Newsmakers | Winter 2020

Fellow Wins Nobel Prize

Michael Kremer ’85, PhD ’92, RI ’14 can add one very impressive achievement to his CV: the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2019, which he shares with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Abhijit Banerjee AM ’88, PhD ’88 and Esther Duflo. The prize was awarded “for their experimental approach to alleviating world poverty,” said the Royal Swedish Academy of Science in its citation.

In their joint work, the three economists introduced a rigorous, practical, and incremental approach to tackling global poverty. They break down large social problems, such as deficiencies in education and child health, into smaller components and then determine the most efficient solutions through targeted field experiments. 

“It can often seem like the problems of global poverty are intractable, but over the course of my lifetime and career, the fraction of the world’s people living in poverty has dropped dramatically,” Kremer told the Harvard Gazette. “Over the years, we have learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t work, and why. Governments and nonprofit organizations have become much more effective in addressing [these problems], and there is much wider recognition of how researchers and policymakers can work together in the fight against poverty.”

Kremer, who spent his year as the Katherine Hampson Bessell Fellow at the Institute studying health issues around water in developing countries and determining strategies for combating them, is the Gates Professor of Developing Societies in the Department of Economics at Harvard.

Honor Roll

Francine Berman RI ’20, the Katherine Hampson Bessell Fellow at Radcliffe and the Edward P. Hamilton Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, has won the 2020 Paul Evan Peters Award from the Coalition for Networked Information, the Association of Research Libraries, and EDUCAUSE. Berman was nominated for the award by her peers in the information science community in recognition of her leadership in digital data stewardship, preservation, and cyberinfrastructure.

Steffani Jemison RI ’18 has received a 2020 Creative Capital award for her performance and video project In Succession.

With his coauthor Sarah Fine EdM ’13, EdD ’17, Jal Mehta ’99, AM ’02, PhD ’06, RI ’17 has won the 2020 Grawemeyer Award in Education for In Search of Deeper Learning: The Quest to Remake the American High School (Harvard University Press, 2019). The book explores how schools might move away from rote learning and standardized testing to produce more critical thinkers. Mehta is a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. 

Evie Shockley RI ’19 has been honored with the 2019 Lannan Literary Award for Poetry. She is a professor of English at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, and the author of, most recently, the award-winning semiautomatic (Wesleyan University Press, 2017).

Irene Pepperberg AM ’71, PhD ’76, RI ’05 received the 2020 Comparative Cognition Society Research Award, which honors scientists who have made major contributions to the understanding of animal cognition. She will give a master lecture at the 27th International Conference on Comparative Cognition. 

Margaret Atwood AM ’62 is a cowinner of the 2019 Booker Prize for her novel The Testaments (Nan A. Talese, 2019), the sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale (Houghton Mifflin, 1986). She shares the prize with Bernardine Evaristo, the author of Girl, Woman, Other (Hamish Hamilton, 2019). In awarding the prize for two books, the Booker judges disregarded the single-winner rule they instituted in 1992.

Alison Lingane ’93, a cofounder of Project Equity, was elected a 2019 Ashoka Fellow for her work to produce quality jobs by creating more employee-owned businesses. Ashoka is a global network focused on social entrepreneurship and organizing for change.

At the national meeting of the American Musicological Society (AMS) this past fall, it was announced that Daniel M. Callahan RI ’20, this year’s Beatrice Shepherd Blane Fellow, won both the 2019 Alfred Einstein Award and the 2019 Philip Brett Award for his article “The Gay Divorce of Music and Dance: Choreomusicality and the Early Works of Cage-Cunningham,” published in the Journal of the American Musicological Society (Summer 2018). Braxton D. Shelley RI ’20—a Stanley A. Marks and William H. Marks Assistant Professor at the Radcliffe Institute and an assistant professor of music in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences—presented his paper “Musical Ontology in the Gospel Imagination” at the same meeting. Margot Fassler RI ’20, an honorary member of the AMS, chaired the committee for the inaugural Early Music Award. Carolyn Abbate RI ’07, the Paul and Catherine Buttenwieser University Professor at Harvard and also an honorary member, delivered the president’s plenary lecture.  

Hala Zreiqat RI ’17, a professor at the University of Sydney, earned the 2019 ANSTO Eureka Prize for Innovative Use of Technology for her team’s development of synthetic biomaterials capable of healing large bone defects. The Australian Museum’s Eureka Prizes are known as the country’s “science Oscars.”

In 2019, Tanisha C. Ford RI ’19 landed on The Root 100, an annual list of influential African Americans aged 25 to 45. “For Ford, fashion isn’t just about how we look—she knows that what we wear is both personal and political,” says The Root, which reports on black news, opinions, politics, and culture. The online publication placed Ford alongside such household names as Ta-Nehisi Coates, Beyoncé Knowles-Carter, Meghan Markle, and Serena Williams. Kwame Brathwaite: Black Is Beautiful (Aperture, 2019), coauthored by Ford, was included in the Conde Nast Traveler article “The Coffee Table Books to Give (and Keep) This Year.”

Biologist Earns Prize for Insect Insights

The Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) named Naomi Pierce PhD ’83, BI ’90, RI ’06 the winner of its 2019 International Prize for Biology. Pierce—the Hessel Professor of Biology in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University and the curator of lepidoptera at the Museum of Comparative Zoology—studies the ecology and evolution of species interactions, specifically symbiotic relationships between insects and other organisms.

“Scientists typically become ever more specialized and narrow over the course of their careers: their focus may start with a single species, and culminate with a single gene in that species,” said a statement of recognition from the JSPS. “What is notable about Dr. Pierce, in contrast, is the way in which her work is inspired by and directed by her interest in natural history, resulting in an ever-expanding range of study species, biological systems and scientific technologies.”

Pierce accepted her award during a commemorative symposium, “Biological Sciences Related to Insect Sociality and Symbiosis,” held late last year in Tokyo.

Inklings 

Lauren Groff RI ’19 kicked off a new fiction initiative at the Atlantic with her short story “Birdie.” The periodical has recently recommitted to publishing original fiction.

Elizabeth Wurtzel ’89, who sparked a new age of confessional memoir with Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America (Houghton Mifflin, 1994), died in January at age 52 from metastatic breast cancer. “Lizzie’s literary genius rests not just in her acres of quotable one-liners, but in her invention of what was really a new form, which has more or less replaced literary fiction,” the writer David Samuels told the New York Times.

Manisha Sinha RI ’20, a Mellon-Schlesinger Fellow, drew parallels between the current president and Andrew Johnson in her New York Times opinion article “Donald Trump, Meet Your Precursor.” (Subsequently, she appeared on a number of radio programs and podcasts to comment on presidential impeachment.) Sinha also contributed the Wall Street Journal Saturday Essay “The Long History of American Slavery Reparations.”

In the afterword to her recent work “Barbara Forever,” the artist Every Ocean Hughes RI ’20 describes how she came to collaborate with the late filmmaker Barbara Hammer RI ’02 (who died on March 16, 2019, of ovarian cancer) over the last few months of Hammer’s life. “My conviction to speak with Barbara, to interfere in her waning days, came from my knowledge of her personality—I knew she would want to share, and I knew we could be frank, bold, and bare about it,” Hughes says. “Barbara Forever” was published as part of her artist-at-large residency at Camden Arts Centre, in London. As the Mary I. Bunting Institute Fellow at Radcliffe, Hughes has continued her line of research with her project “Queer Death: A Theater of Unsolved Problems.” 

Zadie Smith RI ’03 explored her attachment to fiction as an art form in “Fascinated to Presume: In Defense of Fiction,” in the New York Review of Books: “I was an equal-opportunity voyeur. I wanted to know what it was like to be everybody.” Earlier, in British Vogue, she turned her eye outward, observing differences in how people sartorially express themselves on opposite sides of the Atlantic. In “Zadie Smith on Her Markedly Different Style in London Versus New York,” she writes, “My own truest self-conception in clothes—pyjamas—is of course best kept off the streets.”

An opinion piece by Jacob S. Hacker ’94, GSAJF ’02, RI ’19, “Elizabeth Warren Is Asking the Most Important Question on Health Care,” appeared in the New York Times this past fall. “She has managed to outline a plan that could, in theory, finance generous universal care without a middle-class tax increase,” the Yale University political scientist said of Elizabeth Warren RI ’02.

Katherine Turk RI ’19 contributed the opinion piece “The Supreme Court Must Extend the Civil Rights Act’s Protections to LGBTQ Employees” to the Washington Post. Turk is an associate professor of history and an adjunct associate professor of women’s and gender studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Todne Thomas RI ’20, a Suzanne Young Murray Professor at the Radcliffe Institute and an assistant professor of African American religions at Harvard Divinity School, published an article in Faithfully Magazine titled “White Evangelical Support of Trump Makes Perfect Sense When You Examine the History of the Christian Right.” “Evangelical family values were never solely concerned with ‘the family,’” she writes. “Rather, the program of family values is a politically acceptable umbrella to address a number of gender, sexual, racial, and class concerns.”  

A Boston Globe front-page article—“Anti-ageism Activists Bristle at Julián Castro’s Question to Joe Biden: ‘Are You Forgetting What You Said 2 Minutes Ago?’”—quoted Margaret Morganroth Gullette ’62, PhD ’75, BI ’87 among its ageism experts. She is a resident scholar at Brandeis University’s Women’s Studies Research Center and the author of Ending Ageism, or How Not to Shoot Old People (Rutgers University Press, 2017).

Alexandra D. Lahav JD ’98, RI ’20, the Matina S. Horner Distinguished Visiting Professor at Radcliffe and a professor at the University of Connecticut School of Law, was quoted by several news outlets in connection with multidistrict litigation around the opioid crisis. NPR, the New York Times, Reuters, and the Washington Post sought her expertise as they reported on these huge cases.

In 1977, Ruth I. Abrams ’53, LLB ’56 became the first woman to sit on the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, appointed by Governor Michael Dukakis. For two decades, she remained the only woman on the bench. Her death this past September, at age 88, from complications of heart disease, was noted by the Boston Globe, the New York Times, and WBUR.  

The Quanta Magazine article “Long-Lived Stellar Blast Kindles Hope of a Supernova We’ve Never Seen Before” covered a finding by Edo Berger RI ’20, the Mildred Londa Weisman Fellow, and his team. They recently published a paper about SN 2016iet: a supermassive supernova—called a pair-instability supernova—that explodes so completely that not even a black hole remains. 

The work of David Gruber RI ’18, a marine biologist at the City University of New York, was featured in the New York Times, in “A Robot With Noodle-like Fingers Helps Handle Soft Jellyfish.” Gruber and his team of engineers are developing undersea robots tough enough to withstand the ocean yet gentle enough to trap fragile invertebrates without harming them.

Lewis Hyde RI ’14 reframed a portion of his recent book, A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), to address current events in the New York Times opinion piece “How Nationalism Can Destroy a Nation.” Also, a documentary inspired by Hyde’s The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (Random House, 1983) hit theaters this past fall. 

A Complicated Legacy

A number of Radcliffe-affiliated writers have taken part in the New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project, which marks the 400th anniversary of slavery in America.

“Feb. 12, 1793” is a redacted poem by Reginald Dwayne Betts RI ’12. Tiya Miles ’92, a Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at the Institute, penned a short historical meditation, “The Enslaved Pecan Pioneer.” A short story by ZZ Packer RI ’15, “July 30, 1866,” was inspired by the New Orleans Massacre of 1866. Khalil Gibran Muhammad RI ’17, RI ’20, a Suzanne Young Murray Professor at Radcliffe, examined the West Indies sugar trade in “The Sugar That Saturates the American Diet Has a Barbaric History as the ‘White Gold’ That Fueled Slavery.” Muhammad also appeared on “Episode 5: The Land of Our Fathers, Part 2” of the 1619 podcast. 

Annette Gordon-Reed JD ’84, RI ’12, RI ’13, RI ’14, RI ’16, who spent four fellowship semesters as a Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at Radcliffe, helped conceptualize
the project.

Shelf Life 

Rachel Conrad ’83, a professor of childhood studies at Hampshire College, has published Time for Childhoods: Young Poets and Questions of Agency (University of Massachusetts Press, 2020). The interdisciplinary study considers what poems composed by children have to offer to the greater literary culture—and argues that these works should be regarded as more than juvenilia.

In Broke: Hardship and Resilience in a City of Broken Promises (St. Martin’s Press, 2019), Jodie Adams Kirshner ’99—a research professor at New York University—follows seven Detroit residents after the city’s bankruptcy in 2013. In a starred review, Kirkus called the book a “significant work of social sciences and urban studies.” 

With Chip Colwell, Lindsay M. Montgomery RI ’20, Radcliffe’s Hrdy Fellow, has published Objects of Survivance: A Material History of the American Indian School Experience (University Press of Colorado, 2019). The authors use the Denver Museum of Nature & Science’s Jesse H. Bratley Collection—a visual and material archive that contains nearly 500 photographs and 1,000 objects—as a lens through which to investigate the history and legacy of Native American education across the American West.

Sally Dawidoff ’86 has published the poetry collection Talking to Yourself Is Fine (CavanKerry Press, 2019), which explores a father’s schizophrenia and its impact on his daughter. Dawidoff, who teaches writing in New York City and has produced work across genres, including a stage adaptation of a novel and a song cycle, is affiliated with the Urban Range poetry collective.

Sibyl Moholy-Nagy: Architecture, Modernism and Its Discontents (Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2019), by Hilde Heynen RI ’08, is an intellectual biography of the influential architectural historian and critic. The book, which was also published in German by Sandstein, is the culmination of Heynen’s fellowship project. 

Ellery Akers ’67 has published her third poetry collection, Swerve: Environmentalism, Feminism, and Resistance (Blue Light Press, 2020). “In the world we are in now, and in the harrowing world to come, we need poems as guides, and as resistance to the forces that would corrupt and diminish us,” said Joseph Stroud in advance praise. “Swerve is a book that confronts the primary issues of the 21st century with insight and candor, along with hope and courage.”  

Mating in Captivity: A Memoir (She Writes Press, 2018), by Helen Zuman ’98, chronicles the author’s five post-Harvard years at the Zendik Farm commune, a cult with a radical take on sex and relationships. Kirkus included the book in its “Best Indie Memoirs of 2018”—“Her whip-smart prose . . . conveys the squalid exuberance of Zendik’s blend of idealism and fraud,” says the publication in a starred review—and it was a finalist for a 2019 Firecracker Award in creative nonfiction. 

Felon: Poems (W. W. Norton, 2019) is the third collection from Reginald Dwayne Betts RI ’12 (see page 26). “Poets tell various kinds of down-and-out stories about being rescued by their vocations, but Betts’s is among the most amazing I have ever heard,” wrote Dan Chiasson in “Reginald Dwayne Betts’s Poetry after Prison,” which appeared in the New Yorker.

Eve M. Kahn ’84 dove into rediscovered correspondence, journals, and paintings—which turned up in a Connecticut boathouse in 2012—to write Forever Seeing New Beauties: The Forgotten Impressionist Mary Rogers Williams, 1857–1907 (Wesleyan University Press, 2019). The biography reacquaints the public with a once-celebrated artist who fell into obscurity after her death from abdominal cancer at age 50.

Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019), by Adrienne Brodeur RPC ’95, explores the author’s complicated relationship with her mother. The debut memoir landed on a number of “best of” lists and earned starred reviews from Library Journal and Publishers Weekly.

Passeggiate (Arrowsmith Press, 2019) is the newest poetry collection by Judith Baumel ’77, a professor of English and the founding director of the Creative Writing Program at Adelphi University. 

A Door in the Earth (Little, Brown and Company, 2019) is the second novel by Amy Waldman RI ’07, who has reported from Afghanistan for the New York Times. The book follows the unintended consequences of a young woman’s return to Afghanistan, the country of her birth, to engage in philanthropic work. “Waldman delivers a breathtaking and achingly nuanced examination of the grays in a landscape where black and white answers have long been the only currency,” says Kirkus in a starred review. “A bone-chilling takedown of America’s misguided use of soft power.”

Martha Collins BI ’83 has published Because What Else Could I Do (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), a collection of poems that she addressed to her husband, Ted, in the months following his death. “This small book urgently and unflinchingly captures the shock and reverberation of unexpected grief,” says Booklist.

Perdita Buchan ’62, BI ’74 has published The Carousel Carver (Plexus Publishing, 2019), a historical novel that follows an immigrant carver during the early- 20th-century height of the craft. This is Buchan’s third novel.

In The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America’s Broken Education System—and How to Fix It (Avery, 2019), Natalie Wexler ’76 shadows elementary school students and their teachers through the course of a year to reveal the system’s curricular failures. In a starred review, Library Journal says the book is “essential reading for teachers, education administrators, and policymakers alike.” 

Erika Dreifus ’91, EdM ’93, AM ’95, PhD ’99 has published her first poetry collection, Birthright (Kelsay Books, 2019). Says Jewish Journal, “Birthright is exceptionally rich and provocative, earnest and intimate, fully as accessible as an overheard conversation and yet deeply rooted in both Jewish history and Jewish arts and letters.”

In Paris, 7 A.M. (Simon & Schuster, 2019), Liza Wieland ’81 draws inspiration from three missing weeks in the diaries of Elizabeth Bishop to fictionalize the poet’s travels in France just before World War II. Says Booklist, “Wieland’s prose is simultaneously poetic and sparse, much like Bishop’s poems. 

Wendy Doniger ’62, AM ’63, PhD ’68 tells the story of her parents’ beginnings in Europe and their subsequent life on Long Island in The Donigers of Great Neck: A Mythologized Memoir (Brandeis University Press, 2019). “Whether factual or mythological, it’s a story, driven by passion, tension and an engaging voice, that ultimately renders the Donigers vivid on the page,” says the New York Times.

Data Feminism (MIT Press, 2020), by Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein ’00, offers a new way of thinking about data science. The book—which was researched in part at the Schlesinger Library—is forthcoming in March.

Ben Miller RI ’15 is a contributor to the fifth edition of Best American Experimental Writing (Wesleyan University Press, 2020), guest edited by Carmen Maria Machado and Joyelle McSweeney ’98. The anthology, forthcoming this summer, features poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction; editions are published biennially.

Drawing on an Ancient Japanese Art 

Karole Armitage RI ’16 and her company Armitage Gone! Dance recently enjoyed a limited return engagement of You Took a Part of Me at New York Live Arts. (The work premiered at the Japan Society last spring.) The dancer-choreographer was inspired by the Japanese dance theater form Noh, which she has studied for 30 years. Armitage commissioned the score from Reiko Yamada RI ’16. 

Armitage enlisted other cross-disciplinary collaborators in the creation of You Took a Part of Me. Designers at the MIT Media Lab developed temperature-sensitive, color-changing makeup for the dancers, and the editorial hairstylist Danilo—who, notes Vogue in “The Original ‘Punk Ballerina’ Karole Armitage Teams Up with Hairstylist Danilo on a New Dance Work,” has been a friend of Armitage’s since the late 1970s—created 40-inch-long hair extensions, which were incorporated into the choreography.  

On Stage and Screen 

A film by Ja’Tovia Gary RI ’19, The Giverny Document (2019), had its world festival premiere at the Locarno Film Festival, where it won the Moving Ahead Award. The film also earned a special mention from the jury at the Camden International Film Festival, which included Sky Hopinka RI ’19. 

Judgment Day, an adaptation by the Catherine A. and Mary C. Gellert Fellow Christopher Shinn RI ’20 of Ödön von Horváth’s 1937 play, recently had its world premiere at the Park Avenue Armory in New York.

Pacific Far East Line (1979), a short film by Abigail Child ’68, RI ’06, was shown as part of the Museum of Modern Art program “West Coast Lights.” 

Ayodele Casel RI ’20 collaborated with the jazz musician Arturo O’Farrill on a stage production that ran at the Joyce Theater in New York. “Simply put, the show is a delight,” said a New York Times review of Ayodele Casel + Arturo O’Farrill. Casel also performed at the 2019 Arthur Miller Foundation Honors.

Art Aware 

On view through May 11 at MOCA Grand Avenue, in Los Angeles, is Open House: Gala Porras-Kim. The exhibition, the second in the museum’s Open House series, takes as its jumping-off point the active role of art institutions in the life cycle of works in their collections. Gala Porras-Kim RI ’20, who is a David and Roberta Logie Fellow, explored this idea further in her fellow’s presentation. 

Amy Sillman RI ’11 curated the Museum of Modern Art’s latest Artist’s Choice exhibition, The Shape of Shape, for which she plumbed MoMA’s collections for works “in which shape does prevail over other considerations,” she said in a statement. “Often eccentric, poetic, or intimate, these works are like bodies that speak, operating at the hub of language and matter, signs and sensations.” The Shape of Shape is up through April 12. 

Anne Seelbach BI ’90 was chosen by Lucien Smith to exhibit in Artists Choose Artists at the Parrish Art Museum, in Southampton, New York. Her work also appeared in the exhibition Weird, Wild, Beautiful Places at Hygienic Art in New London, Connecticut, and in the four-person exhibition Environmental Reflections at the Jamie Forbes Gallery, in Center Moriches, New York.

Rencontres de Bamako (Bamako Encounters), the biennial dedicated to African photography and video, has released the list of artists participating in its 25th anniversary edition, among them Bouchra Khalili RI ’18.

The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston invited Anthony Romero RI ’20, a David and Roberta Logie Fellow, to create the project …first in thought, then in action. Over the past year, he has collected stories of activism, migration, and displacement in East Boston. As part of the project, he premiered a sculpture and sound piece of the same name along with an event series that culminated in a January performance and discussion.

The Cornell University College of Architecture, Art, and Planning hosted Open Architecture: A Book on Migration at its John Hartell Gallery. The exhibition brought together original mapping, video, and photo installations that Esra Akcan RI ’20, the Frieda L. Miller Fellow, produced for Open Architecture: Migration, Citizenship and the Urban Renewal of Berlin-Kreuzberg by IBA - 1984/87 (Birkhauser, 2018).

Elise Adibi RI ’14 was the first artist-in-residence at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI), where she created a living installation designed to combat burnout among staff members in the Department of Psychosocial Oncology and Palliative
Care (POPC). Adibi installed a shelf system featuring a variety of succulents in a large west-facing window. The DFCI’s artist-in-residence program was designed by William F. Pirl MD ’94, MPH ’08, RI ’14, the vice chair of POPC, who connected with Adibi during their fellowship year. “A lot of her work focuses on life and time, change and transformation,” he told DFCI Online. “It’s a message I thought would be excellent for our team to explore.”

These Sounds Fall Into My Mind, an exhibition at Morán Morán by Eve Fowler RI ’19, included video and six wall pieces alongside with it which it as it if it is to be, Part II, the 30-minute film that was her Radcliffe project. The film documents 20 women artists in the later years of their careers.

Four sculptures by Catherine Bertulli BI ’83 appeared in Dressed, an exhibition at the Danforth at Framingham State University. The works in the show, says the museum, referenced “the intricacies of covering the body, the meaning held in garments, and the gendering of handwork.” 

Authorship, Architecture, Anonymity: The Impossible Career of Petra Andrejova-
Molnár, an exhibition by Katarina Burin RI ’18, was on view at Bennington College’s Suzanne Lemberg Usdan Gallery. Burin spent a decade developing the character of Andrejova-Molnár, producing the models and drawings, décor, and ephemera that make up the fictional visual archive on display.

This past fall, work by Colleen Kiely RI ’01 was featured in a pop-up solo exhibition, Women on the Verge, at Boston’s The Cost Annex. Her work also appeared in a group exhibition at the University of New Hampshire Museum of Art, The Odyssey Project: An Old Story for Modern Times.

Beth Galston BI ’91 is collaborating with Bartek Konieczny on a public art project for the MBTA’s upcoming Gilman Station, part of the Green Line Extension project. Last year, her work was included in Avant Gardens at the Newport Art Museum, in Rhode Island, and in Horizons: As Above, So Below at the Portsmouth Arts and Cultural Center, in Virginia. In addition, her large-scale sculpture Floating Garden has been permanently installed in The Pioneer, an apartment building in Everett, Massachusetts.

Grace Notes

Heart Chamber, a new opera by Chaya Czernowin RI ’20, the Rieman and Baketel Fellow for Music, premiered at the Deutsche Oper Berlin. Said the Financial Times, “Heart Chamber is a fragmentary collage of gossamer sound effects that is intimate, strange, wonderful, and frustrating.” 

Works by the composer Mauricio Pauly RI ’15 popped up around the world this past fall. His piece HOMICONMADOABLO was performed by Promenade Sauvage in Modena and Udine, Italy. Fream ad wall made its way to Freiburg, Germany, and to Liverpool and London, where it was performed by Line Upon Line Percussion, which commissioned the piece. And his own project Distractfold performed Charred Edifice Shining in Pinerolo, near Turin, Italy. In February, he collaborated with Renee Gladman on Theory for Moving Houses at the Seattle Art Museum Olympic Sculpture Garden. 

Public Life 

Late last year, Harvard President Lawrence S. Bacow announced a University-wide initiative to further explore Harvard’s historical ties to slavery, naming Radcliffe Dean Tomiko Brown-Nagin RI ’17 to lead the effort. “Anchoring this new presidential initiative at Radcliffe—a cross-disciplinary laboratory of ideas that brings together scholars, students, and practitioners to explore issues that can only be fully understood by drawing on multiple perspectives—reflects the Institute’s unique role within the University,” says Brown-Nagin, who is also the Daniel P.S. Paul Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School and a professor of history in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. “This endeavor also reflects our enduring commitment to grappling with inequality and promoting inclusion.”

The University of Wisconsin–Madison granted tenure to Nicole C. Nelson RI ’19, who teaches in the Department of Medical History and Bioethics. Her current work combines historical and ethnographic methods to address the “reproducibility crisis” in science.

Katie Bugyis RI ’19, who recently published The Care of Nuns: The Ministries of Benedictine Women in England during the Central Middle Ages (Oxford University Press, 2019), began in a new post this past fall as an assistant professor in the Program of Liberal Studies, a concurrent assistant professor in the Department of Theology, and a faculty fellow of the Medieval Institute at the University of Notre Dame, where she earned her doctoral degree. “I am over-the-moon excited about returning to Notre Dame as a faculty member,” Bugyis said in a Q & A with a member of the university’s College of Arts and Letters.

Allegra Goodman ’89, RI ’07 and Jill Lepore AM ’03, BI ’00, RI ’20, who is the Perrin Moorhead Grayson and Bruns Grayson Fellow, were featured authors at the Massachusetts Book Awards Holiday Dozen, a book party at the Cambridge Public Library. They were among the 12 Boston-area writers, all recently honored by the Massachusetts Center for the Book, who participated in lightning talks and a book signing. Goodman won the 2018 Massachusetts Book Award in fiction for The Chalk Artist (Dial Press, 2017), and Lepore won the 2019 Massachusetts Book Award in nonfiction for These Truths: A History of the United States (W. W. Norton, 2018).