Feb. 29, 1672 – President Charles Chauncy dies in office.

Feb. 10, 1853 – Jared Sparks steps down as President; James Walker, Class of 1814, immediately succeeds him to become Harvard’s 18th President. Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison describes Walker as “stone deaf.” Ironically, in the fall of 1856, music becomes the only new subject added to the curriculum during his presidency.

Feb. 5, 1903 – The Semitic Museum formally opens.

Feb. 12, 1942 – Physical Education and Athletics Director William J. Bingham ’16 announces a program of compulsory exercise – four hours per week – for all undergraduates, to prepare them for military service or other war duties. The program, which takes effect on April 6, emphasizes “physical conditioning and hardening” instead of recreation, Bingham explains. Exempted are members of the current senior class and those whose physical condition prohibits strenuous activity.

February 1943 – The presidents of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton jointly announce that because of wartime conditions, intercollegiate athletics cannot proceed as usual. The statement sets forth a general operational framework for the three institutions, which remain free to make their own particular plans. While many details are yet to be worked out, Harvard for the moment plans to stress intramurals and recognizes that certain sports may have to be suspended for the duration of the war.

Feb. 16, 1950 – A service in the Memorial Church, a Phillips Brooks House tea and open house, and an Eliot House banquet mark the 50th anniversary of the opening of Phillips Brooks House (actual opening: Jan. 23, 1900).

– From the Harvard Historical Calendar, a database compiled by Marvin Hightower

The Semitic Museum is sponsoring a free, docent-led tour of “The Houses of Ancient Israel: Domestic, Royal, Divine” today (March 8) at 12:15 p.m. The museum, located at 6 Divinity Ave., maintains collections of archaeological materials from the Ancient Near East. The current exhibit explores everyday life in ancient Israel during the Iron Age.

The Semitic Museum will sponsor a docent-led tour of its “Ancient Egypt: Magic and the Afterlife” and “Cyprus, the Cesnola Collection” exhibits on April 12 at 12:15 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.

Chorus auditions this weekend

The 150-voice Harvard-Radcliffe Chorus will hold auditions for all voice parts this Saturday (Sept. 15 from 1 to 5 p.m.) and Sunday (Sept. 16 from 6 to 10 p.m.). The audition consists of scales, ear and pitch memory exercises, and sight-reading. Auditions are on a first-come, first-served basis, and take about 10 minutes. A prepared piece is not required.

This year’s repertoire includes Handel’s “Coronation Anthems”

and Brahms’ “Ein deutsches Requiem.” Rehearsals will be held Monday evenings from 7 to 10 p.m.

For more information, visit http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~hrc/, or contact Associate Conductor of the Harvard-Radcliffe Choruses Kevin Leong at (617) 495-0693 or kleong@fas.harvard.edu.

‘No End in Sight’ to screen at Kennedy School tonight

A screening of the new documentary “No End in Sight,” which chronicles American policy in Iraq, will be held today (Sept. 13) at the Kennedy School of Government. Free and open to the public, the program will begin at 6 p.m. at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum. Samantha Power, Anna Lindh Professor of Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy, will introduce the film.

Watch the live Web stream at http://www.iop.harvard.edu/events_forum.html. To view this and other events after their conclusion, visit the forum archive at http://ksgaccman.harvard.edu/iop/events_forum_listview.asp.

‘Stuff Sale’ for good cause to take over Science Center lawn

Harvard Habitat for Humanity’s upcoming multiday “Stuff Sale” will feature more than $80,000 of used furniture, electronics, appliances, storage containers, games, sports equipment, mirrors, vases, clothes, and more. All proceeds support Harvard Habitat for Humanity’s domestic and international home-building trips throughout the year.

The sale will be held on the Harvard Science Center lawn Sept. 15-16 from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.

Day of Service on Sept. 29 to celebrate civic engagement

Members of the Harvard community are invited to join in the first University-Wide Day of Service on Sept. 29. A student-led initiative, the Day of Service will foster collaboration across the University in a collective effort to promote civic engagement and social awareness through meaningful service. The event represents a new partnership between the Harvard Graduate Council (HGC), the Undergraduate Council (UC), and the Phillips Brooks House Association. All three student-run organizations share a common commitment to fostering social responsibility and civic engagement. The Day of Service will bring together Harvard undergraduate and graduate students, alumni, as well as faculty and staff, to volunteer at service agencies such as Habitat for Humanity and the Greater Boston Food Bank.

The day will begin with a kickoff breakfast for volunteers with Harvard University President Drew Faust in the morning. After completing community service projects, volunteers will be invited back to campus in the afternoon for a barbecue with Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino and other invited guests. To learn more — and to sign up to volunteer — visit http://www.dayofservice.harvard.edu/.

Visit Ancient Egypt on lunch break

The Semitic Museum will sponsor a docent-led lunchtime tour of its “Ancient Egypt: Magic and the Afterlife” and “Cyprus, the Cesnola Collection” exhibits on Wednesday (Sept. 19). The free tour begins at 12:15 p.m. Call (617) 495-4631 for more information.

Reading and Study Strategy course to kick off next month

Beginning Oct. 10, Harvard’s Bureau of Study Counsel (BSC) will begin offering its fall Reading and Study Strategy seminar. Through readings, films, and classroom exercises, students learn to read more purposively, selectively, and with greater speed and comprehension. Hour-long sessions will be held Monday, Wednesday, and Friday (Oct. 10-Nov. 9) at 4 p.m. and Monday through Friday (Oct. 15-Nov. 1) at 8 a.m. The cost is $150.

To register, visit the Bureau at 5 Linden St., or call (617) 495-2581 for more information.

— Compiled by Andrew Brooks

HARVARD BRIDGE PROGRAM, IOP RECOGNIZE 23 NEW CITIZENS

The Harvard Bridge to Learning and Literacy Program, and the Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics (IOP) recognized 23 Harvard employees who have become U.S. citizens this year with an April 10 ceremony at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum. Part of the Harvard Bridge program, the Citizenship Preparation Program provides one-on-one tutoring for University employees in the process of becoming U.S. citizens. Volunteers from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences serve as tutors.

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy sent a message of congratulations via video to the new citizens and the directors of the IOP and the Bridge Program. The new citizens (from 14 countries) and their families attended the event.

CASH RECEIPTS OFFICE SET FOR MAY MOVE

Next month, the Cash Receipts Office will move to its new home on the mezzanine level at 1033 Massachusetts Ave. The new space, a short walk from the office’s current location in Holyoke Center, will open for business on May 12. The last day the office will be open for business in Holyoke Center is May 9. The main phone number (617-496-8332) will not change.

For departments that still want to drop off their checks or correspondence at Holyoke Center, a mail slot has been created in the seventh-floor mailroom. The mailroom staff will not provide receipts for deposits; those will be sent from the Cash Receipts Office once the deposits have been processed. Please note that no cash can be brought to the mailroom.

There will be no facility at Holyoke Center for cash deposits. The Cash Receipts Office is currently working on a Harvard Square solution as an alternative to 1033 Massachusetts Ave. More information will be announced as it becomes available.

CHILDREN INVITED TO ‘SARCOPHAGI UP-CLOSE’ AT SEMITIC MUSEUM

The Semitic Museum will present “Sarcophagi Up-Close,” a 50-minute program for school-age children (grades four through six) on April 22 at 10 a.m. and April 24 at 2 p.m. The cost is $3 per child and the program is limited to the first 20 children. Additionally, on April 23 the museum is offering a free, noontime tour of the Egypt gallery. For more information, call (617) 495-4631.

MEMORIAL CHURCH AUCTION TONIGHT

The Memorial Church will hold its third annual charity auction to benefit the grants committee this evening (April 17) at the Sheraton Commander Hotel (across from the Cambridge Common) beginning at 6:30 p.m. Admission is $10 at the door ($5 with student ID).

Included among the silent and live auction items are a dinner party with the Rev. Professor Peter J. Gomes at Sparks House; a candlelit dinner with entertainment under the Commencement tent on the south porch of the Memorial Church; vacations in Montana and Florida; a weekend stay in a deluxe apartment in Charlestown; luxury hotel and bed-and-breakfast accommodations; signed prints by Josef Albers of the Bauhaus school, and Susumu Yamaguchi, the woodblock printing artist (all from the collection of Diana Rockefeller); memorabilia from “Law and Order,” “The Wire,” and “Monk”; acting classes with the American Repertory Theatre Company’s Jeremy Geidt; gift certificates to restaurants, bookstores, and retail shops; tickets to museums, concerts, and shows; autographed books; and other one-of-a-kind donations. All proceeds will benefit local nonprofit groups.

LAST CALL FOR ARTISTS

The Harvard Neighbors Gallery has extended its deadline for the submission of portfolios to May 1. Portfolio submissions will be considered from eligible Harvard-affiliated artists (including current or retired full- or part-time faculty and staff and their spouses or partners). Artists will be selected to show their work during month-long exhibitions (solo or group shows). Eligible artists are invited to submit 10 digital images representing the body of work for a show, a brief artist’s statement, and contact information.Complete submission specifications are available at http://www.neighbors.harvard.edu, or by calling (617) 495-4313.

EAST ASIAN LEGAL STUDIES ACCEPTING SUBMISSIONS UNTIL MAY 2

The East Asian Legal Studies (EALS) program at Harvard Law School (HLS) is accepting submissions of papers for the Yong K. Kim ’95 Memorial Prize. The prize is awarded to the author of the best paper concerning the law or legal history of the nations and peoples of East Asia or concerning issues of law as it pertains to U.S.-East Asia relations. The author should also embody Yong Kim’s interest in and enthusiasm for fostering U.S.-East Asian understanding, plan a career that will further advance this understanding, and have made contributions to EALS while a student. The paper can be written in conjunction with a course, seminar, or independent study project at the Law School.

The prize includes a cash award and will be announced at Commencement. Submissions (two bound or stapled copies) must be received at the EALS office, Pound Hall, Room 426, HLS, by May 2 and should include the student’s name, School, class level, e-mail address, and phone number. Contact Juliet Bowler at jbowler@law.harvard.edu with questions.

— Compiled by Andrew Brooks

HARVARD-AFFILIATED MEEI NAMED ONE OF AMERICA’S BEST HOSPITALS

The 2008 edition of America’s Best Hospitals, published by U.S. News & World Report, assigned Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary (MEEI) a top-five ranking in two categories. The hospital ranked No. 4 in ophthalmology and No. 5 in ear, nose, and throat care. MEEI has attained a U.S. News & World Report top-five ranking in either one or both of its specialties since the magazine began publishing its annual survey of hospitals in 1990. Founded in 1824, MEEI is an affiliate of Harvard Medical School.

HUDS AND CRIMSON CATERING RECOGNIZED WITH AWARDS

In early July, Harvard University Dining Services’ (HUDS) Crimson Catering received the Grand Prize and People’s Choice Award at the meeting of the National Association of College & University Food Services (NACUFS). In addition, HUDS Executive Director Ted Mayer was elected at-large director for NACUFS and will serve on the association’s board of directors for two years.

DOCENTS SOUGHT FOR SEMITIC MUSEUM

The Semitic Museum is currently seeking volunteer docents for the coming year. Docents will provide guided tours to school groups and the general public on the museum’s collection of archaeology of the ancient Near East. The current exhibits include artifacts from ancient Israel, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Cyprus. The initial training program will provide guidance from experts in the field. The full training program runs from Sept. 9, 2008, to May 12, 2009. For more information, contact Dena Davis at davis4@fas.harvard.edu. Applications are due by Sept. 1 and can be found at www.fas.harvard.edu/~semitic/docentintro.html.

AGREEMENT TO DOUBLE NUMBER OF SCHOLARSHIPS FOR COLOMBIAN STUDENTS

A new scholarship program for Colombians studying at Harvard University was recently formalized in an agreement between the University and Colfuturo, a Colombian foundation that makes funds available to top students from the South American nation. In the new agreement, Colfuturo will commit up to $1 million annually to finance the studies of Colombians who have been accepted at Harvard.

In the past decade, an average of 35 students from Colombia per year have attended Harvard, but under the new agreement, that average could increase to between 70 and 80 students per year, according to Margot Gill, administrative dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, who also manages the Harvard-Colombian Fund. This fund currently has a market value of $4.3 million. Harvard has recently doubled the size of its endowment holdings dedicated to scholarships for Colombian students.

HU PRESS PUBLISHING MODERN GREEK STUDIES SERIES

The Harvard Modern Greek Studies program recently announced a new publication series titled “Harvard Early Modern and Modern Greek Studies,” published by Harvard University Press. The research focus and scholarly scope of the series aims to be highly interdisciplinary and comparative. The publication series will produce two groups of books: monographs on aspects of Greek literature, history, and culture in the period between the 12th century and postmodernism; and editions of texts, with commentaries, English translations, and introductions.

HABITAT FOR HUMANITY SALE SET FOR AUGUST

The annual Harvard Habitat for Humanity (HHH) stuff sale is back again for 2008! The event features thousands of pieces of furniture, rugs, chairs, school supplies and books, and more. All proceeds support HHH’s mission to aid disadvantaged families who wish to become independent homeowners. The sale will be held on the Harvard Science Center lawn on the following dates: Aug. 23, 24, 30 and 31, and Sept. 6-10, 13, and 14 from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. For more information or to view items before the sale, e-mail Irina Perjar, iperjar@harvard.edu.

HARVARD POPS BAND TO HOLD SUMMER CONCERTS

The Harvard Summer Pops Band will hold concerts this summer on July 30 and Aug. 3. “Invitation to a Dance: Music for Dance Through the Ages” will feature selections from “The King and I,” “The Nutcracker Suite,” and the swing music of Glenn Miller. The July 30 concert begins at 4 p.m. in Harvard Yard; the Aug. 3 concert begins at 3 p.m. at the Hatch Memorial Shell in Boston.

Both concerts are free and open to the public. For more information, call (617) 496-2263 or visitwww.hcs.harvard.edu/~hub/events/summerband.shtml.

EXTENSION SCHOOL PROVIDES OVERVIEW OF PROGRAMS

The Harvard Extension School will hold a general information session on Aug. 19. The event will provide an overview of the School, and feature independent sessions on degree and certificate programs.

The information session is open to anyone interested in applying to a degree or certificate program, taking a course, or hoping to learn more about the Extension School. In addition, representatives from the career and academic resource center will be on hand and distance-learning staff members will demonstrate online courses.

The information session will be held at the Harvard Science Center from 6 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. Refreshments will be served. Limited parking will be available beginning at 5 p.m. at Broadway Garage, 7 Felton St. located near the Science Center. To register for the event or for more information, contact events@dcemail.harvard.edu.

A.R.T. BRINGS SHAKESPEARE TO THE SQUARE

Shakespeare comes to Harvard Square this August, with outdoor theater performances by the American Repertory Theatre (A.R.T.), Actors’ Shakespeare Project, and Revels. The following performances take place at Winthrop Park:

• A.R.T. performs Shakespeare Slams, which feature a blending of Shakespeare works with modern contemporary music, movement, and culture. Directed by A.R.T. member Thomas Derrah, the performances will be held on Aug. 1 at 6 p.m., Aug. 2 at 4:30 p.m., and Aug. 3 at 7:45 p.m.,

• Actors’ Shakespeare Project performs “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” a classic tale in which six actors play 16 roles dancing back and forth between male and female, pursuer and pursued. Performances will be on Aug. 1 at 7:15 p.m., Aug. 2 at 7:30 p.m., and Aug. 3 at 3 p.m.

• Revels will re-create their environs to match that of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, filling the area with musicians, jugglers, dancers, and other performers.

Throughout the square, local businesses will participate in creating an unforgettable Elizabethan scene, coordinated with A.R.T. The event is presented by the Harvard Square Business Association and is free and open to the public. All performances take place at Winthrop Park, located at the corner of JFK and Mt. Auburn streets.

SUMMER SCHOOL CHORUS TO PERFORM

The Harvard Summer School Chorus will perform Franz Schubert’s Mass in E flat at 8 p.m. on Aug. 1 at Sanders Theatre. Led by director William Wright, the 120-person chorus is composed of Harvard Summer School students and members of the community.

The chorus will be joined by an orchestra and will feature soloists Jayne West, soprano; Gale Fuller, mezzo-soprano; Aaron Sheenan, tenor; and Robert Honeysucker, bass. The concert is free and open to the public. Seating is limited and available on a first-come, first-served basis.

‘KIDNEY KABARET’ LETS HARVARD FOLKS SING FOR CAUSE

A group of Harvard students, staff, and faculty, who have been rehearsing cabaret songs since March, are ready to use their talents for a good cause. Proceeds from “Kidney Kabaret” will defray medical expenses for a kidney transplant for the husband of fellow Extension School student Lauren LaRosa.

Songs from “Chicago,” “Hairspray,” and “La Cage aux Folles” among others will be performed 7:30 p.m. Friday (July 25) and Saturday (July 26) at First Church, 11 Garden St., Cambridge.

“Most of the songs hit a humorous note,” said LaRosa. “After all, laughter is the best medicine.”

Assisting LaRosa in creating “Kidney Kabaret” was Harvard instructor Pamela Murray. “Just because it’s for a good cause doesn’t mean people can’t have a good time,” Murray explained. “We want people to feel glad both because they’re giving someone a hand and because they are having a fun evening.”

LaRosa selected all the songs and has crafted them into a continuous program interspersed with some of the inspirational thoughts that have helped her cope with her husband’s illness.

Tickets are $25 for general admission and can be purchased in advance at www.brownpapertickets.com/event/37944 or at the door (check or exact change preferred).

DEADLINES FOR ONLINE AND FIRST PRINT ISSUE

The Harvard Gazette’s next online issue will be Aug. 21 (http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette). Deadlines are the Thursday prior to publication. For the first print issue of the academic year, Sept. 11, 2008, the deadline is two weeks prior to publication. Send news items to terry_murphy@harvard.edu. Send Calendar items to calendar@harvard.edu.

For the latest in Harvard news, visit http://www.harvard.edu.

HARVARD-AFFILIATED STUDY RUNS IN JOURNAL OF COMMUNITY PSYCHOLOGY

A new, Harvard-affiliated study on effective community partnerships (titled “Staying at the Table: Building Sustainable Community-Research Partnerships”) appears in the August 2008 issue of the Journal of Community Psychology. Authored by Assistant Professor of Psychiatry Nancy Rappaport, director of school-based programs at Cambridge Health Alliance (CHA); Margarita Alegría, director of the Center for Multicultural Mental Health Research at CHA and professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School (HMS); Norah Mulvaney-Day, research associate at the Center for Multicultural Mental Health Research and instructor in psychology at HMS; and Barbara Boyle, principal at a public elementary school in Cambridge the study analyzes the key principles to establish successful partnerships and build an alliance for educational systemic change.

The researchers were driven to action by the significant learning gaps seen in immigrant students. Frustrated by the lack of services available to address the achievement gap, the researchers worked to define problems in collaboration with school staff. Interventions were piloted, school resources were reviewed, and many project participants were interviewed at length to identify the barriers in serving these students.

Over the course of the study, which ran for four years, the researchers found that the management of expectations, particularly maintaining optimism in the face of negative experiences, is a key component of successful community-based partnerships. Learned optimism is a concept that helps to counteract feelings of despair by challenging the belief that a situation is permanent and pervasive. Reframing disappointments and identifying incremental positive change allow progress on seemingly large and entrenched problems.

DOCENTS SOUGHT FOR SEMITIC MUSEUM

The Semitic Museum is currently seeking volunteer docents for the coming year. Docents will provide guided tours to school groups and the general public on the museum’s collection of archaeology of the ancient Near East. The current exhibits include artifacts from ancient Israel, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Cyprus. The initial training program will provide guidance from experts in the field. The full training program runs from Sept. 9, 2008, to May 12, 2009. For more information, contact Dena Davis at davis4@fas.harvard.edu. Applications are due by Sept. 1 and can be found athttp://www.fas.harvard.edu/~semitic/docentintro.html.

HUCTW CHILDCARE FELLOWSHIPS AVAILABLE

The Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers (HUCTW) has announced that applications for the 2009 Childcare Fellowship are now available for download athttp://www.huctw.org/fund_childcare/2009_application.pdf. The fund covers a portion of day care, after-school care, and vacation/summer day camps. Please note that this fund does not cover private school tuition with the exception of preschool.

HUCTW accepts applications only once a year. Applications are due Sept. 26. For more information, visit http://www.huctw.org/fund_childcare/2009_instructions.pdf.

HABITAT FOR HUMANITY SALE BEGINS AUG. 23

The annual Harvard Habitat for Humanity (HHH) stuff sale is back again for 2008! The event features thousands of pieces of furniture, rugs, chairs, school supplies and books, and more. All proceeds support HHH’s mission to aid disadvantaged families who wish to become independent homeowners. The sale will be held on the Harvard Science Center lawn on the following dates: Aug. 23, 24, 30 and 31, and Sept. 6-10, 13, and 14 from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. For more information or to view items before the sale, e-mail Irina Perjar, iperjar@harvard.edu.

HMS TO HOST SECOND ‘FREECYCLE’ EVENT, DONATIONS SOUGHT

Organizers at Harvard Medical School (HMS) will host the School’s second “freecycle” event on Sept. 10 from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Those interested in participating are encouraged to donate any unneeded office supplies to the Tosteson Medical Education Center Building on Tuesdays (10 a.m. to 2 p.m.) and Thursdays (2 to 5 p.m.) prior to Sept. 10. The big event, meanwhile, will be held at the Courtyard Café at HMS.

Accepted donations include typical office supplies as well as books, coat hangers, desk organizers, lamps, light bulbs, magazines, mugs, and paper or plastic cups and plates.

HMS TO HOST QUANTITATIVE GENOMICS CONFERENCE, POSTER COMPONENT

The second annual Conference in Quantitative Genomics will be held Sept. 23-25 at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH). Hosted by the Program in Quantitative Genomics at the School, “Emerging Quantitative Issues in Parallel Sequencing” is supported with a grant from the National Cancer Institute and the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute.

The conference will be held in the Joseph B. Martin Conference Center at Harvard Medical School (HMS) and is co-sponsored by HSPH, HMS, and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, as well as corporate sponsors.

The focus of the conference will be to examine the interplay between emerging sequencing technologies, basic and population sciences, and data analysis methods. Geneticists, computational biologists, and statisticians will participate in discussions regarding applications of massive parallel sequencing.

All registrants are encouraged to participate in submitting abstracts for a poster session. The top abstracts will be selected for short talks to be presented at the conference or for abstract awards for travel assistance. To register or submit an abstract, visithttp://www.hsph.harvard.edu/research/pqg-annual-conference/index.html.

DEADLINE FOR FIRST PRINT ISSUE

The Harvard Gazette’s first print issue will be Sept. 11 (www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/). The deadline for this particular issue is two weeks prior to publication. Send news items to terry_murphy@harvard.edu. Send Calendar items to calendar@harvard.edu.

For the latest in Harvard news, visit www.harvard.edu.

The Semitic Museum is currently seeking volunteer docents for the coming year. Docents will provide guided tours to school groups and the general public on the museum’s collection of archaeology of the ancient Near East. The current exhibits include artifacts from ancient Israel, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Cyprus. The initial training program will provide guidance from experts in the field. The full training program began Sept. 9, although interested candidates may still join the Sept. 16 class. The training continues through May 12.

For more information, contact Dena Davis at davis4@fas.harvard.edu. Applications are due immediately and can be found at www.fas.harvard.edu/~semitic/docentintro.html.

JOINT CENTER ACCEPTING GRAMLICH FELLOWSHIP APPLICATIONS

The Joint Center for Housing Studies (JCHS) is accepting applications for the Edward M. Gramlich Fellowship in Community and Economic Development through Feb. 20. The fellowship provides master’s level Harvard students with the opportunity to spend a summer with JCHS faculty and NeighborWorks staff developing an analytical project suitable for publication as a working paper. The fellows will also present their research in Washington, D.C., at a policy briefing arranged by the center.

For more information, visit http://www.jchs.harvard.edu/education/student_opportunities.html.

ISRAELITE BREAD-MAKING DISCUSSION AT THE SEMITIC MUSEUM

On Tuesday (Feb. 17), the Semitic Museum will host a half-hour discussion (appropriate for grades three through six) on how ancient Israelites made bread — from planting to eating —and explore everyday life of the average villager 2,700 years ago. Students will also have the opportunity to handle original ceramic fragments and try to match them with whole vessels on display.

Registration is required and limited to 15 children per session, $2 per child. For more information, call (617) 495-4631 or e-mail Dena Davis at davis4@fas.harvard.edu.

KISSEL GRANTS ARE AVAILABLE

The Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics encourages Harvard College students to apply for Lester Kissel Grants in Practical Ethics to support research and writing that makes contributions to the understanding of practical ethics.

Grant recipients will be awarded up to $3,000, which can be used to cover expenses or as a stipend to enable recipients to pursue research in lieu of summer employment. Applications should include a description of the project and the applicant’s preparation for the project, a statement of the project’s potential value to the student and to the understanding of practical ethics, and a proposed budget.

The deadline for receipt of applications is March 16. For further information, contact Stephanie Dant at (617) 495-1336, or e-mail stephanie_dant@harvard.edu.

The Semitic Museum will host a lunchtime tour of “The Houses of Ancient Israel: Domestic, Royal, Divine” on May 21 at 12:15 p.m., offering a view of life in an ancient Near Eastern agricultural society. The exhibit — which displays family dwellings, palaces, and temples — is arranged in terms of the different types of ancient Israeli buildings and houses that were associated with the different levels of society.

“All glass is beautiful,” Belgian researcher Patrick Degryse said, gently turning a delicate, Roman-era vessel, its bluish sheen glowing under the fluorescent lights of the Semitic Museum’s basement collections.

Degryse, a research professor from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, was on one of his twice-yearly pilgrimages to Harvard to examine the Semitic Museum’s archaeological collections. Degryse is one of several international researchers investigating the properties of ancient glass and other materials to understand more about where and how they were manufactured and what the background says about their makers.

Together with Katherine Eremin, the Patricia Cornwall Conservation Scientist at the Harvard Art Museums’ Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies, Degryse is examining Roman-era glass to reconstruct trade patterns, looking at associated collections at the museums, which hold items of an artistic nature. He is also meeting with Eremin to discuss progress on a project to investigate glass from the ancient Mesopotamian city of Nuzi, which was destroyed in 1,350 B.C. The site is in modern Iraq.

Though less spectacular than the far younger Roman specimens, the glass from Nuzi is in some ways the crown jewel of the ancient glass collection, according to Joseph Greene, assistant director of the Semitic Museum.

Excavated in the 1930s by an international team that included Harvard archaeologist Richard Starr, who was associated with the Fogg Museum of Art, the Nuzi finds were divided between the Semitic Museum, which received historic-era materials, the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, which received prehistoric items, and the Harvard Art Museums, which received items created as art. At the Semitic Museum, the Nuzi glass collection has something going for it that some similar collections do not: clay tablets.

The excavation of Nuzi turned up not only glass artifacts, but also thousands of clay tablets, marked in cuneiform, one of the earliest forms of writing. The tablets describe the society of the day and, when combined with the material excavated from Nuzi, create a powerful resource for scholars seeking to understand the Mesopotamian region of more than three thousand years ago.

“Together, they tell us much, much more,” Greene said.

For example, the tablets say the city had large stores of gold and silver, as well as weapons. Though the excavations turned up some metal blades and tools like adze heads, very little silver and gold have been found. Researchers believe it was probably taken when Nuzi was looted in 1,350 B.C.

“We assume the Assyrians took all the gold,” Greene said.

In recent decades, unrest in the Middle East — especially in Iraq — made collections at the Semitic Museum and a handful of other institutions critically important resources for a generation of Mesopotamian scholars, Greene said. Nuzi is located near the Iraqi city of Kirkuk, in a region dangerous for archaeologists to visit. In addition, the looting of the Iraq Museum after the U.S. invasion of Iraq eight years ago created great uncertainty about other Nuzi materials.

“We can access materials [at Harvard] we can’t otherwise access,” Degryse said.

Degryse uses isotopic analysis to read the molecular signature of minerals in the glass’ raw material to trace it back to its source. So far, it seems that glass at the time of Nuzi was mainly manufactured in two regions: Mesopotamia and Egypt. Though the glass appears to have been widely traded, Egyptian glass doesn’t show up in Mesopotamia and Mesopotamian glass doesn’t show up in Egypt. Both, however, are present in ancient Greece, Degryse said.

Glassmaking goes back to at least 3,000 B.C. and perhaps earlier, Degryse said. Early glass was made by combining a silica source such as sand with plant ash. The plant ash was a key component because it reduced the melting point of the silica considerably, from 1,700 degrees Centigrade to 1,000 degrees, within reach of the furnaces of that period.

Because the technique of glass blowing wasn’t invented until 100 B.C., early glass vessels were made by applying glass around a clay mold, which was then broken up and removed when the glass cooled. The result was that early glass vessels tended to be thick-walled compared with the more delicate glass of the Roman era.

Early glass was a rare item, reserved for the elite, Eremin said. In Nuzi, it was often colored dark blue, perhaps to mimic the gemstones lapis lazuli or turquoise.

It was only later, during the Roman era, when manufacturing changed to replace plant ash with natron, a mineral soda, that glass became more common outside of the elite classes and began to be used for more functional purposes.

Modern analytical techniques like isotopic analysis weren’t even dreamed of by Richard Starr when the Nuzi materials were originally excavated 80 years ago. Greene said that points to the importance of maintaining collections such as those at the Semitic Museum because future scholars may have ways of analyzing materials that don’t presently exist.

“Archaeological collections are repositories to be interrogated with techniques that weren’t thought of when they were originally collected,” Greene said.

When he first stumbled on the field that would become his life’s work, Peter Der Manuelian was a fourth-grader in suburban Boston. The object of his attention was 5,000 years old.

He was transfixed by ancient Egypt. “It was the first time a subject grabbed me,” said Manuelian ’81, who is Harvard’s first Egyptologist since 1942, and who realizes that a childhood fascination with pyramids usually goes the way of dinosaurs and superheroes. “Most people grow out of it. I never did.”

It was the vast scale of things he fell in love with — the huge pyramids, and the three millennia that Egypt was an unwavering civilization of pharaohs and deities and social systems as stable as salt beds. Of course there were the mummies too, and the gorgeous art, and the puzzle of the language written in hieroglyphs.

Sustaining his interest through the years was the incomparable collection of Egyptian artifacts at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), where the young Manuelian signed up as a volunteer. The longest running archaeological dig in Egypt and the Sudan (1905 to 1947) was the joint Harvard-MFA Expedition, and thousands of artifacts came to be housed in Boston. “I was lucky to be local,” he said.

By the time Manuelian enrolled at Harvard College in 1977, he had already spent the first of what were to be numerous summers on expedition to Giza, a site filled with pyramids, temples, and tombs just west of modern Cairo. And he was in his second year as an assistant at the MFA in ancient Egyptian, Near Eastern, and Nubian art. So Manuelian was well primed for his next major Egyptological inspiration: Harvard itself.

A key mentor was Thomas Oden Lambdin, the College’s senior teacher of biblical Hebrew, Egyptian, and a host of other languages, and the closet thing Harvard had to an Egyptologist at the time. “He took me in,” said Manuelian, whose present-day office at the Semitic Museum is next to the office that Lambdin (now emeritus) once occupied. (For effect, there is a mummy nearby too.)

While still an undergraduate at Harvard (where he played varsity squash and bunked at Lowell House), Manuelian joined two Washington State University expeditions to Nagada, Egypt, and continued his research internships at the MFA. After earning an A.B., magna cum laude, in Near Eastern languages and civilizations, Manuelian studied at Germany’s Tübingen University on a Fulbright-Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst Fellowship.

Then he took up doctoral studies at the University of Chicago, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1990. After that, Manuelian spent three six-month stints in New Kingdom temples as a staff Egyptological artist on the University of Chicago’s Epigraphic Survey in Luxor, Egypt. (An epigrapher records and deciphers inscriptions.)

Returning to Boston in 1987, Manuelian rejoined the MFA as an Egyptian Department curator, lectured at Harvard, taught at Tufts University for a decade, and in 2000 became Giza Archives director at the MFA, a post he held until 2010. In July of that year, he was named Harvard’s Philip J. King Professor of Egyptology.

To find a parallel you have to go back almost 70 years to George A. Reisner, who was the University’s de facto Egyptologist from 1910 to 1942. He lived and worked in the fruitful tumult of an era of fervent artifact hunting in the ancient world. “He was my predecessor and my hero,” said Manuelian, who is writing a Reisner biography. “He was one of the first scientifically minded archaeologists.”

Reisner was so busy at Harvard Camp at Giza, and at 22 other dig sites, that he taught in Cambridge perhaps just a few semesters in his four decades with the University. “You could fault him” for teaching so little, said Manuelian — but not really. “He was interested in excavating.”

Manuelian is a digger too, one with a grasp of computer-based tools that capture and archive data and artifacts in 3-D layers of information. The showcase of that effort is the Giza Archives Project, a decade-long effort to assemble all extant Giza materials into a comprehensive, attractive, searchable whole. (There are 37,000 photographs, 1,200 spinning 360-degree panoramas, and more than 21,000 objects currently online.) “I’m a cataloger, basically,” said Manuelian. “I’m trying to bring diverse materials together.” Helping him have been the more than 400 students and volunteers that he has recruited for the work over the last decade, in addition to more than $3 million in support to the MFA from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

At the heart of the project is the mass of maps, excavation photographs, diaries, letters, tomb records, artifacts, and other finds from the 1904-1947 Harvard-MFA Giza Expedition. To enrich the database, Manuelian has scoured Giza collections in Egypt, Austria, Germany, France, the United States, and elsewhere.

Manuelian is working with colleagues from Dassault Systèmes to develop computer interfaces that let a student roam through a virtual Giza necropolis, plunge down a tomb shaft to look around, or click on a sarcophagus to link to layers of related documents. He uses these tools for teaching in Harvard’s Visualization Center at the Geological Museum, thanks to collaborations with the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences.

“It isn’t static,” he said of the new technology of digital excavation. “It’s an immersive way to teach Giza archaeology.”

In the basement of Harvard’s Semitic Museum, Alex Douglas looked at the pieces of baked clay in front of him, teasing out how they fit together into a small tablet, thousands of years old and marked with ancient cuneiform writing.

Finding a void in the reassembled tablet without a piece to fit into it, Douglas referred to a computer screen, where a photograph of the intact tablet was displayed.

“I want to make sure that wasn’t me getting the mend wrong,” Douglas said. “When I first took it out, there were a lot of pieces. I wasn’t sure where they all went.”

Douglas, a graduate student in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, is part of a long-running project at the Semitic Museum to conserve its unusual collection of thousands of clay tablet.

The project seems humble enough. A furnace on a table behind Douglas bakes a handful of the small tablets, just inches on a side. That is followed by two baths in de-ionized water, drying, and, for tablets whose internal moisture causes them to break in the process, reassembly.

Part of Alex Douglas' job is to see how the tablets fit together.

“They’re our responsibility, essentially forever,” said Adam Aja, the assistant curator at the museum and overseer of the project. “This is the best treatment you can do. They’ll be as stable as any ceramic pot and can be handled.”

Preparing tablets that are already thousands of years old to survive “forever” may warrant such a long-running project. The Semitic Museum has been baking tablets for 10 years and has another five or so to go, Aja said. The tablets themselves are part of an enormous collection of 5,000 clay tablets, some of them purchased, but most excavated in the 1920s and 1930s by a Harvard-led dig in the ancient city of Nuzi, near Kirkuk in present-day Iraq.

The tablets represent a unique record of the area 3,500 years ago, according to Anne Lohnert, a postdoctoral fellow in the Mahindra Humanities Center who works two days a week translating tablets. Rather than a grand telling of history, most of the tablets are records of everyday life, sales receipts, real estate transactions, and adoption records.

“You get a picture out of these hundreds of texts of life in these times,” Lohnert said.

Lohnert said she expected such a detailed accounting to be dull, but instead a rich picture of everyday life has emerged. Real estate transactions, for example, required the buyer to be adopted into the seller’s family. The tablets also highlight details of the government and the tax system, of marriage contracts, of buildings that need repair, and also of the importance of the military. Many tablets detail the armory’s inventory, warriors who died in battle, and even crippled horses.

“It doesn’t have the filter of a king saying, ‘I did this and that.’ Here, it’s the opposite. The king is absent,” Lohnert said.

Lohnert said she has been struck by the prominence of women in the records and of how they could be hard bargainers. She was also struck by the sheer volume of the tablets, unusual for a city of Nuzi’s size.

When they were created, the small, pillow-shaped tablets were left in the sun, which dries the exterior but can leave moisture in their thick middle. Over the years, some tablets were baked further, sometimes in a kiln set up in the field where they were excavated. That means the collection contains tablets in widely varying conditions, some baked, some not, some incompletely baked. Moisture remaining in the tablet can cause it to crack and crumble.

The baking project, designed by conservator Dennis Piechota, who remains an adviser, is intended to cure each tablet thoroughly and uniformly, and then soak it to eliminate any salts that could cause damage later. The kiln temperature is slowly raised to 675 degrees Celsius, held there for several days, and then slowly brought back down to room temperature. The tablets are placed in a fine metal mesh container before going into the furnace, to contain any pieces that may come off during the process and in the subsequent water baths. Any loose pieces are reattached by a cadre of trained students.

“You have to apply some artistry. It’s not a simple task. It requires practice,” Aja said. “It’s about precision, not speed.”

Douglas, in his second year of studying the Semitic language Akkadian, said he isn’t fluent enough to read the tablets casually as he works but could parse them if needed. It’s exciting, he said, to handle the original texts from an ancient era that he’s studying in the classroom.

“It’s fascinating work to do,” Douglas said. “It’s a chance to work with ancient artifacts up close.”

A group of 4,000-year-old clay tablets that survived looting, confiscation by U.S. customs officials, and the 9/11 terrorist attacks is shedding light on what everyday life was like in ancient Iraq as an agricultural official.

The tablets are from an archive near the city of Nippur, the Sumerian religious capital in southern Iraq. Benjamin Studevent-Hickman, a lecturer on Assyriology in Harvard’s Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, spent months translating the tablets, which are inscribed with cuneiform characters, and is preparing a monograph on his findings.

The tablets are the “papers” of an official named Aradmu, who held a high position, Studevent-Hickman said. He was an agricultural official, directing people who were plot managers, cultivators, and ox drivers.

The records show the activities of Aradmu and his family, whose members held similar positions. His father, Lugal-me-a, and his brothers are all represented in the tablets, Studevent-Hickman said. Aradmu appears to have attained the highest position.

The tablets detail routine operations of an agrarian society and include receipts for agricultural objects like oxen and donkeys. Grain loans were also common from officials such as Aradmu to those whose supply couldn’t get them through to another harvest. Those loans, several of which were made by Aradmu, carried a hefty interest rate of 33 percent, the standard interest rate for grain loans at the time, Studevent-Hickman said.

The translations complete an incredible journey for the tablets and the stories they hold. Officials are unsure of their exact origins, but they know the tablets were looted from an unknown site in southern Iraq sometime prior to the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001.

Officials know that much because the 145 Aradmu tablets were among a larger group of 302 tablets confiscated by U.S. customs when they were being smuggled into Newark, N.J. They were being stored in the basement of the Customs House at 6 World Trade Center when the building was destroyed in the attacks.

Weeks later, the boxes of tablets were retrieved from the basement and stored elsewhere until 2004. Before they were returned to Iraq, the Iraqi government gave permission for their restoration, a task undertaken by conservators Dennis and Jane Drake Piechota and funded by the U.S. State Department. Clay tablets like these were usually sun dried, not baked to a ceramic hardness, which provides additional protection against damage.

Harvard had earlier turned to the Piechotas for help conserving its own collection of 5,000 clay tablets. The Piechotas designed a process that combines long, slow baking in a small furnace followed by water baths to extract salts. Harvard is in the midst of a years-long process of baking its own tablets, but let the Piechotas use its furnace in the Semitic Museum basement to conserve these tablets. Harvard students were also employed to work on the project.

Before the baking process began, Studevent-Hickman and Professor of Assyriology Piotr Steinkeller assigned dates to all 302 tablets and transliterated them from cuneiform into Roman text. Studevent-Hickman then set to work translating the 145 tablets dealing with Aradmu before they were repatriated to Iraq in late 2010. He has continued to work with photographs of the tablets since then.

Studevent-Hickman has since learned that other parts of apparently the same archive wound up in Italy and at Cornell University via different paths. The texts in Italy have already been published. Lance Allred of the University of California, Los Angeles, will publish the Cornell tablets.

“Nothing beats having the tablets themselves,” Studevent-Hickman said. “I spent as much time as I could with them, knowing they were going to leave.”

Studevent-Hickman said he feels compelled to make the story of the tablets as complete as possible, so he has filed a Freedom of Information Act request with Immigration and Customs Enforcement for records about the investigation that resulted in the tablets’ confiscation in the first place. He is also scouring satellite images of the area near Nippur through 2001, provided by Professor Elizabeth Stone of Stony Brook University, to see if he can find signs of looting that might indicate where the tablets were unearthed.

“It’s part of my responsibility as a historian to publish as much as I can about these tablets since they left the ground,” Studevent-Hickman said.

There’s a mystery in the Syrian desert shielded by the conflict tearing apart the Middle Eastern nation.

In 2009, archaeologist Robert Mason of the Royal Ontario Museum was at work at an ancient monastery when, walking nearby, he came across a series of rock formations: lines of stone, stone circles, and what appeared to be tombs.

Mason, who talked about the finds and about archaeology at the monastery on Wednesday at Harvard’s Semitic Museum, said that much more detailed examinations are needed to understand the structures, but that he isn’t sure when he will be able to return to Syria, if ever.

Analysis of fragments of stone tools found in the area suggests the rock formations are much older than the monastery, perhaps dating to the Neolithic Period or early Bronze Age, 6,000 to 10,000 years ago. Mason also saw corral-like stone formations called “desert kites,” which would have been used to trap gazelles and other animals. The region is dry today (“very scenic, if you like rocks,” Mason said), but was probably greener millennia ago.

It was clear, Mason said, that the purpose of the stone formations was entirely different from that of the stone-walled desert kites. The kites were arranged to take advantage of the landscape and direct the animals to a single place, while the more linear stone formations were made to stand out from the landscape. In addition, he said, there was no sign of habitats.

“What it looked like was a landscape for the dead and not for the living,” Mason said. “It’s something that needs more work and I don’t know if that’s ever going to happen.”

The monastery is home to many frescoes — some badly damaged— depicting Christian scenes, female saints, and Judgment Day.

In a talk in 2010, Mason said he felt like he’d stumbled onto England’s Salisbury Plain, where Stonehenge is located, leading to the formations being dubbed “Syria’s Stonehenge.”

Mason also talked about the monastery, Deir Mar Musa. Early work on the building likely began in the late 4th or early 5th century. It was occupied until the 1800s, though damaged repeatedly by earthquakes. Following refurbishment in the 1980s and 1990s, it became active again.

Mason thinks the monastery was originally a Roman watchtower that was partially destroyed by an earthquake and then rebuilt. The compound was enlarged, with new structures added until it reached the size of the modern complex, clinging to a dry cliff face in the desert about 50 miles north of Damascus.

Mason was searching Roman watchtowers when he came across the stone lines, circles, and possible tombs.

The monastery is the home to many frescoes — some badly damaged — depicting Christian scenes, female saints, and Judgment Day. Mason also explored a series of small caves that he believes were excavated and lived in by the monks, who returned to the monastery for church services.

Mason said that if he’s able to return, he’d like to excavate the area under the church’s main altar, where he thinks there might be an entrance to underground tombs. He’s already received the permission of the monastery’s superior, who was recently ejected from the country.

On Saturday, Sept. 29, five Harvard University museums —the Harvard Art Museums, Harvard Museum of Natural History , Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology, Semitic Museum, and the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments — will open their doors free of charge along with 1,400 other participating museums nationwide during the eighth annual Museum Day Live!

The Harvard museums are emulating the free admission policy of the Smithsonian Institution’s Washington, D.C.-based facilities, which encourage learning and the spread of knowledge nationwide, and are partnering together to extend the offer.  Visitors who download tickets at Smithsonian.com/museumday are asked to select one participating museum for free admission. Museum Day Live! ticket holders who sign up for any one Harvard museum will gain free entry to all participating Harvard museums that day.

“Harvard’s world-renowned museums are unique assets to Cambridge and the greater Boston area, offering exhibitions, programs and lectures that are open to the public year-round,” said Christine Heenan, vice president for Harvard Public Affairs & Communications. “We are pleased to be part of a nationwide effort to make cultural education accessible to everyone and invite museum-goers to experience the breadth and depth of our museum collections.”  

Harvard’s museums are all within walking distance of each other at the north end of Harvard’s Cambridge campus. Open to the public, they are invaluable archives that extend the University’s teaching mission. See a full listing of Harvard museums and collections.

As part of a repair job 3,300 years in the making, Harvard’s Semitic Museum is seeking to undo some of the destruction wrought when Assyrians smashed the ancient city of Nuzi in modern-day Iraq, looting the temple and destroying artifacts.

In a high-tech project that would have been impossible even four years ago, technicians are attempting to re-create a 2-foot-long ceramic lion that likely flanked an image of the goddess Ishtar in a temple in long-ago Nuzi, which is the modern archaeological site of Yorghan Tepe. The project will blend fragments of the original statue held by the museum with pieces created through 3-D scans of its intact mirror image, which likely sat on Ishtar’s other side.

Adam Aja, assistant curator of collections, carefully examines a piece of the model.

Museum assistant director Joseph Greene said the project is partly driven by the desire to re-create the damaged lion and partly by a commitment to use the latest technology to probe the thousands of artifacts in the museum’s collection in search of new data from them.

“It’s important to devote our time and attention to objects we have in our collection and to apply the latest techniques, techniques not dreamed of when [the artifacts] were dug up,” Greene said. “There’s a continual curiosity: What more can we learn? What hasn’t been tried so far? Can we wring new data from objects that have been in our basement for 80 years?”

The museum holds just two pieces of the fragmentary lion, its front paws and a larger chunk of rump and back legs. Technicians from an outside contractor, Learning Sites Inc., visited the museum Friday to take digital photographs of the fragments to augment more than 120 images taken of the intact statue.

According to Donald Sanders, Learning Sites president, the 3-D models are made using the digital photos and sophisticated computer software that knits the images together. The images can be taken with ordinary cameras and even cellphone cameras, but they have to overlap, so that the software can sort and match the images to create the model. The more overlap there is, he said, the more data points the software has, and the more detailed the model can be. By taking more than 120 images of a relatively small statue like the lion, the resolution can be less than a millimeter.

A detail from the face of one of the statues. The temple where the lions originated likely contained at least four such statues, two standing and two crouching, flanking an image of the goddess Ishtar, according to Adam Aja.

The result, Sanders said, is a 3-D image that can be called up on a computer screen, rotated, zoomed in and out, and examined in detail by scholars off-site, providing accurate access to a museum artifact that they might otherwise have had to visit Cambridge to see. For display purposes, the digital models can be “printed out” on sophisticated, 3-D machines that sculpt from high-density foam.

The software will attempt to use the 3-D model of the intact lion to re-create the missing parts for the broken one. The intact original will be returned to its owner, the University of Pennsylvania, next year when the Semitic Museum’s second-floor exhibition hall is closed for renovation.

The temple where the lions originated likely contained at least four such statues, two standing and two crouching, flanking an image of the goddess Ishtar, according to assistant curator Adam Aja.

The two standing statues, owned by the Harvard University Art Museums, and the crouching lions have been on display at the Semitic Museum since 1998, the first time they’ve been together since the late Bronze Age destruction of the temple, Aja said.

Nuzi was inhabited by people called Hurrians near modern-day Kirkuk in Iraq. The city was destroyed by the Assyrians sometime between 1350 and 1300 B.C. Lions, which once roamed the area, were considered symbols of power, and reliefs depict rulers going on lion hunts.

The statues and their re-created models will be taken off display next year when the gallery is renovated, but will be public again when the work is completed, probably in 2014.

Dean Michael D. Smith of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) announced today that Jane Pickering has been named executive director of the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture. Pickering is currently deputy director and director of public programs at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History.

In the spring of 2012, Smith, in collaboration with faculty leaders of the individual FAS museums, announced a new consortium, the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture (HMSC), to develop a strong, coordinated public face for these collections. The FAS museums include some of the world’s premier collections in many disciplines. The faculty and staff associated with the collections are widely recognized for their scholarship.

“Harvard’s collections are some of our most unique and valuable resources, benefiting in some instances from centuries of faculty-led collection development and scholarship,” said Smith, who is also John H. Finley Jr. Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences. “The overriding goal of the new Harvard Museums of Science and Culture is to enable the easy utilization of these tremendous resources in our teaching and scholarship, and to share them with the public. Under the leadership of Jane Pickering, Harvard is launching a new model for university museums, one that has the potential to be so much more than the sum of its parts.”

The HMSC will draw on faculty and staff expertise, and the collections of six partner museums: the Museum of Comparative Zoology, the Harvard University Herbaria, and the Mineralogical and Geological Museum (which have already been collaborating as the Harvard Museum of Natural History), and the Semitic Museum, the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, and the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments.

At the Yale Peabody, Pickering was responsible for all public programming and exhibitions, front-of-house activities, and general administration.  Her career spans more than 20 years in museums at Oxford University (U.K.) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), as well as Yale, and she developed extensive expertise in outreach and education for a broad audience.

“I am thrilled to be joining Harvard. The University’s vision, to bring together the public activities of six world-class museums and their tremendous collections, is a unique opportunity, and it is an amazing privilege to be chosen to lead this exciting new venture,” Pickering said.

“Universities provide an environment that enables the type of risk taking and experimentation that together with a deep commitment to interdisciplinary work can foster truly great and innovative museum programming. Building on the successes of the past, I look forward to working with faculty, students, and staff at Harvard and the wider community to help realize that potential.”

Pickering will take over for interim executive director David Ellis. Ellis, a former president of Lafayette College and president of the Museum of Science, Boston, was brought in to lead HMSC on a temporary basis while a national search for a permanent executive director was conducted.

“I want to thank David Ellis for his outstanding leadership, and for providing his deep expertise and thoughtful guidance during this transition,” said Smith. “It is because of David’s work with the museum staff and faculty that we are able to embark on this new model for university museums.”

Pickering began her career as the assistant curator of zoological collections at the Oxford Museum of Natural History in 1989, before becoming director of the MIT Museum. In 2002, she became director of public programs at Yale’s Peabody, and in 2004 added the responsibilities of deputy director.

Pickering has an M.A. degree in natural sciences from the University of Cambridge and an M.S. in museum studies from the University of Leicester. She is an associate of the U.K. Museums Association and an alumna of the Getty Leadership Program’s Museum Management Institute.

James McCarthy, Alexander Agassiz Professor of Biological Oceanography, chaired the faculty executive board that worked to develop the HMSC consortium.

“Taking their lead from Dean Smith, and consulting widely with colleagues, the faculty directors of the six partner museums developed over the past year a bold vision for this new consortium. It was their hope that they could attract an accomplished museum director to head this venture, and I believe that Dean Smith and they chose extremely well with Jane Pickering. Her broad experience in university-based museums, from curator to director, and her accomplishments in each of these roles bodes well for a swift and steady launch of the HMSC under her leadership,” McCarthy said.

The executive director has overall responsibility for the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture. In collaboration with faculty leaders of the parent museums and key stakeholders, the executive director is responsible for the public-facing functions of the museums, including exhibits, education, public programs, development, and administration and operations.

“This new era of coordination of the exhibition and outreach programs of the FAS museums on Oxford and Divinity avenues offers exciting new opportunities for teaching and scholarship within Harvard and for the public who use these museums,” McCarthy said.  “Faculty within the departments associated with the museums, as well as other faculty all across the FAS, will appreciate the new ease of access to these resources for use in Harvard courses. Moreover, the public, from school students and teachers to interested adults, will benefit from new windows into the research of faculty who know and understand the value of the objects and specimens in these museums’ world-class collections.”

In recent years, DNA analysis has shed light on the parents of Egypt’s most famous pharaoh, the boy king Tutankhamun, known to the world as King Tut. Genetic investigation identified his father as Akhenaten and his mother as Akhenaten’s sister, whose name was unknown.

French Egyptologist Marc Gabolde offered a different interpretation of the DNA evidence on Thursday. Speaking at Harvard’s Science Center, Gabolde said he’s convinced that Tut’s mother was not his father’s sister, but rather his father’s first cousin, Nefertiti.

Nefertiti was already known to be Akhenaten’s wife and in fact the two had six daughters. Gabolde believes they also had a son, Tutankhamun, and that the apparent genetic closeness revealed in the DNA tests was not a result of a single brother-to-sister mating, but rather due to three successive generations of marriage between first cousins.

“The consequence of that is that the DNA of the third generation between cousins looks like the DNA between a brother and sister,” said Gabolde, the director of the archaeological expedition of Université Paul Valery-Montpellier III in the Royal Necropolis at el-Amarna. “I believe that Tutankhamun is the son of Akhenaten and Nefertiti, but that Akhenaten and Nefertiti were cousins.”

Gabolde’s talk, “Unknown Aspects of Tutankhamun’s Reign, Parentage, and Tomb Treasure,” was sponsored by Harvard’s Semitic Museum and the Harvard Department of Anthropology. It was hosted by Peter Der Manuelian, the Philip J. King Professor of Egyptology.

Tutankhamun was a pharaoh some 3,300 years ago. He was made pharaoh at age 8 or 9 and ruled for about 10 years. In his talk, Gabolde covered some of the scarce known details of his life and his burial.

Tut’s tomb, Gabolde said, was not intended as such. The real — and undiscovered — tomb, he said, was probably under construction when he died at 19, and is likely somewhere in the Valley of Kings, on the Nile. The place where he was actually buried was probably not intended for a royal burial but hurriedly prepared when Tut died unexpectedly, most likely of an infection that took hold when he broke his leg.

The burial mask of Tutankhamun, known to the world as King Tut.

“Nobody could imagine he would die so young,” Gabolde said.

Other details of Tut’s life, which Gabolde has pieced together from carved images and inscriptions, include a military campaign in Syria, in which he likely didn’t personally take part. Tut also was interested in Nubia, a region in southern Egypt and northern Sudan. Inscriptions on a fan that belonged to Tut showed him hunting ostriches, whose feathers were used to make the fan. In addition, Gabolde said, a staff found in Tut’s tomb had inscriptions that showed it was made of a tall reed, cut by Tut himself in a city on the Nile delta.

Gabolde also traced an ornament that was found with Tut when he was discovered in 1922, but had since disappeared. Gabolde said he believes the golden hawk-head clasp, part of a broad collar worn by Tut, is in a private collection, sold by Tut discoverer Howard Carter to pay for surgery later in his life. The rest of the broad collar was stolen during World War II, Gabolde said.