easily skew experimental results. A more reliable way to prove theory, to the point where it can be used to reliably influence policy, is via thorough field-testing of theoretical predictions in a variety of real situations. Our intent in organizing this seminar is to bring together theorists and empirical researchers (and some researchers already involved in both theoretical and empirical work) to examine which new theoretical predictions in political economy might be open to empirical testing in the field.
January
January 22–23
Computational Challenges in Cellular, Molecular, and Systems Biology
Natural Science, Statistical Science, and Computational Science
Edoardo Airoldi (Statistics, Harvard University)
Jun S. Liu (Statistics, Harvard University)
Erin O’Shea (Molecular and Cellular Biology, Harvard University)
This seminar aims to promote intellectual discussion among faculty from Harvard and peer institutions in the broad areas of cellular, molecular, and systems biology. The primary goal of the seminar is to explore and identify the fundamental computational challenges the systems biology community will face in the next 1–3 years. Strategies (technologies, protocols, and designs) to measure complex cellular events, from multiple coordinated perspectives and at unprecedented resolutions, are being fine-tuned at Harvard, MIT, Princeton, and elsewhere. While these new tools promise to support scientific inquiry of biological systems one leap forward, the analysis of complex data generated in this pursuit raises a wide array of core scientific, inferential, and computational questions. This exploratory seminar will gather scientists with quantitative, computational, technological, and biological backgrounds. Each participant brings different tools and perspectives to the table, but all share a common interest in reverse engineering cascades of cellular events—for instance, to map regulatory programs that allow microorganisms to maintain balanced growth in a changing environment. As several of the key players are local to the Boston area, we will use this opportunity to set a detailed scientific agenda, jump-start collaborations, and establish a Harvard-led focus group.
January 29–31
Architectural Histories of Organization
Humanities
Timothy Hyde (Architecture, Harvard Graduate School of Design)
The exploratory seminar will convene a group of scholars for a discussion of architectural histories of organization. The seminar will pose the question: how might the field of architectural history productively engage organizations as objects of study? Discussion will address methods, sources, and evidentiary standards that might apply to such histories and will speculate on the forms of knowledge—instrumental, interpretive, or theoretical—that could emerge from such studies. The seminar will bring architectural historians whose work focuses on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries together with scholars from disciplines that address issues of organization.
March
March 5–6
Design and Analysis of Experiments in Modern-Day Science and Technology
Social Science and Science
Tirthankar Dasgupta (Statistics, Harvard University)
Xiao-Li Meng (Statistics, Harvard University)
Design and analysis of experiments is a systematic strategy to generate and analyze data for efficient study of input-output relationships or models by deliberately varying the inputs. In recent years, however, we have witnessed dramatic changes and paradigm shifts in the concept and process of data collection for causal investigation in many scientific fields, including physical, chemical, biological, computer, and engineering sciences. The objective of this workshop is to identify and synthesize critical research issues in experimental design across fields affected by the changing paradigm and that have the potential of making a profound impact on causal investigation in scientific studies.
April
April 22–23
The Genetics and Evolution of Animal Coloration
Science
Hopi Hoekstra (Biology and Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University)
Marcus Kronforst (Center for Systems Biology, Harvard University)
Animals display incredibly diverse color patterns. Yet little is known about the underlying genetic basis of these adaptive phenotypes. What are the genes that produce animal color patterns? What is the functional DNA sequence variation that causes color pattern variation among individuals, populations, and species? How does the process of development translate this DNA sequence variation into different color pattern phenotypes? The answers to these questions are just beginning to emerge and, as they do, they reshape our view of how the process of adaptive evolution occurs. We will bring together the leading experts in the field of adaptive pigmentation in animals for a two-day exploratory seminar. This meeting will provide a unique venue for an active research community to discuss (1) the function and evolution of color across biological systems, (2) various approaches available to explore the genetic basis of adaptive pigmentation, and (3) the conclusions that study of animal pigmentation can contribute to understanding larger questions about how adaptation proceeds at the molecular level.
April 23–24
The Social Sciences and Liberalism in Modern Americas
Humanities and Social Science
James T. Kloppenberg (American History, Harvard University)
Andrew Jewett (History and Social Studies, Harvard University)
Rebecca Lemov (History of Science, Harvard University)
Expanding our focus beyond the oft-studied 1870–1920 and 1950–1965 eras, and beyond the familiar nexus of fact-value separation with a technocratic or managerial mode of politics, participants in this seminar will explore the full range of interactions between the social sciences and liberalism in the modern United States. We will discuss whether the complexities of this relationship can be captured in a single analytical frame and think about fruitful avenues for future research: new themes, new periods, new sources, and even new methodologies. Along the way, we will also place the American case in a comparative context, addressing the vexed question of American exceptionalism as it pertains to the social sciences and liberalism. We will pay particular attention to the persistence of evangelical Christianity as a central feature of American public culture, and the strengths and weaknesses of methodological approaches rooted in intellectual history, history of science, and social sciences.
May
May 14–15
Toward a New Agenda for Multidisciplinary Research on Modern Middle Eastern History
History
Roger Owen (Middle East History, Harvard University)
Beshara Doumani RI ’08 (History, University of California at Berkeley)
The aim of the exploratory workshop is to bring together a group of international scholars to discuss the many academic and methodological implications of Martha Mundy’s new book, Governing Property, Making the Modern State: Law, Administration and Production in Ottoman Syria (2007). This pathbreaking work, which has been two decades in the making, provides for the first time a detailed and archive-based account of ways in which the Ottoman government attempted to provide individual title to the lands farmed by certain villages in what is now the northern district of Trans-Jordan. The subject of land registration, though written about quite extensively in general, has never before been treated either with such a level of theoretical sophistication or in such a locally specific way. Not the least of its many virtues is how it presents a way of thinking about the development of Middle Eastern rural property relations that should be instantly recognizable to the peoples of the region.
June
June 7–9
Christianity and Torture
Humanities
Karen King (Ecclesiastical History, Harvard Divinity School)
Sarah Sentilles (California State University Channel Islands)
Publication of the photographs from Abu Ghraib and revelations about US engagement in practices of torture have sparked a discussion across academic disciplines about the intersection between Christianity and torture. We have identified 16 scholars who have been investigating this intersection and the questions it raises. We will bring these scholars into conversation for a three-day seminar to explore how Christians have imagined and represented humiliated, violated, and suffering bodies in literature, art, and ritual. We will focus on crucifixion, torture, and martyrdom, and what the implications are for enabling or resisting practices and religiously based ideologies of torture. We have intentionally chosen scholars who are not necessarily in agreement with one another and whose positions we believe will be deepened by exchanges with other views. Prior to the seminar, each participant will be asked to write as 5–10 page essay outlining his or her initial approach to the above questions, focusing on issues of imperialism, gender, and power. The seminar will be organized around discussion of these papers. We anticipate that a set of rigorous essays will arise from the seminar to be later published as a cohesive volume.
June 11–12
Linguistic Rhythm and Literacy
Social Science
Jennifer Thomson (Harvard Graduate School of Education)
Confidence and skill in reading and spelling are crucial to success in today’s literacy-dependent society. One of the most critical research findings to impact contemporary classroom pedagogy is the relationship between phonological awareness—the ability to reflect upon and manipulate the sounds of one’s language—and reading and spelling acquisition. While this finding and the inclusion of phonological awareness in early reading programs have had a significant and positive impact, we have yet to discover the prerequisites for successful development of phonological awareness, or to identify the factors responsible for individual differences in reading that cannot be attributed to phonological awareness. Converging evidence is emerging from a cluster of interdisciplinary and international research groups that sensitivity to linguistic rhythm may be an important factor to consider, both through its role in the early development of sound sensitivity as well as its top-down role in facilitating the processing of comprehensible “chunks” of text. Through this seminar, we aim to synthesize the findings of empirical work to date and chart a systematic, collaborative program of future research.
