Conversations
Fifteen Questions: David Yang on Chinese Authoritarianism, Political Economy, and Cookbooks
The Economics professor sat down with Fifteen Minutes to discuss his work on the political economy of authoritarian regimes in China. “There are people in China who eagerly want and fight for democracy. There are people in the U.S. who take on actions that go very much against democracy,” he says.
Mina Cikara Portrait
Mina Cikara is a Psychology professor that studies discrimination, conflict, and harm using social psychological and cognitive neuroscience approaches.
Fifteen Questions: Mina Cikara on Social Psychology, Intergroup Conflict, and Being a ‘Valley Rat’
Psychology professor Mina Cikara sat down with the magazine to discuss her influences and the psychology of discrimination. “Social psychology is rife with theorizing about all of the different inputs to intergroup conflict,” she says. “There are many, and they are multiply determined, and they are incredibly complex.”
Fifteen Questions: Catherine Brekus on Historical Women, Christian Nationalism, and Religious Freedom
Divinity School professor Catherine A. Brekus ’85 sat down with Fifteen Minutes to talk about women’s history and religion. “For me, religion became a tool for asking questions about how women had made sense of their lives, and how they had made meaning,” she says.
Kathleen Coleman
Kathleen M. Coleman, a member of Harvard’s faculty for a quarter-century, is a Classics professor and the Department’s chair as well as a Senior Research Curator for the Harvard Art Museums.
Fifteen Questions: Kathleen Coleman on Gladiators, the Classics, and Poems
The former Chair of Harvard’s Classics Department discusses her experiences in apartheid South Africa, the gladiators of Ancient Rome, and the future of the Classics. She has been “privileged,” she says, “to spend my career basically pursuing my hobby.”
Fifteen Questions: Orlando Patterson on the Sociology of Slavery, Advising the Jamaican Prime Minister, and Cricket
Historical and cultural sociologist Orlando Patterson sat down to discuss his upbringing and sociology research. “I didn’t get into academia just for the scholarship,” he says. “My work was motivated by the need to understand Jamaica.”
Fifteen Questions: Ian Miller on Zoos, Climate Change, and the Quad
The historian and Cabot House Faculty Dean Ian J. Miller sat down to discuss his research on empire and energy in modern Japan and East Asia and life as a faculty dean. “When you stand somewhere else, you look at the world through someone else’s eyes or you work with historical documents, reading into those powerful texts, it can be empowering,” he says.
Beloved Math Lecturer Dusty Grundmeier Bids Farewell to Harvard
Math lecturer Dusty Grundmeier is leaving Harvard at the semester’s end. Known for his empathy and engaging lectures, he’s something of a legend among students on campus. We sat down with Grundmeier and interviewed students to explore what makes his teaching special.
Aliyah Collins Is Eco-Healing
Collins founded the Eco-Healing Project last fall to “help HBCU students heal and recover from the impact of climate disasters.”
Dusty Three
Grundmeier points out one of his favorite thank you cards, which is signed by all the students in one of his math classes and reads “We Love You Dusty.” Gifts like these are littered throughout Grundmeier’s office.
Tommy Orange
In 2018, Orange published his debut novel “There There,” which tells stories about Native American characters and their relationships with their identities. The novel received great acclaim, including the Hemingway Foundation/PEN award, the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and recognition as a Pulitzer Prize Finalist.
Aliyah Collins
Aliyah S. Collins, now a student at the Harvard Divinity School, notes that there is a unique, intersectional impact of climate disasters for HBCU students, especially those who are low-income. “A lot of students face or experience a lot of PTSD, stress, depression, just having to navigate the climate disaster,” Collins says.
Dusty 1
Dusty Grundmeier, the professor for Math 22A and 22B, is set to leave Harvard at the end of the semester to join the math department at Ohio State University. His unique teaching philosophy and compassionate approach have earned him a legendary status among students on campus.
Dusty 2
Photos of Grundmeier’s wife, three children, and cat Albie sit in frames atop a box in the corner, as well as in decorative transparent cubes on the table before us. “There’s my daughter on Halloween. This is on the Tea Party Boat in Boston. I got my cat here, Albie,” Grundmeier says. “I think he was more popular than I was.”
Valeria Luiselli Portrait
Valeria Luiselli is a visiting professor of ethnicity, indigeneity, and migration in the English Department. Luiselli is the author of several books including “Lost Children Archive,” which was longlisted for the Booker Prize.
Fifteen Questions: Valeria Luiselli on the Best Novel That Has Ever Been Written, Her Friend Crush, and the Perils of an MFA
The author sat down with Fifteen Minutes to discuss writing and teaching. “How do we reshape the view of the migrant as an inherently victimized figure or as an intruder of sorts by thinking, for example, of migration in its kind of heroic arc?” she says. “Of the migration story not as a tragedy, but as a form of epic?"
Tamarra James-Todd
Associate professor of Environmental Reproductive Epidemiology at Harvard’s School of Public Health Tamarra James-Todd focuses on understanding how environmental exposures adversely affect women’s reproductive health.
Lena Chen’s Intimate Internet
In the intimacy of Chen’s performance art, I see the nascent question of what desire, care, and closeness can look like in an increasingly online world. Chen is an artist who speaks into the future: the future of sex, the future of technology, the future that implicates everyone interacting on the internet.
Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow: Tamarra James-Todd on the Hidden Toxins in Black Hair Care
But with products filled with unpronounceable chemicals like linalool methylparaben and methylisothiazolinone, one might begin to wonder: What exactly are Black women putting in their hair, and what does it mean for their health?
Lena Chen Lena Chen
Lena Chen ’09 is a performance artist who spearheaded the creation of OnlyBans. While at Harvard, she wrote the blog Sex and the Ivy, which documented her sex life.
Fifteen Questions: Pardis Sabeti on LS1B, Computational Genetics, and Holiday Cards
Biologist Pardis C. Sabeti sat down with Fifteen Questions to talk about the famed introductory genetics class, the quirks of her lab, and being a woman in science. “A successful life is not one that is free of setbacks. It’s defined by setbacks,” she says.
William Cheng
William Cheng, a professor of music at Dartmouth College and a 2022–23 fellow at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, loves video games. He has studied and played them through a complicated and trailblazing career in academia, where he says that caring for the “whole person” is often “perceived to be extracurricular and kind of secondary.”
William Cheng, Scholar of Music and Video Games
William Cheng, a professor of music at Dartmouth College and a 2022–23 fellow at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, loves video games. He has studied and played them through a complicated and trailblazing career in academia, where he says that caring for the “whole person” is often “perceived to be extracurricular and kind of secondary.”
Noah Feldman on Constitutions, Content Regulation, and Boaty McBoatface
Feldman, who specializes in constitutional law, draws upon established political systems to tackle the emerging, ever-changing domain of the digital world. The man who advised constitutional processes in Iraq and Tunisia now wants to develop systems of governance for social media platforms.