Curated category
Harvard University faculty
- Kurt VonnegutKurt Vonnegut survived the firebombing of Dresden by hiding in a meat locker three stories underground, surrounded by hanging cadavers.
- Alvin HansenAlvin Harvey Hansen was born on the 23rd of August 1887 in Viborg, South Dakota, the son of a farmer. He died in 1975 having done more to shape American…
- Carl SaganCarl Sagan grew up in a modest Bensonhurst apartment with parents who, by his own account, "knew almost nothing about science." Yet it was precisely those…
- Henry Wadsworth LongfellowHenry Wadsworth Longfellow published his first poem at age 13 in the Portland Gazette on the 17th of November, 1820. It was a patriotic four-stanza piece…
- James Wood (critic)James Douglas Graham Wood was born on the 1st of November 1965 in Durham, England, and by his mid-twenties he had made himself into one of the most…
- Henry KissingerHenry Kissinger arrived in New York City on the 5th of September, 1938, a 15-year-old Jewish refugee who had fled Germany with his family just weeks before.
- Herbert MarcuseHerbert Marcuse was born on the 19th of July, 1898, in Berlin, into an upper-middle-class Jewish family well integrated into German society.
- Jaan PuhvelJaan Puhvel was born in Tallinn, Estonia, on the 24th of January 1932, into a country that would not stay his home for long.
- David LandesDavid Saul Landes spent decades at Harvard asking a question that made many scholars uncomfortable: why did some nations grow rich while others stayed poor?
- Janet YellenJanet Yellen grew up in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, in a row house where her father Julius, a family physician, ran his practice out of the ground floor.
- Walter BurkertWalter Burkert was born on the 2nd of February 1931 in Neuendettelsau, Germany, and over the course of a long career he changed how the modern world thinks…
- Joseph SchumpeterJoseph Alois Schumpeter was born on the 8th of February, 1883, in Triesch, a small town in Habsburg Moravia, in what is now the Czech Republic.
- Oliver Hart (economist)Oliver Hart walked into a courtroom not to give testimony about a crime, but to explain what it means to truly own something.
- George SartonGeorge Sarton buried his life's work in a garden in Belgium. It was August 1914, and German soldiers were advancing on Ghent.
- Edwin MuirEdwin Muir was born on the 15th of May 1887 at the farm of Folly in Deerness, a parish in Orkney, and in his own words he arrived in Glasgow in 1901 feeling…
- Joseph WeizenbaumJoseph Weizenbaum built one of the most unsettling programs in the history of computing, and it unsettled him most of all.
- Olivier BlanchardOlivier Blanchard arrived at the International Monetary Fund as its chief economist in September 2008. He started the job two weeks before Lehman Brothers…
- Joseph HenrichJoseph Henrich began his adult life not in a university laboratory but in an aerospace engineering role at General Electric Aerospace in Springfield…
- Stephen GreenblattStephen Greenblatt once recalled the moment he realized the term "New Historicism" had taken on a life of its own. When he heard that American universities…
- Gerald HoltonGerald James Holton was born on the 23rd of May 1922, in Berlin, Germany. He grew up in a Jewish family where his father worked as an attorney specializing…
- Elliot ForbesElliot Forbes entered the world on the 20th of August 1917, into a family that defined Boston's cultural elite. His father Edward Forbes directed Harvard's…
- Annemarie SchimmelAnnemarie Schimmel was born in Erfurt, Germany, on the 7th of April 1922, the daughter of a postal worker named Paul and his wife Anna.
- Cynthia DworkCynthia Dwork holds a black belt in taekwondo, and it turns out that discipline maps neatly onto her scientific career. Born on the 27th of June, 1958, Dwork…
- Melissa DellMelissa Dell grew up in Enid, Oklahoma. Her parents worked as civilian contractors at Vance Air Force Base. They managed the parts shop and ran a daycare…
- Paul HindemithPaul Hindemith was born in Hanau, near Frankfurt, on the 16th of November 1895, and within two decades he would be playing concertmaster at the Frankfurt…
- Daniel Patrick MoynihanDaniel Patrick Moynihan shined shoes at Pennsylvania Station as a boy during the Great Depression, in the same building he would later spend decades fighting…
- Erwin PanofskyErwin Panofsky looked at a fifteenth-century Flemish painting of a man and a woman in a dim room and saw something no one else had seen: a legal contract.
- Frank KermodeFrank Kermode was born on the 29th of November 1919 on the Isle of Man, the only son of a delivery truck driver and a former waitress, in a family he later…
- George SteinerFrancis George Steiner was born on the 23rd of April 1929 in Neuilly-sur-Seine near Paris. His right arm withered from birth yet his mother insisted he use…
- Charles RosenCharles Welles Rosen was born on the 5th of May, 1927, in New York City, the son of a Russian-Jewish immigrant architect and a semiprofessional actress who…