Welcome to HMSC Connects! where we go behind the scenes of four Harvard museums to explore the connections between us, our big, beautiful world, and even what lies beyond. For this week's episode, host Jennifer Berglund is speaking with Wendel White, a photographer, educator, cultural worker, and the 2021 recipient of the Peabody Museum's Robert Ga…

What would Nietzsche say… about today’s divisive issues and debates? I spoke with Glenn Wallis, author of the new book, Nietzsche Now!, on how the Great Immoralist guides us in understanding democracy, identity, civilization, consciousness, religion, and other urgent topics of our time. Wallis identifies six guiding principles in Nietzsche’s work t…

Welcome to HMSC Connects! where we go behind the scenes of four Harvard museums to explore the connections between us, our big, beautiful world, and even what lies beyond. For this week's episode, host Jennifer Berglund is speaking with Don Pfister, a professor at Harvard and a curator of the Farlow Reference Library and Herbarium of Cryptogamic Bo…

What does it mean to be human? What do we know about the true history of humankind? In this episode, I spoke with historian and NYU professor Stefanos Geroulanos to discuss his new book, The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins (Liveright, 2024) to discover how claims about the earliest humans and humankin…

Welcome to HMSC Connects! where we go behind the scenes of four Harvard museums to explore the connections between us, our big, beautiful world, and even what lies beyond. For this week's episode, host Jennifer Berglund is speaking with S. D. Biju, a biologist and professor in the Environmental Studies Department at the University of Delhi, who is …

Welcome to HMSC Connects! where we go behind the scenes of four Harvard museums to explore the connections between us, our big, beautiful world, and even what lies beyond. For this week's episode, host Jennifer Berglund is speaking with Adam Aja, the Chief Curator at the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East or HMANE. On March 15, 2024, HMANE wil…

Welcome to HMSC Connects! where we go behind the scenes of four Harvard museums to explore the connections between us, our big, beautiful world, and even what lies beyond. For this week’s episode host Jennifer Berglund is speaking with Caroline Fernald, HMSC's new Executive Director.By Harvard Museums of Science & Culture

Welcome to HMSC Connects! where we go behind the scenes of four Harvard museums to explore the connections between us, our big, beautiful world, and even what lies beyond. For this week’s episode host Jennifer Berglund is speaking with Elizabeth Solinga, the new Administrative Director of the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture.…

Welcome to HMSC Connects! where we go behind the scenes of four Harvard museums to explore the connections between us, our big, beautiful world, and even what lies beyond. For this week’s episode host Jennifer Berglund is speaking with Adam Baldinger, the Curatorial Associate and Collections Manager of Invertebrate Zoology here at the Museum of Com…

A century ago, journalist H. L. Mencken provocatively stated in Notes On Democracy (new edition by Warbler Press, 2023) that anti-democratic behavior is not only not shocking but that we should in fact expect democracies to give rise to un- and even anti-democratic forces. Mencken doubted that such the evils of democracy will be cured by more democ…

Welcome to HMSC Connects! where we go behind the scenes of four Harvard museums to explore the connections between us, our big, beautiful world, and even what lies beyond. For this week’s episode host Jennifer Berglund is speaking with Stephanie Mach, the curator of North American Collections at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. She …

Welcome to HMSC Connects! where we go behind the scenes of four Harvard museums to explore the connections between us, our big, beautiful world, and even what lies beyond. For this week’s episode host Jennifer Berglund is speaking with Hannah Marcus, a professor in Harvard's History of Science Department, and the new Faculty Director of the Collect…

Welcome to HMSC Connects! where we go behind the scenes of four Harvard museums to explore the connections between us, our big, beautiful world, and even what lies beyond. For this week’s episode host Jennifer Berglund is speaking with Aaron Gluck-Thaler, and Carolyn Bailey, PhD candidates in the History of Science and Visual Studies Departments at…

Welcome to HMSC Connects! where we go behind the scenes of four Harvard museums to explore the connections between us, our big, beautiful world, and even what lies beyond. For this week’s episode host Jennifer Berglund speaks with Dustin Johnson, a member of and Cultural Program Manager for the Gitxaała Nation, and Kara Schneiderman, the Peabody's …

Welcome to HMSC Connects! where we go behind the scenes of four Harvard museums to explore the connections between us, our big, beautiful world, and even what lies beyond. For this week’s episode host, Jennifer Berglund is speaking with Shoyo Sato, an Invertebrate Biologist who just finished his Ph.D. at Harvard. Shoyo is an old friend to HMSC. He'…

Welcome to HMSC Connects! where we go behind the scenes of four Harvard museums to explore the connections between us, our big, beautiful world, and even what lies beyond. For this week’s episode host, Jennifer Berglund is speaking with Abbie Sandoval-Focil, a bilingual museum educator at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology, as well as Mi…

Welcome to HMSC Connects! where we go behind the scenes of four Harvard museums to explore the connections between us, our big, beautiful world, and even what lies beyond. HMSC is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year! A lot has changed over 10 years. It's been quite the journey, but we've been guided with grace by two Executive Directors. Fir…

Celebrated, censored, canceled: Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn cannot be avoided. William Faulkner called Twain “the father of American literature.” Toni Morrison explained that “the brilliance of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is that it is the argument it raises…. The cyclical attempts to remove the novel from classrooms extend Jim’s…

Welcome to HMSC Connects! where we go behind the scenes of four Harvard museums to explore the connections between us, our big, beautiful world, and even what lies beyond. For this week’s episode host, Jennifer Berglund is speaking with Ilisa Barbash, the curator of Visual Anthropology for the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology, and a docume…

State censorship and cancel culture, trigger warnings and safe spaces, pseudoscience, First Amendment hardball, as well as orthodoxy and groupthink: universities remain a site for important battles in the culture wars. What is the larger meaning of these debates? Are American universities at risk of conceding to mobs and cuddled “snowflake” student…

Why read the Classics, and how to do it best? Louis Petrich teaches at St. John’s College, the third-oldest college and “the nation's most contrarian college” (according to the New York Times, meant as a compliment). St. John’s takes a remarkable approach to the liberal arts: students and teachers read and discuss 3,000 years of Great Books over fo…

Welcome to HMSC Connects! where we go behind the scenes of four Harvard museums to explore the connections between us, our big, beautiful world, and even what lies beyond. For this week’s episode host, Jennifer Berglund is speaking with Donald Sanders, an archaeologist and architect who compiled and published the life's work of Theresa Goell, a 20t…

What Is to Be Done? In her luminous biography Emma Goldman: Revolution as a Way of Life (Yale UP, 2011), Vivian Gornick brings us back to this question, originally made by Lenin after a novel which suggests that in order to achieve egalitarianism and sexual liberation, revolutionaries have to live “as though hunted:” no romance, no sex, no friends,…

Welcome to HMSC Connects! where we go behind the scenes of four Harvard museums to explore the connections between us, our big, beautiful world, and even what lies beyond. For this week’s episode host, Jennifer Berglund is speaking with Peabody Archaeologist Jenny Carballo.By Harvard Museums of Science & Culture

Welcome to HMSC Connects! where we go behind the scenes of four Harvard museums to explore the connections between us, our big, beautiful world, and even what lies beyond. For this week’s episode host, Jennifer Berglund is speaking with Professor Scott Edwards, the Curator of Ornithology for the Museum of Comparative Zoology, and the Department Cha…

Virginia Woolf’s 1938 provocative and polemical essay Three Guineas presents the iconic writer’s views on war, women, and the way the patriarchy at home oppresses women in ways that resemble those of fascism abroad. Two great Woolf experts, Professor Anne Fernald, editor of two editions of Mrs. Dalloway which she movingly discusses on another Think…

Welcome to HMSC Connects! where we go behind the scenes of four Harvard museums to explore the connections between us, our big, beautiful world, and even what lies beyond. For this week’s episode host, Jennifer Berglund is speaking with diorama maker, artist, geologist, and all-around renaissance man, Terry Chase.…

Roosevelt Montás is Senior Lecturer in American Studies and English at Columbia University. A specialist in Antebellum American literature and culture and in American citizenship, he focuses mainly on the history, meaning, and future of liberal education. This question motivates his book Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Wh…

Welcome to HMSC Connects! where we go behind the scenes of four Harvard museums to explore the connections between us, our big, beautiful world, and even what lies beyond. For this week’s episode host Jennifer Berglund is speaking with Peter Der Manuelian, a professor of Egyptology and the Director of the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East. Pe…

Welcome to HMSC Connects! where we go behind the scenes of four Harvard museums to explore the connections between us, our big, beautiful world, and even what lies beyond. For this week’s episode host Jennifer Berglund is speaking with Breda Zimkus, the Director of Collections Operations at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology. She coordinates…

Welcome to HMSC Connects! where we go behind the scenes of four Harvard museums to explore the connections between us, our big, beautiful world, and even what lies beyond. For this week’s episode host Jennifer Berglund is speaking with Davíd Carrasco, a professor in the Harvard Department of Anthropology as well as the Harvard Divinity School, wher…

Welcome to HMSC Connects! where we go behind the scenes of four Harvard museums to explore the connections between us, our big, beautiful world, and even what lies beyond. For this week’s episode host Jennifer Berglund is speaking with Keith Ellenbogen, an underwater wildlife photographer, Associate Professor of Photography at SUNY, the Fashion Ins…

Hannah Arendt said that she had one life-long “best friend.” That was Rachel Varnhagen, a Jewish woman who lived in Enlightenment-era Berlin around 1800 and died 73 years before Arendt was born, in 1906. Arendt wrote her first book, a startlingly original literary biography of Varnhagen who founded one of the most celebrated yet short-lived salons …

Welcome to HMSC Connects! where we go behind the scenes of four Harvard museums to explore the connections between us, our big, beautiful world, and even what lies beyond. For this week’s episode host Jennifer Berglund is speaking with Annewies Van Den Hoek, a retired Greek language professor at the Harvard Divinity School, who's been spending her …

Halfway through Mrs Dalloway, Septimus Smith mutters to himself: "Communication is health; communication is happiness, communication.” It’s easy to write off his message that communication is vital for human existence. He’s a shell-shocked World War I vet, who, in this moment, hallucinates that the birds are communicating with him in grief. But in …

Welcome to HMSC Connects! where we go behind the scenes of four Harvard museums to explore the connections between us, our big, beautiful world, and even what lies beyond. For this week’s episode host Jennifer Berglund is speaking with Richard Ketchen, a horologist, or artisan who makes and repairs clocks.…

Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination is a must-read for anyone interested in American literature and in the formation of American identity in general. In her short, incisive book, Nobel-prize winner Morrison explores the ways in which canonical authors like Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Willa C…

Welcome to HMSC Connects! where we go behind the scenes of four Harvard museums to explore the connections between us, our big, beautiful world, and even what lies beyond. For this week’s episode host Jennifer Berglund is speaking with Mrs. Yvonne Grovner, a resident of Sapelo Island, Georgia, and Master basketmaker, whose talents are featured in t…

Welcome to HMSC Connects! where we go behind the scenes of four Harvard museums to explore the connections between us, our big, beautiful world, and even what lies beyond. For this week’s episode host Jennifer Berglund is speaking with Andy Knoll, a now emeritus professor of earth sciences and biology, with dual appointments in the Department of Or…

When first published in 1926, Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises changed American literature forever. Hemingway follows a disillusioned group of expats in post-World War I Europe whose relationships unravel as they travel from Paris to the bullfights in Spain. Unsettling, provocative, and inspiring to this day, this legendary novel about loyalty…

Welcome to HMSC Connects! where we go behind the scenes of four Harvard museums to explore the connections between us, our big, beautiful world, and even what lies beyond. For this week’s very special episode HMSC's Executive Director, Brenda Tindal, interviews none other than our usual host, Jennifer Berglund, HMSC exhibit and content developer. T…

Secretly his unconscious body, still flickering with life, is spirited away by to an island monastery in the Venetian lagoon where he recovers his health and joie de vivre. From there he begins a series of adventures that include Auguste Rodin, a romance with an English aristocrat, a new lover, a session with Sigmund Freud, and an heroic death. I s…

Welcome to HMSC Connects! where we go behind the scenes of four Harvard museums to explore the connections between us, our big, beautiful world, and even what lies beyond. For this week’s episode host Jennifer Berglund delves into the collaboration behind the upcoming exhibit "In Search of Thoreau's Flowers," opening at the Harvard Museum of Natura…

Welcome to HMSC Connects! where we go behind the scenes of four Harvard museums to explore the connections between us, our big, beautiful world, and even what lies beyond. Our women’s history month-themed podcast interview features Stephanie Pierce, Professor in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, and the Museum of Comparative Zo…

Welcome to HMSC Connects! where we go behind the scenes of four Harvard museums to explore the connections between us, our big, beautiful world, and even what lies beyond. In this episode host Jennifer Berglund and guest Sarah Clunis, the Director of Academic Partnerships for the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, and the new curator of t…

For the first HMSC Connects! podcast of 2022, host Jennifer Berglund speaks with the Harvard Museums of Science & Culture’s new Executive Director, Brenda Tindal, reflecting on Brenda’s first six months, the current state of the museums, and the significance of the upcoming 10th anniversary of HMSC.By Harvard Museums of Science & Culture

James Joyce’s 1914 collection of fifteen short stories, Dubliners, is righty considered one of the greatest literary achievements of Western modernity. But what is so original about these stories that begin with childhood, cover adolescence and adult choices, and conclude with a deeply moving reflection on our mortality? What life-changing experien…

Welcome to HMSC Connects! where Jennifer Berglund goes behind the scenes of four Harvard museums to explore the connections between us, our big, beautiful world, and even what lies beyond. This week Jennifer Berglund is speaking with Julia Szejnblum, the former coordinator of the Escúchame/Hear Me Out project at the Harvard Museums of Science & Cul…

“The good life” and “the American Dream “remain powerful animating principles in popular culture, politics, and also our individual psyches. I spoke with Professor Dora Zhang at the University of California at Berkeley who teaches a course on “the good life,” using mostly literary rather than philosophical texts. From Sophokles’s Antigone (441 B.C.…

Charlie Louth’s illuminating recent book, Rilke: The Life of the Work (Oxford University Press, 2021) examines why Rilke’s poems have exercised such preternatural attraction for now several generations of readers. The early 20th century German-language poet captured the experience of European culture irrevocably lurching into modernity, where an en…