For his graduate work at Harvard, GSAS student Emilio Vavarella had his mother make him again. At the center of his year-long performance piece, Genesis , she weaves a fabric on a Jacquard loom—considered to be one of the first computers of history—...

As a young film scholar, Raymond De Luca, PhD ’22 casts his gaze on the old Soviet Union, exploring the ways that filmmakers portrayed animals while building a communist culture—and probing the animal-human divide. In so doing, he offers insight into how humans perceive distinctions between themselves and animals—and how those perceptions can be challenged.

Alumna Joana Pimenta researches the art of the moving image—what it is, its history, and its use in modernity—while creating motion pictures of her own that critique, provoke, and illuminate the ways we think and live.

At age 89, poetry scholar Helen Vendler, PhD '60, reflects on the poetic form, its ability to confer a kind of immortality, and why the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor Emerita calls herself a critic rather than a scholar.

In this episode of the Harvard Horizons podcast, Braganza explains how the secret letters of Mary, Queen of Scots, written in code, upend our notions of the doomed royal as a woman with no agency, swept under by a powerful leader and the currents of history.

In this episode of the Harvard Horizons podcast, recent PhD graduate Hannah Cohen sheds light on the work of these craftspeople through a look at one of the century's most arresting works of art: Shibboleth , an installation that involved cracking the foundation of London's massive Tate Modern museum.

2022 GSAS graduate Nikhita Obeegadoo explores the way that contemporary authors often present the perspectives of oppressed and exploited migrants through the lens of oceanic ecology and materiality.

In her doctoral dissertation, “Imagined Histories: Hellenistic Libraries and the Idea of Greece,” recent graduate Alexandra Schultz pushes back against the longstanding narrative of Hellenistic libraries as established, maintained, and used solely by wealthy, “great men.” In doing so, she hopes to shake up the way that scholars look at the history of knowledge.

Graduating student Henry Stoll’s PhD dissertation, “The Unsung Revolution: The Music of Haitian Independence, 1804–1820,” argues that much of early Haitian music followed French traditions, highlighting the difference between European Enlightenment ideals and the real-world treatment of colonies.

As a PhD student in German language and literature at Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Rebecca Stewart explores the art and thought of Friedrich Schiller with fresh eyes, finding in his work a trenchant critique of power and a championing of the marginalized.