The scholars and university leaders Ruth J. Simmons and Tomiko Brown-Nagin discuss Simmons’s recent memoir, Up Home: One Girl’s Journey (Random House, 2023). Along the way, they consider her personal journey, her pioneering work researching and sharing publicly universities’ historical ties to slavery, and her perspectives on the future of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and higher education in light of recent Supreme Court rulings.

This episode was recorded on November 14, 2023.

Released on March 21, 2024.

Episode Transcript

Ruth J. Simmons is a distinguished presidential fellow at Rice University and senior adviser to the president of Harvard University on engagement with HBCUs. She served as president of Prairie View A&M University until March 2023. Prior to joining Prairie View, she was president of Brown University from 2001 to 2012 and president of Smith College from 1995 to 2001.

Tiya Miles is a Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at Harvard Radcliffe Institute and the Michael Garvey Professor of History at the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences. She leads the audience Q and A in this episode.

Tomiko Brown-Nagin is dean of Harvard Radcliffe Institute, the Daniel P.S. Paul Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School, and a professor of history in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

Up Home: One Girl's Journey (Random House, 2023)

Harvard Gazette: Ruth Simmons Named to Senior Post Advising on HBCU Partnerships

Event Page

Tiya Miles: Radcliffe Professor Biography

Ivelisse Estrada is your cohost and the editorial manager at Harvard Radcliffe Institute (HRI), where she edits Radcliffe Magazine.

Alan Catello Grazioso is the executive producer of BornCurious and the senior multimedia manager at HRI.

Jeff Hayash is a freelance sound engineer and recordist.

Marcus Knoke is a multimedia intern at HRI, a Harvard College student, and the general manager of Harvard Radio Broadcasting.

Heather Min is your cohost and the senior manager of digital strategy at HRI.

Anna Soong is the production assistant at HRI.

Special thanks to Kevin Grady and Max Doyle from Radcliffe’s event streaming team for their invaluable contributions to recording this podcast episode.

More than addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, mathematics is a “whole unexplored universe which has no boundaries,” says our guest, Laura DeMarco. In this episode, we reconsider not only what math is but also what it can do—and who can do it.

This episode was recorded on November 9, 2023.

Released on March 14, 2024.

Episode Transcript

Laura DeMarco is a Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at Harvard Radcliffe Institute and a professor of mathematics at Harvard University whose research focuses on the theory of dynamical systems and number theory. She is currently investigating the mathematical concepts of stability—if you bump into something, will that knock it out of position?—and complexity, along with how the two are related.

Laura DeMarco: Fellowship Biography

Laura DeMarco: Harvard Department of Mathematics Biography

Ivelisse Estrada is your cohost and the editorial manager at Harvard Radcliffe Institute (HRI), where she edits Radcliffe Magazine.

Kevin Grady is the multimedia producer at HRI.

Alan Catello Grazioso is the executive producer of BornCurious and the senior multimedia manager at HRI.

Jeff Hayash is a freelance sound engineer and recordist.

Marcus Knoke is a multimedia intern at HRI, a Harvard College student, and the general manager of Harvard Radio Broadcasting.

Heather Min is your cohost and the senior manager of digital strategy at HRI.

Anna Soong is the production assistant at HRI.

With daylight saving time coming up this weekend, one might wonder whether losing a single hour of sleep is that big of a deal. In this episode, we talk with a neurologist who specializes in daily rhythms about what might be lost along with that hour—and finally answer the question, Are you getting enough sleep?

This episode was recorded on December 14, 2023.

Released on March 7, 2024.

Episode Transcript

Elizabeth B. Klerman is a professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School, a physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and a neurologist at Mass General Research Institute whose research focuses on the influences of circadian and sleep rhythms in normal and pathological states. With her colleague Charles Czeisler, Klerman convened a Radcliffe Exploratory Seminar to consider how to better publicize the physical effects of Daylight Saving Time.

Boston Globe editorial: Making Daylight Saving Time Permanent Would Mean Losing Sleep—and Lives

Elizabeth B. Klerman: Harvard Medical School Bio

Exploratory Seminar: Should Daylight Saving Time Be Eliminated or Made Permanent? Another Clash between Scientific Evidence and Politics

Ivelisse Estrada is your cohost and the editorial manager at Harvard Radcliffe Institute (HRI), where she edits Radcliffe Magazine.

Alan Catello Grazioso is the executive producer of BornCurious and the senior multimedia manager at HRI.

Jeff Hayash is a freelance sound engineer and recordist.

Marcus Knoke is a multimedia intern at HRI, a Harvard College student, and the general manager of Harvard Radio Broadcasting.

Heather Min is your cohost and the senior manager of digital strategy at HRI.

Anna Soong is the production assistant at HRI.

Special thanks to Cabin 3 Media for their invaluable contributions to the editing of this podcast episode.

In June 2023, a US Supreme Court ruling on two cases essentially ended affirmative action in higher education. In a 6–3 ruling, the court decided that accounting for race in admissions violates the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. In this deep dive into the ruling, the civil rights lawyer and legal scholar Sherrilyn Ifill and our dean, Tomiko Brown-Nagin—herself an award-winning legal historian and an expert in constitutional law—unpack the issues underpinning affirmative action and provide analysis of the decision for the layperson.

This episode was recorded on October 18, 2023.

Released on February 29, 2024.

Episode Transcript

Sherrilyn Ifill is a civil rights lawyer and the inaugural Vernon E. Jordan, Jr., Esq. Endowed Chair in Civil Rights at Howard University, where she leads the 14th Amendment Center for Law & Democracy in collaboration with a variety of institutions in law, business, and the arts, including the Charles Hamilton Houston Center at Harvard Law School. She was the 2022 recipient of the Radcliffe Medal, the Institute’s highest honor.

Guy-Uriel E. Charles is the Charles J. Ogletree Jr. Professor of Law at Harvard Law School where he also directs the Charles Hamilton Institute for Race and Justice. He writes about how law mediates political power and how law addresses racial subordination. He leads the audience Q and A in this episode.

Tomiko Brown-Nagin is dean of Harvard Radcliffe Institute, the Daniel P.S. Paul Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School, and a professor of history in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

Sherrilyn Ifill Howard University Announcement

Event Page

Tomiko Brown-Nagin: Leadership Biography

Radcliffe Day 2022

Ivelisse Estrada is your cohost and the editorial manager at Harvard Radcliffe Institute (HRI), where she edits Radcliffe Magazine.

Alan Catello Grazioso is the executive producer of BornCurious and the senior multimedia manager at HRI.

Jeff Hayash is a freelance sound engineer and recordist.

Marcus Knoke is a multimedia intern at HRI, a Harvard College student, and the general manager of Harvard Radio Broadcasting.

Heather Min is your cohost and the senior manager of digital strategy at HRI.

Anna Soong is the production assistant at HRI.

Special thanks to Kevin Grady and Max Doyle from Radcliffe’s event streaming team for their invaluable contributions to recording this podcast episode.

Today’s episode—released to coincide with the announcement of an astronomical discovery—brings us inside the exciting world of scientific inquiry. In 2020, a group of scientists discovered a star-producing cosmic ripple in the local arm of the Milky Way that changed scientists’ understanding of the galaxy that our solar system calls home. They named it the Radcliffe Wave after the generative environment that inspired the finding. And the discoveries keep coming: new research published in Nature confirms that the Radcliffe Wave is indeed in motion, as its name suggests. Today, we talk to four of the scientists who collaborated on this groundbreaking research about what it all means.

This episode was recorded on February 6, 2024.

Released on February 20, 2024.

Episode Transcript

João Alves is a professor of stellar astrophysics at the University of Vienna. During his Radcliffe fellowship year in 2018–2019, he combined both space and ground-based observational data to build the first map of the space motion of gas and to investigate how giant gas clouds, the nurseries of stars, came to be.

Alyssa A. Goodman is the Robert Wheeler Willson Professor of Applied Astronomy at Harvard University, a former codirector for science at Harvard Radcliffe Institute, a research associate of the Smithsonian Institution, and the founding director of the Harvard Initiative in Innovative Computing. She was a Radcliffe fellow in 2016–2017, and her work spans astrophysics, science education, data science, data visualization, and prediction.

Ralf Konietzka is a PhD student in astronomy and astrophysics at Harvard University. His research focuses on the formation and evolution of the Milky Way, and he uses a combination of analytic theory, observations, data visualization, and numerical simulations to investigate the structure and dynamics of the local interstellar medium and examine how stars originate.

Catherine Zucker, who earned her PhD from Harvard University in 2020, is an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian whose research focuses on developing novel techniques to tease out the 3D structure and dynamics of our home galaxy, the Milky Way. Much of her work involves the use of “big data” and high-performance computing.

Nature: A Galactic-Scale Gas Wave in the Solar Neighbourhood

Radcliffe Wave Visuals

WBUR: Harvard Astronomers Update Map of the Milky Way Galaxy

Harvard Gazette: The Giant in Our Stars

Harvard Magazine: An Interstellar Ribbon of Clouds in the Sun’s Backyard

New York Times: A New Map of the Sun’s Local Bubble

Radcliffe Magazine: Behind Radcliffe Wave, Creative Inspiration

João Alves Personal Website

Alyssa A. Goodman Profile

Ralf Konietzka Bio

Catherine Zucker Bio

Accelerator Workshop: The Radcliffe Wave at Radcliffe

Maxwell Doyle is the A/V support technician at Harvard Radcliffe Institute (HRI).

Ivelisse Estrada is your cohost and the editorial manager at HRI, where she edits Radcliffe Magazine.

Kevin Grady is the multimedia producer at HRI.

Alan Catello Grazioso is the executive producer of BornCurious and the senior multimedia manager at HRI.

Jeff Hayash is a freelance sound engineer and recordist.

Marcus Knoke is a multimedia intern at HRI, a Harvard College student, and the general manager of Harvard Radio Broadcasting.

Heather Min is your cohost and the senior manager of digital strategy at HRI.

Anna Soong is the production assistant at HRI.

In response to recent events, protest and discord have reached a fever pitch on university campuses. It is in this context that Harvard Radcliffe Institute gathered interdisciplinary experts for a crucial discussion about hate speech, academic freedom, and the legal norms that govern how universities can respond to protest.

In this episode, we explore the underpinnings of how antisemitism, Islamophobia, and other identity-based hatreds—issues that have received increased attention in the context of the ongoing Gaza crisis and attendant campus controversies—fit into a broader set of questions about the role of institutions of higher education.

This episode was recorded on December 12, 2023.

Released on December 20, 2023.

Episode Transcript

Tomiko Brown-Nagin, dean, Harvard Radcliffe Institute; Daniel P.S. Paul Professor of Constitutional Law, Harvard Law School; and professor of history, Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences

Erica Chenoweth, Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor, Harvard Radcliffe Institute; academic dean for faculty engagement and the Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment, Harvard Kennedy School; and faculty dean at Pforzheimer House, Harvard College

Jeannie Suk Gersen, John H. Watson, Jr. Professor of Law, Harvard Law School

Nadine Strossen, John Marshall Harlan II Professor of Law Emerita, New York Law School; past president, American Civil Liberties Union

Keith E. Whittington, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics, Princeton University

Event: Free Speech, Political Speech, and Hate Speech on Campus

Ivelisse Estrada is your cohost and the editorial lead at Harvard Radcliffe Institute (HRI), where she edits Radcliffe Magazine.

Alan Catello Grazioso is the executive producer of BornCurious and the senior multimedia manager at HRI.

Jeff Hayash is a freelance sound engineer and recordist.

Marcus Knoke is a multimedia intern at HRI, a Harvard College student, and the general manager of Harvard Radio Broadcasting.

Heather Min is your cohost and the senior manager of digital strategy at HRI.

Anna Soong is the production assistant at HRI.

Special thanks to Kevin Grady and Max Doyle from Radcliffe’s event streaming team for their invaluable contributions to recording this podcast episode.

Tamar Gonen Brown, head of education and outreach at Radcliffe’s Schlesinger Library, gives us a peek into the fascinating world of archives. She uses rare archival materials not only to teach students research skills but also to train them on how to be “history detectives” in their own right and to share the thrill of discovery.

Some useful background from Gonen Brown:

The Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America collects material that documents the history of women, gender, and sexuality in the United States, and the scope and extent of our collections means that there are many topics beyond gender history that researchers can investigate through our holdings. The Library is certainly not the only repository dedicated to documenting gender and US women’s history—there is the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture at Duke University, the Sophia Smith Collection of Women’s History at Smith College, and the Pembroke Center Archives at Brown University, for example. The historian Mary Ritter Beard was an important early advocate, beginning in the 1930s, for the need to collect documents that reflect women’s lives and work, and the Schlesinger Library was in fact called the Women’s Archives until it was renamed in honor of Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger in 1965. Beard’s idea of a singular archives dedicated to documenting all aspects of women’s lives on a global scale never came to pass, and we are now among a cohort of repositories that are explicitly dedicated to documenting the history of women and gender. At the Schlesinger, one of our priorities is working to ensure that the collections document the full range of women’s experiences in American history, including the stories of women of color, immigrant women, queer and trans women, and other historically marginalized communities.

This episode was recorded on August 9, 2023.

Released on December 19, 2023.

Episode Transcript

Tamar Gonen Brown, a research and teaching librarian, is the head of education and outreach at the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library for the History of Women in America. She earned a PhD in English and American language and literature from Harvard, a master’s in library and information science from Simmons University, and a bachelor’s from the University of Chicago.

Tamar Gonen Brown: Harvard Library Biography

Schlesinger Library: Teaching and Learning with Special Collections

Zooming the Archives

75 Stories, 75 Years

Ivelisse Estrada is your cohost and the editorial lead at Harvard Radcliffe Institute (HRI), where she edits Radcliffe Magazine.

Alan Catello Grazioso is the executive producer of BornCurious and the senior multimedia manager at HRI.

Jeff Hayash is a freelance sound engineer and recordist.

Marcus Knoke is a multimedia intern at HRI, a Harvard College student, and the general manager of Harvard Radio Broadcasting.

Heather Min is your cohost and the senior manager of digital strategy at HRI.

Anna Soong is the production assistant at HRI.

For millennia, humans have regarded other species with curiosity and wonder. We have tried to decode their behaviors and imagine what they are saying—but truly speaking with animals has traditionally been the stuff of stories, such as those featuring Dr. Dolittle. In this episode of BornCurious, we talk with the oceanographer David Gruber, who is spearheading Project CETI, a multidisciplinary collaboration. We learn that understanding animals is rapidly moving beyond the realm of fiction: Gruber and his colleagues are using hard science—state-of-the-art robotics and machine learning—to listen to and translate sperm whale communication.

This episode was recorded on May 12, 2023.

Released on November 30, 2023.

Episode Transcript

David Gruber is a visiting researcher at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard and a distinguished professor of biology at Baruch College of the City University of New York. He also founded Project CETI—the Cetacean Translation Initiative—which aims to apply technology to bring us closer to nature.

David Gruber and Harvard Radcliffe Institute would like to acknowledge the passing of the environmental scientist and technology expert Karen Bakker RI ’23 in August 2023. Her contributions to the field of bioacoustics, particularly through her book The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology Is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants (Princeton University Press, 2022), have had an enormous impact. Her book Gaia's Web: How Digital Environmentalism Can Combat Climate Change, Restore Biodiversity, Cultivate Empathy, and Regenerate the Earth (MIT Press, 2024), on which she worked during her Radcliffe fellowship, will be published in April.

David Gruber: Fellowship Biography

Project CETI

New Yorker: Can We Talk to Whales?

Event: Speaking with Whales: Listening to and Translating Their Communication

Radcliffe Magazine: Radcliffe’s “Jellyfish Guy” Follows the Light

David Gruber: Personal Website

Whale recordings are provided courtesy of Dominica Sperm Whale Project and Project CETI.

Ivelisse Estrada is your cohost and the editorial lead at Harvard Radcliffe Institute (HRI), where she edits Radcliffe Magazine.

Alan Catello Grazioso is the executive producer of BornCurious and the senior multimedia manager at HRI.

Jeff Hayash is a freelance sound engineer and recordist.

Marcus Knoke is a multimedia intern at HRI, a Harvard College student, and the general manager of Harvard Radio Broadcasting.

Heather Min is your cohost and the senior manager of digital strategy at HRI.

Anna Soong is the production assistant at HRI.

In this episode, Meek Mill, an award-winning rapper and one of the nation’s top voices for parole and probation reform, talks with Brittany White—a practitioner in residence at Radcliffe and Harvard Law School, an organizing fellow at the Institute to End Mass Incarceration, and a formerly incarcerated Black woman—and others. This conversation brings together people with lived experience of incarceration as experts to discuss their efforts to change the probation and parole system, helping to make the US justice system more just.

This episode was recorded on May 1, 2023.

Released on November 16, 2023.

Episode Transcript

Ayana Bean is an activist and founder of A Year and a Day Foundation.

Meek Mill is a rapper and cofounder of REFORM Alliance.

Wallo is a podcaster, an influencer, and a speaker on prison reform.

Brittany White is a 2022–2023 visiting practitioner in residence at Harvard Radcliffe Institute, an organizing fellow at the Institute to End Mass Incarceration, and a voice for formerly incarcerated Black women.

Experience Is Expertise

Brittany White: Fellowship Biography

Video: Organizing for a Pathway to Redemption

Brittany White: Radcliffe Fellow’s Presentation

REFORM Alliance

A Year and a Day Foundation

Instagram: Meek Mill

Personal Website: Wallo267

Ivelisse Estrada is your cohost and the editorial lead at Harvard Radcliffe Institute (HRI), where she edits Radcliffe Magazine.

Alan Catello Grazioso is the executive producer of BornCurious and the senior multimedia manager at HRI.

Jeff Hayash is a freelance sound engineer and recordist.

Marcus Knoke is a multimedia intern at HRI, a Harvard College student, and the general manager of Harvard Radio Broadcasting.

Heather Min is your cohost and the senior manager of digital strategy at HRI.

Anna Soong is the production assistant at HRI.

Special thanks to Kevin Grady and Max Doyle from Radcliffe's event streaming team for their invaluable contributions to recording this podcast episode.

In the continuation of a conversation about language and thought, the cognitive psychologist Asifa Majid talks about why most studies on the topic have focused on English speakers, where in the brain language is processed, why some languages have trouble describing sensory input while others do not, and where language studies should go next.

This episode was recorded on June 2, 2023.

Published on November 8, 2023.

Episode Transcript

Asifa Majid is a professor of cognitive science at the University of Oxford who studies the relationship among language, culture, and mind. At Radcliffe, she worked on a book that will synthesize her wide-ranging empirical work to elucidate which aspects of cognition are fundamentally shared and which are language- or culture-specific.

Asifa Majid: Fellowship Biography

Asifa Majid: Radcliffe Fellow’s Presentation

Ivelisse Estrada is your cohost and the editorial lead at Harvard Radcliffe Institute (HRI), where she edits Radcliffe Magazine.

Alan Catello Grazioso is the executive producer of BornCurious and the senior multimedia manager at HRI.

Jeff Hayash is a freelance sound engineer and recordist.

Marcus Knoke is a multimedia intern at HRI, a Harvard College student, and the general manager of Harvard Radio Broadcasting.

Heather Min is your cohost and the senior manager of digital strategy at HRI.

Anna Soong is the production assistant at HRI.