A bridge to somewhere
Bady Balde’s path to Harvard University began at age 4, on a six-mile trip along a dusty, rural African road. Alone. It’s the reason he’s a good runner. Balde recalled trying to catch two older,...
View ArticleHard look at harsh times
Back just three days from a trip to Kenya, colonial era historian Caroline Elkins was thinking about the present and the future, and not just her specialty, the past. Elkins, who was named professor of...
View ArticleOut of Africa
April has brought more than showers and sunshine to Harvard; it has brought Africa. The second-largest continent is the subject this month of Harvard Africa Focus, a series of lectures, panels, and...
View ArticleReducing malnutrition
The world is unlikely to reach the international goals set to reduce malnutrition or maternal and child mortality by 2015, authorities on global health and nutrition say. They believe that improving...
View ArticleHip-hop’s global reach
The global dimensions of hip-hop, a thriving subculture of art, music, and dance, was at the heart of a two-day Harvard panel last week aimed at helping educators use the genre as a teaching tool in...
View ArticleMarie-Ange Bunga of HKS starts Congo Initiative at Harvard
Marie-Ange Bunga, a graduating M.P.A./M.C. student at the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS), has started the Congo Initiative at Harvard, a student organization aiming to increase awareness about the...
View ArticleBasic science
The petri dishes were the bottoms of plastic water bottles, cut off and sterilized over a charcoal cookstove. Filled with agar and inoculated with bacteria from students’ fingers, the classroom...
View ArticleA higher profile for African studies
The U.S. Department of Education has named the University Committee on African Studies as a National Resource Center, thereby raising the profile of Harvard’s Africa programs and bringing in grant...
View ArticleSaturday Is for Funerals
Max Essex, the Mary Woodard Lasker Professor of Health Sciences, and Unity Dow track the Botswana HIV/AIDS crisis through heartrending narratives of those affected by the disease — an estimated one out...
View ArticleDocumenting a colonial past
A Harvard history professor and a team of current and past students are helping Kenyans to tell the story of their break from colonial Britain in a new exhibit in the East African nation’s National...
View ArticleLooking past the plantation
In 1836, Frank McWorter founded the town of New Philadelphia, Ill. McWorter, who owned a large farm nearby, used the sale of lots in the town not to enrich himself, but to buy his family out of slavery...
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‘Africa in Motion’
The rhythmic sound of drums echoed through the Northwest Lab building Thursday evening (Oct. 21) as singers, dancers, and several hundred scholars and students gathered to celebrate the growth of...
View ArticleThe outlook for Africa
Over the course of Condoleezza Rice’s many trips to Africa, one indelible image — at a museum commemorating the roughly 800,000 people murdered in the 1994 Rwandan genocide — still haunts the former...
View ArticleItaly and Africa, entwined
Students of literature often construct their understanding of a topic primarily from books and readings. But that’s not the case for students in Giuliana Minghelli’s new course on cultural migrations...
View ArticleSick to death
In the United States, large, long-running studies provide clues about people’s health, highlighting ailments such as diabetes, heart disease, and cancer, while providing a starting point for research...
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Seeing double
Contrary to the belief of many scientists (as well as many members of the public), new research confirms that Africa has two — not one — species of elephant. Scientists from Harvard Medical School...
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Plotting the demise of malaria
Watch your back, malaria. Authorities on the disease from around the world gathered at Harvard Medical School (HMS) for a three-day session focused on establishing new research priorities demanded by a...
View ArticleTurning on the lights
Despite the economic strides that many of its nations have made in recent years, Africa is still, in a literal sense, a dark continent. No country there represents this more clearly than Liberia, where...
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The tipping point
When Marshall Nannes began researching his master’s thesis on American military bases in Bahrain and Kuwait, he did something practically unknown. He actually asked the people in those countries how...
View ArticleA champion of democracy
The administration of Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf is part of a new wave of democratic governance washing through African nations, bringing an emphasis on economic reforms to get the nation...
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