Two New Faculty Directors Named

Radcliffe's faculty directors are tenured Harvard faculty members who want to be at the forefront of developing the Institute’s cutting-edge programming across the arts, humanities, sciences, and social sciences. Individuals who are dedicated to working across disciplines to generate new ideas and share them with the public, they return to their full-time roles at Harvard after they complete their appointments with Radcliffe.

Harvard faculty members who will join Radcliffe’s Academic Ventures program on July 1 are Alyssa A. Goodman AM ’86, PhD ’89, RI ’17 (the 2016–2017 Edward, Frances, and Shirley B. Daniels Fellow and the Robert Wheeler Willson Professor of Applied Astronomy) and Shigehisa (Hisa) Kuriyama ’77, AM ’78, PhD ’81 (the Reischauer Institute Professor of Cultural History in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations and the Department of the History of Science). Working with the Institute’s other three faculty directors, they will develop innovative programs to engage researchers, students, fellows, faculty members, and the public.

Goodman will codirect Radcliffe’s science program. Her work spans astronomy, data visualization, science education, and the use of technology in academic research and teaching. Recently, she has focused on the history, science, and art of making predictions from ancient Mesopotamia to modern computer simulation of climate change.

She earned an undergraduate degree in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a PhD in physics from Harvard. She was a President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, before joining the Harvard faculty.

Kuriyama, who will direct Radcliffe’s humanities program, is a Japanologist and a historian of medicine. His work explores broad philosophical issues (being and time, representations and reality, knowing and feeling) through the lens of specific topics in comparative medical history (China, Europe, and Japan). His book The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine (Zone, 1999) received the 2001 William H. Welch Medal of the American Association for the History of Medicine and has been translated into Chinese, Greek, Spanish, and Korean.

He has been expanding the horizons of teaching and scholarly communication through the creative use of digital technologies at Harvard and other universities in the United States and abroad.

Kuriyama earned undergraduate and master’s degrees from Harvard. After completing acupuncture studies in Tokyo, he earned a PhD at Harvard. He joined the Harvard faculty as Reischauer Institute Professor after working at the University of New Hampshire, Emory University, and the International Research Center for Japanese Studies in Kyoto, Japan.

“Alyssa and Hisa are full of ideas for bringing together people and projects that are uniquely suited to Radcliffe’s place at the crossroads of exploration and illumination,” says Radcliffe Institute Dean Lizabeth Cohen. “We look forward to supporting their pursuits in the years ahead and sharing their work broadly.”