Contributing writer
Ciana J. King
Latest Content
Through Oral History, Students Listen to the Silences
“Memory changes because life experience has changed, but so does the language and ideas available for someone through which to understand that experience,” says Professor Katie Holmes. “Meaning is always individual and cultural, therefore, it is historically located.”
Up Close with Lee Smith
Smith’s enduring attachment to his time is representative of his broader artistic philosophy, one of introspection and intimacy. Part of that philosophy emerged from an encounter with the groundbreaking photojournalist Gordon Parks during his visit to the yearbook staff.
Most Likely to Be President: Arjun Akwei
But Arjun is no joke. Despite having a laid-back vibe, he speaks evenly, holds himself with strong posture, and maintains a piercing gaze.
Fifteen Questions: Naomi Oreskes on Climate Change Denial, Apolitical Scientists, and Her Favorite Rocks
The historian and her dog sat down with Fifteen Minutes to talk about disinformation, climate change, and rocks. “Generally people don’t act — especially if you’re asking people to change how they're living, how they’re behaving, how they’re thinking — if you just give them dry scientific information,” Oreskes says.
Goodbye, Beloved
To me, Sethe was the literary embodiment of womanhood — the queenly woman with blood on her hands and a tree scarred into her back. She was the personification of repression and “rememory,” the manifestation of a traumatic past into the present.
‘That Class Shut Harvard Down’: The Founding of African and African American Studies
In the late 1960s, Black students's advocacy led to the creation of what is now Harvard's African and African American Studies Department. What does the campaign to found Black studies have to teach people discontented with the university, society, and world they find themselves in?
Poetry, Politics, and Prayers: Digitizing HLS’ Prison Periodicals
HLS’ basement houses several prison periodicals housed in Harvard’s archives, and when Jessica N. Chapel found them, they were in dire need of preservation.
The Universal Design Playground — A Space for Children of All Abilities to Play
With its grand opening in December 2021, the playground is the first in Cambridge to fully incorporate Universal Design — the concept that an entire play structure should be accessible for all.
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.”
(Comic) Stripping Down the Patriarchy
These scenes are from the panels in “Breaking Out,” one of the stories in the July 1970 edition of “It Ain’t Me Babe Comix,” in which popular female comic characters revolt against the men dominating their lives and defy their creators. The “uprooted sisters” team up “into small groups not unlike witch covens” and go picketing for women’s history and self-defense classes. They consider if they should “take that acid we’ve been saving and commune with the moon,” while Supergirl frees the inmates of a women’s prison.
Stripped Down: A Look Inside the Harvard Undergraduate Pole Dancing Club
The newly formed Harvard Undergraduate Pole Dancing Club seeks to "empower" its members, particularly people from "historically disempowered identities."
A Centuries-Old Papier-Mâché Octopus Swims Northwest, Finds a “A Second Life”
After decades of collecting dust in a Harvard Museum of Natural History classroom, a life-size papier-mâché model of an octopus has found a new home. With each of its looping tentacles stretching out about eight feet, it lies suspended above a grand staircase in the spacious, modern, glassy foyer of Harvard’s Northwest Building, home to labs, classrooms, and offices for Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
'Termite Justice': Prison Justice Advocacy, Within and Outside Harvard's Gates
Whether Harvard has an obligation to educate students about mass incarceration — and how it should do so — is a question that looms large.
To Be a Good Neighbor
At biweekly meetings, City Life/Vida Urbana members convene with residents and Project No One Leaves, a canvassing group led by Harvard Law School students, to address housing-related issues in the Boston area.
Putting Used Books to Use
The bookstore is home to thousands of used, rare, and out-of-print books, the purchases of which fund scholarships for its namesake, Bryn Mawr College.
