Fifteen Questions
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.”
Susannah Tobin ’00 on Opinion Writing, Civil Rights, and the Gold Coast
The law professor sat down with Fifteen Questions to discuss her experience writing for The Crimson and working with Harvard students at the College and Law School. She shares her love of history and talks about what it can teach us, “I think about that and think about how far we’ve come and how much further we have to go.”
Susannah Tobin
Susannah B. Tobin ’00 is the Assistant Dean for Academic Career Advising and Ezra Ripley Thayer Senior Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School. She is also Managing Director of the Climenko Fellowship Program. She serves on the graduate council for The Harvard Crimson and Cambridge Historical Mission.
Orland Patterson portrait
Orlando Patterson is a Sociology professor who studies race, freedom, and slavery. He served as a special adviser for Jamaican Prime Minister Michael Manley from 1972 to 1979 and has written several novels.
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.”
Ian Miller
Ian J. Miller is a historian studying empire and energy in modern Japan and East Asia. He is a history professor, Faculty Dean of Cabot House, and Director of Undergraduate Studies.
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.
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?"
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.
Pardis Sabeti
Pardis C. Sabeti is a professor at the Center for Systems Biology and the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, a professor in the Department of Immunology and Infectious Disease at Harvard School of Public Health, institute member of the Broad institute, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. She does work in computational biology, medical genetics, and evolutionary genetics.
Fifteen Questions: Steven Levitsky on Democracy, Latin America, and the Mets
The political scientist sat down with Fifteen Minutes to discuss threats to democracy in the United States and Latin America. “Democracy is always an unsettled system,” he says. “It’s always going to be open to threats and so it requires a tireless fight.”
David Atherton Portrait
David C. Atherton ’00 is an Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard College. He specializes in Japanese literature of the Edo period, and teaches multiple Japanese literature courses as well as Gen Ed 1067: “Creativity.”
Fifteen Questions: David Atherton on Japanese Literature, Creativity, and Remembering to Breathe
The literary scholar sat down with Fifteen Minutes to discuss Edo-period writing and his experience returning to Harvard as a professor. “How can we find and contribute and generate interesting humanistic questions and different ways of thinking about things like literature and culture,” he says, “that are not bound by region at all?”
Joe Harris 15Q
Joseph D. Harris ’72 is a mathematician in the field of algebraic geometry and Harvard’s Math 55 professor.
Fifteen Questions: Joe Harris ’72 on Math 55, the Dudley Co-op, and Failure
The mathematician sat down with Fifteen Minutes to discuss Math 55’s notorious reputation and his own experience at Harvard. “In math, it’s rare that you would decide to fix on a specific concrete goal, and then either achieve it or not,” he says. “Usually, it’s a matter of exploration.”
Fifteen Questions: Manja Klemenčič on Student Agency, Pre-Professionalism, and Small Acts of Kindness
The sociologist sat down with FM to discuss the most pressing issues in higher education today and student agency, even in the smallest acts. “You don’t need to change the entire world already while you’re at Harvard,” she says. “You can do small things every day and that matters also.”
Manja 15Q Portrait
Manja Klemenčič is an associate senior lecturer in Sociology and researcher on higher education, student agency, and student-centered learning.
Fifteen Questions: Melanie Matchett Wood on Number Theory, Failing, and Her Lifetime Supply of Hagoromo Chalk
The mathematician sat down with Fifteen Minutes to talk about breaking barriers for women in pure math. “If you’re not ever getting rejections or failing, you’re not trying hard or interesting enough things,” she says.
Melanie Matchett Wood
Melanie Matchett Wood is a professor of mathematics at Harvard University and a Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
Fifteen Questions: Morgan Ridgway on Urban Indigeneity, Solange, and Linear Time
The historian sat down with Fifteen Minutes to discuss the way their archival work, poetry, and performance art inform each other. “I think less about events happening sequentially, and more about these moments of aspiration,” they say.
Fifteen Questions: Glenda Carpio on Humor, Hum 10, and the Failure of “Success” Stories
The Chair of the English Department sat down with Fifteen Minutes to discuss rethinking the literary canon and immigrant narratives. “I was the lucky one, I survived,” she says. “What happens to those who are undone by the violence of having to be uprooted?"