Meet Some Members of Our Community

Meet some valued members of our community and learn about some of their recent work.

Jennifer Adaeze Anyaegbunam, '10, Concentrator in VES

MD Candidate at the University of Virginia School of Medicine

Jennifer Adaeze Anyaegbunam ‘10 is currently a second year medical student at the University of Virginia School of Medicine.  As a premedical student at the College, Jennifer received a concentration in Film Studies from the Visual and Environmental Studies department, and a secondary concentration in Health Policy. More

Nicholas Dang, 96, Concentrator in VES

Cardiothoracic Surgeon

Nicholas Dang, '96, is a cardiothoracic surgeon practicing in Honolulu, HI.  He was a VES concentrator at Harvard, where his primary interest was in printmaking.  After graduation, he attended the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, and obtained his MD in 2000.  He then completed a general surgery residency at New York-Presbyterian Hospital-Columbia in 2007, followed by a cardiothoracic surgery fellowship at New York-Presbyterian Hospital-Cornell in 2009. More.

Glenda Carpio

Professor of English and African and African American Studies

Reassessing the meanings of "black humor" and "dark satire," Glenda Carpio’s Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery illustrates how black comedians, writers, and artists have deftly deployed various modes of comedic "conjuring"--the absurd, the grotesque, and the strategic expression of racial stereotypes--to redress not only the past injustices of slavery and racism in America but also their legacy in the present. Focusing on representations of slavery in the post-civil rights era, Carpio explores stereotypes in Richard Pryor's groundbreaking stand-up act and the outrageous comedy of Chappelle's Show to demonstrate how deeply indebted they are to the sly social criticism embedded in the profoundly ironic nineteenth-century fiction of William Wells Brown and Charles W. Chesnutt. More

Alice Randall, '81, Concentrator in English

Novelist, Musician, Food Activist

Alice Randall is the author of The Wind Done Gone, Pushkin and the Queen of Spades, Rebel Yell, and Ada's Rules.  On her way to The Wind Done Gone she became the first black woman in history to write a number one country song; wrote a video of the year; worked on multiple Johnny Cash videos and wrote and produced the pilot for a prime time drama about ex-wives of country stars that aired on CBS. Four novels later, the award winning songwriter with over twenty recorded songs to her credit is Writer-in-Residence at Vanderbilt University. She teaches courses on Country Lyric in American Culture, Soul Food as text and in text, and African-American Children’s Literature. After twenty-five years hard at it Randall has come to the conclusion motherhood is the most creative calling of all and health disparity is the dominant civil rights issue of the first quarter of the 21st century. More.

Chelsey Forbess, M.D., '07, Concentrator in Romance Languages and Literatures

Internal Medicine Resident Physician

"When I started my first year at Harvard, my philosophy was to take advantage of the resources at my fingertips and make time for my plethora of interests. I was decidedly pre-med, which was a full-time job alone. But as a creative person at my core, I always worried that medicine alone would not satisfy that defining aspect of my being. I have always been "right-brain" oriented; since I was little, I have played piano, I have sung and acted in every show possible, and I always gravitated toward learning other languages. It just so happened that I also liked science and medicine..." More.

Peter Sacks

John P. Marquand Professor of English

“From afar it looks like an Abstract Expressionist painting: a large triptych with a textured off-white surface imprinted, in part, with a floral motif and dotted with over a dozen irregular shapes—trapezoids, triangles, would-be pentagons—rising elegantly from the surface. Get up close, however, and the painting reveals itself to be an intricate collage layered with paint, fabric, lace, embroidery, wood, cardboard, and other materials. Much of the fabric comes from shrouds and shirts. Some of it looks like the gauze used to bandage wounds. Long passages from the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Enuma Elish, a Mesopotamian creation myth, and from the International Committee of the Red Cross’s ICRC 2004 report on the treatment of prisoners of war in Baghdad have been typed out onto columns of linen...” More.

James F. Rothenberg, '68, Concentrator in English

Member of the Harvard Corporation and Chairman of Capital Research

"Perhaps not for any profound reason, I chose to major in English as a Harvard undergraduate, and then went on to earn an MBA at Harvard Business School. Many people are surprised about the choice of English as a major since my career has been devoted to investment management. When I arrived at Harvard Business School, I did have considerable work to do to learn the language of business and the intricacies of accounting. But my English background provided a truly useful set of skills in written communication, but more importantly, a comfort level with ambiguities, and interpretations rather than “facts.” The humanities and the arts rarely deal with answers and certainties, but instead with logical arguments, and possible or probable outcomes. Decision-making under uncertainty is similar – judgments made prospectively about the future which inherently cannot be known..." More.

Tim O'Reilly, '75, Concentrator in Classics

Founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media

”As John Cowper Powys noted in The Meaning of Culture, culture (vs. mere education) is how you put what you’ve learned to work in your own life, seeing the world around you more deeply because of the historical, literary, artistic and philosophical resonances that current experiences evoke. Classical stories come often to my mind, and provide guides to action (much as Plutarch intended his histories of famous men to be guides to morality and action). The classics are part of my mental toolset, the context I think with..." More.

Sofia Roque Fleming, '95, Concentrator in History and Literature

Senior HR Director at Sotheby's

"I love learning.  I am curious about people – what motivates them, what it feels like to be in their shoes, what shapes their perspective on themselves, on each other, on life.   I look to the past for lessons that can be applied in the future.  And I like to be challenged. Being at Harvard, and having the freedom to choose a concentration in History and Literature ‘ticked all the boxes’, as the English say.  Studying the “Renaissance and Reformation” in Italy, France and England was a wonderful luxury – if not seemingly terribly practical.  I thrived in the variety of courses available requiring me to shift gears between languages and disciplines, and I loved contextualizing social movements and artistic expression within historical events..." More.

Grace Laubacher, '09, Concentrator in VES

Artist/Theater Designer

"At Harvard, my academic home was the screening room at the Carpenter Center, where, as a Film Studies concentrator, I examined the history and theory of cinema and the moving image. A liberal-arts enclave of the VES department, Film Studies is dedicated to the notion that films are not merely aesthetic objects, but cultural and anthropological artifacts – which have, since their invention, played a definitive role in shaping social trends, cultural norms and beliefs, and even political ideologies. My study of film was, therefore, an analysis of the way that mass media have altered the course of society and history since the early 1900s..."  More.

Lucien Castaing-Taylor

Leviathan

"Leviathan," a new film by Lucien Castaing-Taylor (VES and Anthropology) and co-director Véréna Paravel was recently described by the New York Times as "perhaps the most radical work yet to emerge from the lab and certainly the one that goes furthest in striving for an immersive cinematic experience. Shot entirely aboard a fishing trawler off the Massachusetts coast, largely with small, waterproof digital cameras that were variously tethered to the fishermen, tossed in with their dead or dying catch and plunged into the roiling ocean, the film had its premiere in competition last month at the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland, where it won the international critics' prize." It was shown at the Toronto Film Festival, in the Wavelengths section for innovative cinema and will be shown in October at the New York Film Festival.

Xiaofei Tian

Professor of Chinese Literature

The book Visionary Journeys explores the parallel and yet profoundly different ways of seeing the outside world and engaging with the foreign at two important moments of dislocation in Chinese history, namely, the early medieval period commonly known as the Northern and Southern Dynasties (317–589 CE), and the nineteenth century. Xiaofei Tian juxtaposes literary, historical, and religious materials from these two periods in comparative study, bringing them together in their unprecedentedly large-scale interactions, and their intense fascination, with foreign cultures.

Homi K. Bhabha

Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of English and American Literature and Language

Homi K. Bhabha, director of Harvard's Mahindra Humanities Center and an acclaimed post-colonial theorist, was recently awarded an honorary doctoral degree by the Department of Philosophy and Humanities of the Freie Universität Berlin.  Earlier this year, Professor Bhabha received one of India's highest civilian honors, the Padma Bhushan. The award is one of three established in 1954 by the President of India to recognize distinguished service of a high order to the nation, in any field. Bhabha won in the "Literature and Education" category.

Helen Vendler

Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor

Seamus Heaney, Denis Donoghue, William Pritchard, Marilyn Butler, Harold Bloom, and many others have praised Helen Vendler as one of the most attentive readers of poetry. In Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries, Vendler turns her illuminating skills as a critic to 150 selected poems of Emily Dickinson. As she did in The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets, she serves as an incomparable guide, considering both stylistic and imaginative features of the poems.

Robert Levin

Dwight P. Robinson, Jr. Professor of Music

Pianist Robert Levin, a passionate advocate of new music and a noted theorist and Mozart scholar, has been heard throughout the United States, Europe, Australia, and Asia, in recital, as a soloist, and in chamber concerts. In early May, he and cellist Steven Isserlis collaborated on series of events at the 92nd Street Y in New York. After a lecture-recital preview on Wednesday evening, Mr. Isserlis and Professor Levin performed all of Beethoven's works for cello and piano on Thursday and Saturday evenings.
 

"These players, pushing each other to the limit, achieved a gripping excitement seldom heard in these works from the combination of cello and modern piano."
James R. Oestreich, The New York Times

James Simpson

Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English

When we think of breaking images, we assume that it happens somewhere else. We also tend to think of iconoclasts as barbaric. Iconoclasts are people like the Taliban, who blew up Buddhist statues in 2001. Under the Hammer: Iconoclasm in the Anglo-American Tradition argues instead that iconoclasm is a central strand of Anglo-American modernity. Our horror at the destruction of art derives in part from the fact that we too did, and still do, that. This is most obviously true of England's iconoclastic century between 1538 and 1643. And once started, iconoclasm is difficult to stop. It ripples through cultures, into the psyche, and it ripples through history.

Stephen Greenblatt

John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities

Stephen Greenblatt was recently awarded the 2011 National Book Award for Nonfiction for "The Swerve: How The World Became Modern." The book, both an innovative work of history and a thrilling story of discovery, chronicles how one manuscript - an ancient Roman epic by Lucretius - plucked from a thousand years of neglect, changed the course of human thought, fueled the Renaissance, inspired great minds from Galileo to Freud, and helped make possible the world as we know it.

Maria Polinsky

Professor of Linguistics

At the Polinsky Language Sciences Lab at Harvard University, language diversity meets cognitive science. Researchers in the lab study the ways in which people use and process language in real time. The lab has a strong cross-linguistic focus, drawing upon English, Russian, Chinese, Korean, Mayan languages, Basque, Austronesian languages, languages of the Caucasus, and others. One of the major research areas in the lab is in heritage languages and their speakers—people who learned a minority language in childhood but later switched to another, societally dominant language.

Tom Conley

Abbot Lawrence Lowell Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies and of Romance Languages and Literatures

An Errant Eye studies how topography, the art of describing local space and place, developed literary and visual form in early modern France. Arguing for a "new poetics of space" ranging throughout French Renaissance poetry, prose, and cartography, Tom Conley performs dazzling readings of maps, woodcuts, and poems to plot a topographical shift in the late Renaissance.

Doris Sommer

Ira and Jewell Williams Professor of Romance languages and Literatures and African and African American Studies

The Cultural Agents Initiative explores and promotes the arts and humanities as social resources. In courses and individual projects, students learn from philosophers and from a range of creative professionals that art is a feature of active citizenship. Art is also fundamental to effective innovation in everything from medicine and law to political leadership and business. With a long humanistic tradition dedicated to civic development, and thanks to contemporary mentors who show how the challenges of scarcity violence, and disease respond to art and interpretation, Cultural Agents links creativity with service.

Werner Sollors

Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English Literature and Professor of African and African American Studies

"[A New Literary History of America] is a vast, inquisitive, richly surprising and consistently enlightening wallow in our national history and culture...Neither reference nor criticism, neither history nor treatise, but a genre-defying, transcendent fusion of them all... Inevitable, necessary and profoundly welcome..." Laura Miller, Salon.

Alina Payne

Professor of the History of Art and Architecture

From Ornament to Object, one of four new books authored in the past year by Alina Payne, identifies a shift of interest from ornament to objects (increasingly understood as the DNA of culture), and argues for a new understanding of the genealogy of architectural modernism. The Telescope and the Compass, examines the relationship between architecture and science in the age of Galileo, while Teofilo Gallaccini, Writings presents the inedited manuscripts of an early modern Italian scientist and art critic.

P. Oktor Skjaervo

Aga Khan Professor of Iranian

As one of the world's great religions, Zoroastrianism has a heritage rich in texts and cultic practices. The texts are often markedly difficult to translate, but in The Spirit of Zoroastrianism, Prods Oktor Skjærvø, professor of ancient Iranian languages and culture at Harvard, provides modern and accurate translations of Zoroastrian texts that have been selected to provide an overview of Zoroastrian beliefs and practices.

Stephen A. Mitchell

Professor of Scandinavian and Folklore

In Witchcraft and Magic in the Middle Ages, Stephen A. Mitchell offers the fullest examination available of witchcraft in late medieval Scandinavia. By examining witches, wizards, and seeresses in literature, lore, and law, as well as surviving charm magic directed toward love, prophecy, health, and weather, Mitchell provides a portrait of both the practitioners of medieval Nordic magic and its performance.

Sean Kelly

Professor of Philosophy

Re-envisioning modern spiritual life through their examination of literature, philosophy, and religious testimony, Sean Kelly and his collaborator, Hubert Dreyfus, unearth ancient sources of meaning, and teach us how to rediscover the sacred, shining things that surround us every day. All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age will change the way we understand our culture, our history, our sacred practices, and ourselves. It offers a new--and very old--way to celebrate and be grateful for our existence in the modern world.