Dean Ingrid Monson
Academic Year 2010–2011

Dean of Arts and Humanities

In April 2010, Dean Smith announced that Diana Sorensen, James F. Rothenberg Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and professor of comparative literature, would serve as dean of arts and humanities for another two years, following a year of sabbatical. Ingrid Monson, Quincy Jones Professor of African American Music, agreed to serve as interim dean of the Division of Arts and Humanities for the 2010–2011 academic year and oversaw this year’s activities.

New Initiatives

Arts @ 29 Garden

In June 2010, President Drew Faust approved the leasing of space at 29 Garden Street to begin efforts to implement the recommendation of the Report of the Task Force on the Arts that the University develop a “hothouse” or physical space where collaborative projects between students, faculty, and artists could blossom beyond divisional and disciplinary divides. The former site of the Harvard Landscape Institute of the Arnold Arboretum, 29 Garden Street provided a compelling space in which to launch a pilot program of project-based collaborations in conjunction with undergraduate courses and visiting artists. A small steering committee of Associate Provost for Arts and Culture Lori Gross, Interim Dean Ingrid Monson, Director of the Office for the Arts Jack Megan, and Administrative Dean of the Arts and Humanities Division Sara Oseasohn oversaw the hiring of Bess Paupeck as program manager and the crafting of the core mission statement for the program. The mission statement reads:

Harvard’s Arts @ 29 Garden is a new space intended to support and enable creativity, collaboration, experimentation, and art-making amongst faculty, students, and visiting artists. Arts @ 29 Garden will influence and be influenced by art-making across the campus and beyond; it will encourage, gather, connect, and provide space for projects and courses involving imagining, innovating, and employing new ideas, forms, and technologies in the arts. Envisioned as both a physical space and a process of collaboration, the program aims to serve as a laboratory for bringing creative ideas in the visual, verbal, and performative arts to fruition through a process of interdisciplinary interaction, discussion, performance, and implementation.

Over its first six months, Arts @ 29 Garden hosted a wide range of curriculum-connected offerings. As part of its “Salon @ 29 Garden” series, students talked with musicians-in-residence Duncan Sheik and Suzanne Vega about their current project, a musical theater piece based on the writing of Carson McCullers, and with visiting performance artist Aki Sasamoto, sponsored by Jessica Berson’s course Dramatic Arts 162: “Where Dance Meets Performance Art.” Mungo Thompson, a contemporary visual artist based in Los Angeles, was the fall 2010 artist in residence, as well as a visiting faculty member in visual and environmental studies, and offered open studio hours for faculty and students. Set designer Derek McLane offered two workshops.

Other fall events included the writing and performance of an original play in Italian (Italian 136) and a holiday festa (Italian 96r), which included young Italian students from the neighborhood school of Graham and Parks.

During the spring semester, Arts @ 29 Garden hosted “Poetic Urbanisms,” its first formal art exhibit. Funded by a grant from the Harvard University Committee on the Arts, the exhibit is in part the culmination of two years of courses taught by Svetlana Boym, the Curt Hugo Reisinger Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literatures. Her courses explored archaeology as a metaphor for modernity, and students in the courses carried out the creative assignments on display. A second exhibit, “Ruins In Reverse,” was presented by Boym and her students in early May, employing the same archaeological approach to the 29 Garden building, particularly its disused, hidden passageways and basements. The exhibition showcased a selection of found objects and artifacts that speak to that history.

Other highlights of the spring semester included a sound installation entitled “Veils and Vesper,” by John Luther Adams, the Fromm Foundation Visiting Lecturer on Music, and a kickoff site-specific dance piece for the conference “The Body in History / The Body in Space,” which included a performance, reception, and question-and-answer period with the performers.

The January Arts Intensives were envisioned as a small-scale version of other undergraduate research programs, such as PRISE or BLISS, which immerse science and social science undergraduates in the hands-on research activities integral to those disciplines. The intensives provide experiential learning through in-depth participation in art making, as well as the opportunity for collaboration and cross-fertilization across various arts disciplines. The January 2011 Arts Intensives included four options: a three-week performance intensive (with tracks in dance and theater, a collaboration between choreographer Liz Lerman and the American Repertory Theater), and three one-week intensives in stand-up comedy, creative writing, and design. There were many collaborative opportunities built into the program planning, which enabled these groups to work together and learn and grow as artists. Sixty-two students participated, experiencing a rigorous daily schedule of intense focus on their given art form—whether dancing eight hours a day, intensively exploring creative writing, or experiencing life as a design student for five days (including late nights spent at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design). The opportunity for students to devote their time and energy to one specific artistic endeavor proved both fruitful and inspiring. Collaborative experiences across the different intensives were carefully planned as well—mixing dancers and poets, actors and dancers, for example, in an effort to create a unique and collaborative interdisciplinary community. This culminated in a joint event held the last day of intensives week, which allowed students in each group to present some of their work to the participants in all of the intensives. The space at Arts @ 29 Garden served as a nexus for creative collaborations, celebrations, and experiments.

Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard

In October 2010, Harvard announced that Anand Mahindra ’77, MBA ’81 had given the University $10 million to support the Humanities Center in honor of his mother, Indira Mahindra. It is the largest gift in support of the study of humanities in Harvard’s history, and will advance the interdisciplinary collaborations led by center director Homi Bhabha. In recognition, the center was renamed the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard and formally inaugurated at the Barker Center on April 25, 2011. When Mahindra was asked to explain his gift to the Hindustani Times, he noted: “What the humanities teach you is not a particular skill or technology, but to think and to question. Conflict resolution and creating a better world do not come from an improved piece of software or a better engine or a technology, but from people who can break free from their rigid points of view.”

In this spirit, the Mahindra Humanities Center will advance interdisciplinary exchanges among Harvard faculty, faculty from other area institutions, graduate students, undergraduates, and the public. It will sponsor a wide range of panel discussions, lectures, readings, conferences, performances, workshops, and seminars, as well as graduate and postdoctoral fellowships. The center will foster collaborations among the humanities, social sciences, and sciences in the belief that the humanities make a unique contribution in providing platforms for debate across various fields and forms of knowledge.

Digital Humanities

Under the leadership of Dean Monson, the research and creative computing needs of the Division of Arts and Humanities received focused attention in fiscal year 2011. Dean Monson appointed a Divisional Digital Humanities Committee comprising faculty members, technology administrators, and librarians to develop a vision for the digital humanities at Harvard. Faculty members Jeffrey Schnapp, Peter Bol, and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, librarians Virginia Danielson and Susan Fliss, and administrators Bob Wittstein and Alexander Parker served as the inaugural members of this group. Partnering with University CIO Anne Margulies, the digital humanities will be integrated into the newly emerging University-wide strategy for supporting innovative uses of technology in teaching and research.

Events

Digital Humanities 2.0

In February 2011, the Mahindra Humanities Center and the dean of arts and humanities co-sponsored Digital Humanities 2.0, a conversation about emerging paradigms in the arts and humanities in the information age. The discussion was introduced by John Palfrey, Henry N. Ess III Professor of Law, co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and vice dean for library and information sciences at Harvard Law School. Participants included Anne Burdick, chair of the Media Design Program at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California; Johanna Drucker, the Bernard and Martin Breslauer Professor of Bibliography at UCLA; Peter Lunenfeld, professor of the design and media arts at UCLA; Todd Presner, professor of Germanic languages, comparative literature, and Jewish studies at UCLA; and Jeffrey Schnapp, professor of Romance languages and literatures at Harvard.

Before joining the Harvard faculty in the spring of 2011, Professor Schnapp occupied the Rosina Pierotti Chair of Italian Studies at Stanford, where he founded the Stanford Humanities Lab in 2000. Today, Schnapp directs the metaLAB (at) Harvard, a cross-University center for investigating new forms of digital scholarship. MetaLAB is hosted by the Berkman Center.

40 Years of Jazz at Harvard

Jazz performance and scholarship at Harvard were the focus of “40 Years of Jazz at Harvard: A Celebration,” April 7–10, 2011, sponsored by the Office for the Arts at Harvard (OFA) and the Department of Music. Events included an exhibition of Harvard’s new jazz archive, a public conversation, clinics with trumpeter Brian Lynch and saxophonist Don Braden ’85, radio interviews, a Jazz Band alumni reunion, and a concert featuring the “Harvard All-Stars”: drummer Roy Haynes, saxophonist Benny Golson, bassist Cecil McBee, pianist Eddie Palmieri, and Lynch. Braden also appeared.

Wynton Marsalis at Harvard

President Faust has funded a series of six major lectures on the history of jazz by Wynton Marsalis that will take place over a three-year period. The first of these was held on April 28, 2011 at Sanders Theatre. Currently the artistic director of jazz at Lincoln Center, Marsalis is an accomplished musician, composer, bandleader, and educator who has made the promotion of jazz and cultural literacy his hallmark causes. For each lecture Marsalis will be bringing professional performers from New York to Harvard’s campus for a full-day schedule of activities, discussions, and interactions with Harvard students.

The lecture/performance on April 28 was titled “Music as Metaphor” and featured Ali Jackson (drums), Dan Nimmer (piano), Walter Blanding Jr. (tenor sax), Carlos Henriquez (bass), James Chirillo (guitar and banjo), and Mark O’Connor (violin). The following day, Marsalis taught a master class to high school musicians at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School and members of the Harvard Jazz Bands. The next Wynton Marsalis lecture will take place at Sanders Theatre on September 15, 2011.