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.

This is the third of four reports echoing key themes of The Harvard Campaign, examining what the University is accomplishing in those areas.  

Innovation? That was not always one of Harvard’s goals. When it opened in the 17th century, New England’s first college was an institution for educating ministers and lawyers, offering a sound classical curriculum, with facility in Latin required for entering freshmen.

In recent decades, “Harvard” and “innovation” have melded to such a degree that those two words might well be spelled the same. Pressing for the new to solve the old has entered the fabric of the curriculum, from Harvard’s strong humanities and the arts (where digital frontiers are being breached) to its probing sciences, whether pure, applied, or social.

“Harvard is about possibilities,” said President Drew Faust in her remarks Sept. 10 opening the academic year. “Here, it’s possible to change how our successors will think about learning and teaching.” She delivered similar comments in launching The Harvard Campaign last Saturday.

The Harvard innovation picture can reflect a solo effort, as in the case of Olenka Polak ’15, whose app, myLINGO, can translate foreign movies in real time. Or innovation can be a team effort — the mainstay of bench science — like the work of a group run by chemical biologist Xiaoliang Sunney Xie that is investigating life forces at the level of single molecules in live cells.

Some innovations are the province of Harvard institutions. They can have likely names, such as the i-lab, which stands for Harvard Innovation Lab, a University-wide, border-breaking engine of interdisciplinary creativity. Another is the Government Innovators Network at the Harvard Kennedy School’s (HKS) Ash Center. There are innovation-driven entrepreneurship centers at Harvard Business School (HBS), and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS).

In such places, Faust said, Harvard’s entrepreneurs “are building apps and businesses and cultural enterprises.”

HBS, in fact, pioneered the use decades ago of the case study method, which gives students real-world business scenarios and asks them to come up with their own solutions to problems. It is a system that dovetails well in encouraging an entrepreneurial mindset.

Engineers out at the edge

SEAS is pronounced “seize,” as in, seize every opportunity to make the new and remake the old. Research projects under way there include developing a soft and wearable “exosuit” that supports the human body while carrying heavy loads (from Conor Walsh) and adaptive camouflage inspired by cuttlefish (from Joanna Aizenberg). Over the summer, a new student group called Nanostart began creating a community around nanoscale innovation and entrepreneurship. Graduate students, researchers, and companies come together to brainstorm inventions.

Courses at SEAS point right at innovation. This semester, the traditional ES 96 (a required junior-level design course for concentrators in the engineering sciences) will take on therapeutic uses for manufactured human cells. The goal of ES 96, as always, is to teach design theory through a hands-on project.

That touches on another leitmotif within Faust’s semester-opening remarks, her call for “expanded opportunities for hands-on experimental learning.”

This fall, SEAS is offering a new course that points to the future: ES 27, “Digital Interfaces for Collaborative and Participatory Design,” a joint listing for SEAS and the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD).

As a design school, GSD is a place where the future of the built environment is first imagined. But it is also a place of teaching innovations. Many students are driven by an intensive system of required studio courses that demand an eclectic mix of experts, from engineering and ecology to model-building and drawing. (Next spring there will be a GSD course called “Landscape and Painting,” in which student designers sharpen their visual wits by working in oils and acrylics.) In the field, GSD is also breaking ground on some research study sites by teaming graduate students in anthropology and design.

At the core, collaboration

Faust reminded her audience of innovative learning collaborations like that novel pairing. She even gave Harvard’s academic collaboration a new locus of its own. Allston, said Faust, is “a place where we can experiment with the increased fluidity of boundaries between fields and Schools, and between the University and the wider world.”

In the names of still other Harvard institutions, innovation is implied. There is the Digital Arts and Humanities Committee, for instance, an arm of the Arts and Humanities Division. Not long ago, putting “digital” and “arts” together would have sounded like a typo, but today it describes a creative frontier of crisscrossing boundaries. There are 15 departments on that committee, along with 15 museums or other centers, five undergraduate degree concentrations, and a scattering of related programs.

Though the Semitic Museum often pores over the past, it offers digital exhibits — not bad for an institution founded in 1889 — and landmark initiatives in digital publishing for archaeology and data management, part of the Shelby White and Leon Levy Program for Archaeological Publications. The museum’s director, Peter Der Manuelian, the Philip J. King Professor of Egyptology, keeps the Harvard Giza Project on a digital cutting edge. Showing 3-D virtual worlds, he can lead students on tours of the Giza Plateau as it was 4,500 years ago, skimming over pyramids, then plunging into burial chambers.

Visualization is at the heart of another example of innovation, the interactive FloTree at the Harvard Museum of Natural History. This interactive touch-table allows users to explore interconnecting evolutionary patterns in flora and fauna with the swipe of a finger. It was developed at the Scientists’ Discovery Room Lab at SEAS, directed by Chia Shen, the principal investigator for the federally funded Life on Earth project.

Going small, going big

In addition, at Harvard many small-scale, little-known innovations display boundless creativity. A springtime design and project fair in the Science Center Plaza, for example, showcased: a basketball hoop that keeps score; a laser harp; a mind-controlled car; a one-wheeled, self-balancing electric vehicle; an automatic fish feeder; and a math system for crowdsourcing stock picks. Students from the popular ES 50 course wandered through the crowd, wearing T-shirts that said, “Trust me: I’m almost an electrical engineer.”

Earlier this year, two students in the SEAS “Design Survivor” course created a tear-shaped travel mug that can’t tip over. Two undergraduates in a SEAS course called “Design of Usable Interactive Systems” created an apt app for their ages: It tracks drinking behavior.

Other Harvard innovations were more speculative, pointing to applications on a farther horizon. Consider Assistant Professor Sharad Ramanathan’s remote-controlled worms, for instance. His team at the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology used targeted lasers to manipulate neurons in the brains of tiny, transparent C. elegans. Their novel investigation technique not only guided wiggling worms but also may help to unravel how the human nervous system works.

Teaching, learning, evolving

There have been innovations in pedagogy too. This spring, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) introduced an innovation to make fledgling scholars better communicators. In September, GSAS underscored its commitment to innovation in research, graduate study, and the changing future of dissertations. It held an open house about its new Ph.D. secondary field degree in critical media practice, which encourages digital projects that complement written work and break the mold of a text-bound scholarly hurdle as old as print and paper.

Then there is metaLAB@Harvard, a place for creating, as its mission statement says, “innovative scenarios for the future of knowledge creation and dissemination in the arts and humanities.” Last fall, metaLAB affiliates created the “Labrary,” a student-designed, pop-up space on Mount Auburn Street. On display were artifacts hinting at what libraries of the future might look like. There was a retreat-like, inflatable Mylar tent, a bench that was part boom box, and a one-legged “unsteady stool” to keep the user alert.

In April, the Digital Public Library of America launched a beta version of its discovery portal, opening a free-access digital archive of 2.4 million works. The project, a virtual network of national and local libraries, started two years ago at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, itself an innovation machine.

The Berkman Center developed H2O, an educational exchange platform for creating, editing, and sharing course materials electronically in collaboration with the Harvard Law School Library. But H2O will not always be “law-specific,” said law professor and center co-founder Jonathan Zittrain. Available in sharable electronic form, the new format could offer what he called “an intellectual playlist” of online materials widely used — and collaboratively assembled and vetted — by students and professors in any discipline.

“Technology promises both wondrous possibilities and profound dislocations,” said Faust in her semester-opening remarks. Then she mentioned two entities that foster innovation.

The Harvard Initiative for Teaching and Learning, now in its third year, is designed to accelerate the new and the best in those areas. So far, 150 faculty, students, and staff have gotten support from HILT. Then there is HarvardX, now in its second year. So far, nearly 60 faculty members are either offering or preparing courses widely available on line.

This fall the Harvard Kennedy School will offer HKS211.1X, an eight-week, experimental-format class open to 500 students online and to 50 in the traditional classroom setting. The idea is to investigate and analyze options for addressing three of America’s most pressing foreign policy concerns, “each of them, in effect, problems from hell,” said co-teacher Graham Allison in an introductory video: a possible incursion into Syria, concern over Iran’s nuclear program, and the rise of China to mighty power.

As for the new format, Allison, director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and the Douglas Dillon Professor of Government, added a comment that sums up both the hope and the trepidation that innovation contains. “The ‘X’ in the course,” he said, “stands for experimental.”

In her remarks, Faust picked up on the same two-edged threshold that connects the sturdy past to the innovative future. Teaching and learning at Harvard will “both preserve what Harvard has been,” she said, and “evolve to meet the demands of these changing times.”

For those of us aging fast, it is nice to know that one the most beautiful faces in the world is more than 3,300 years old.

That face is on the bust of Queen Nefertiti, the wife of Pharaoh Akhenaten, whose reign in Egypt spanned 1353–1336 BCE. This famous artifact, 44 pounds and life-size, has a layer of painted gypsum stucco over a full-featured limestone core. It was discovered a century ago in the ruins of an ancient artist’s studio in Amarna, south of Cairo. First made public in 1924, it fast became an icon of feminine beauty.

A slender, smooth neck gives way to skin the color of golden sand. Then come full, red lips; a dramatic, sloping nose; almond eyes; and arching, dark eyebrows. Above the face is a colorful, back-sweeping, cylindrical crown. It’s a lot for the eye to take in, especially since the work was likely just an artist’s model, and never intended for display.

Found scattered through the same studio were 22 plaster casts of faces. Some depict older women with every wrinkle and sag, an artistic anomaly in a culture that stylized women as slender and beautiful. (Nefertiti’s image beneath the stucco, recent CT scans show, was more realistic: a woman with lesser cheekbones, wrinkled cheeks, and a bump on the nose.)

But the world sees just the surface. The face “is part of our culture,” said French Egyptologist Alain Zivie in a Harvard lecture last Thursday, “like a picture of Che Guevara or Einstein or the Mona Lisa in Paris.”

The discovery of the bust in Amarna in 1912 is one of archaeology’s signature moments. A famous photograph depicts German Egyptologist Ludwig Borchardt getting a first look at the life-size bust. “Suddenly we had the most alive Egyptian artwork in our hands,” he wrote in his diary. “You cannot describe it with words. You can only see it.” (He kept the bust in his Berlin home for 11 years before moving it to Berlin’s Neues Museum.)

Yet who created the famous bust, and sculpted and painted the famous face? It was Thutmose, who in his day styled himself “the king’s favorite and master of works.”

The lecture, “Discovering the Egyptian Queen Nefertiti’s Artist,” reminded the audience of Pharaoh Akhenaten’s official court sculptor, a man whom Zivie has styled “the Michelangelo of ancient Egypt.” The talk was a testament to Egyptology’s durable drawing power (or perhaps Nefertiti’s). Fong Auditorium was full, from the front row to the top tier. (Co-sponsoring the event were the Semitic Museum and Harvard’s Standing Committee on Archaeology.)

The lecture was also a testament to Zivie’s current academic interest: to prove that the Thutmose of the studio in Amarna is the same as the Thutmose whose tomb he discovered farther north in Saqqara. Zivie was nearly 33 minutes into his 51-minute talk before he mentioned Nefertiti. “Of course, we come to the lady, the icon,” he said, teasing the audience first with a picture of the bust from behind.

It was Zivie who discovered Thutmose’s presumptive tomb in 1996 while helping to excavate what initially were believed to be just subterranean galleries for mummified cats and dogs. (Egyptian animal cults had flourished in Saqqara.) Tombs, he said, “are sometimes small holes,” and may be hard to identify for what they are. Thutmose’s was small and it stank, said Zivie, and was “not very attractive at first.”

The area of the Thutmose tomb is called Bubasteion, which is now less about mummified pets (thought to number in the millions) and “more and more a New Kingdom necropolis,” said Zivie, the director of the French Archaeological Mission of the Bubasteion and this year a visiting scholar at Harvard’s Semitic Museum.

Zivie made his case for the historical Thutmose, a man he called “an exceptional artist who made his own tomb.” He showed his audience the inside. To the left are three preserved painted walls that form a sort of autobiographical triptych. “It’s a lifetime passing by,” he said of the pictures, which include Thutmose, his wife, and children.

Zivie showed one slide that was a detail of “the wife of the master, painted by himself,” which “is so moving.” So was the depiction of the artist and his wife, in full face and figure, painted together on a double coffin. “It’s moving because we know it is Thutmose himself,” said Zivie. “He painted himself dead.”

Central to the triptych is what Zivie called a metaphor of the artist’s life, a small horizontal palette of many colors, similar to the one of ivory found in the studio in Amarna. It was with paint, he said, that the master gave to sculptures “the final touch of life.”

Is it truly the tomb of Thutmose, the artist whose name hovers behind Nefertiti’s memorable face? At lecture’s end, Zivie admitted “the story is unfinished.” The jury of scholars is still out, later agreed Peter Der Manuelian, Harvard’s Phillip J. King Professor of Egyptology and director of the Semitic Museum. “More evidence would be nice, but the contemporaneity works.”

From the audience, Egyptologist Jacquelyn Williamson said during a lively question-and-answer period that, “You have me 98 percent convinced.” Williamson is a Harvard Divinity School affiliate and a specialist in the Amarna Period, when Nefertiti lived. She is a visiting lecturer in Women’s Studies and Near Eastern Studies and in spring will teach a course on gender and sexuality in cultures pre-dating the Bible.

Zivie made his last trip to the Saqqara site last November. It was cut short by Egypt’s political turmoil. But he made the audience an offer. “You are welcome when you pass [by] in Egypt,” said Zivie of the artist’s tomb, “to see with your own eyes.”

Britain’s Lord Carnavon asked famed archaeologist Howard Carter what he saw as he first peered into King Tut’s tomb.

“Wonderful things,” Carter supposedly replied.

Carter would eventually catalog thousands of objects from the tomb of Tutankhamun, the boy king, including some of archaeology’s most recognizable artifacts. The 1922 find sparked a craze for all things ancient Egypt, but that was just the latest wave of “Egyptomania” to wash over the world, according to Bob Brier, a Long Island University senior research fellow and Egyptologist with a particular expertise in mummies.

The phenomenon started in force more than 200 years ago, Brier says, with Napoleon Bonaparte’s 1798 invasion of Egypt, where he defeated a Mamluk army in a battle fought near Cairo, within sight of the pyramids. French rule of the country wouldn’t last long, collapsing after British Admiral Horatio Nelson destroyed the French fleet days later in the Battle of the Nile.

But Napoleon did not go away empty-handed. His gains included the records of more than 100 artists, engineers, and scientists who, as the fighting raged, collected, drew, and documented the natural and manmade wonders of Egypt. The publication of their work in France fed a curiosity that hasn’t faded. According to Brier, it flows largely from three spheres of interest: mummies, the mystery of hieroglyphics, and the allure of a lost civilization, epitomized by Carter’s discovery of Tut’s tomb.

Egyptian mummies capture the imagination, Brier said, because they represent a form of immortality: The leaders who ordered the creation of monuments such as the pyramids and the sphinx are still here, and viewable. Hieroglyphics, he said, are a matter of deep intrigue. The last was carved in 394 A.D., after which the ability to read them was lost for thousands of years. Finally, he said, comes the irresistible pull of a lost civilization.

“You’ve got mummies that scream immortality. You’ve got mysterious hieroglyphics that seem beautiful but are indecipherable, and you’ve got that sense of lost worlds waiting to be discovered,” Brier said.

Brier, whose up-close experience with mummies goes beyond the Egyptians to include the Medici family and Vladimir Lenin, spoke Tuesday at the Yenching Auditorium, in a lecture sponsored by the Semitic Museum, one of the Harvard Museums of Science & Culture. The talk, introduced by the museum’s director, Philip J. King Professor of Egyptology Peter Der Manuelian, covered material featured in Brier’s latest book, “Egyptomania: Our Three Thousand Year Obsession with the Land of the Pharaohs.”

Since the Battle of the Pyramids, several events have fueled interest around ancient Egypt, said Brier, citing as especially important the delivery of Egyptian obelisks to France, Britain, and the United States.

The first, which left Egypt for France in 1832, required more than three years for transport and placement in the Place de la Concorde in Paris. The British obelisk, which left Egypt in 1877, towed behind a steamship in a specially built vessel, was lost at sea in a storm, salvaged, and had to be bought back by the government. The last obelisk was erected in Central Park in 1881. It took 112 days to slowly move the 244-ton, 71-foot, hieroglyphic-inscribed obelisk to the park from the banks of the Hudson River.

Each of these events — capped by the discovery of Tut’s tomb in 1922 — stoked public enthusiasm, Brier said. Egyptian-themed products — jewelry, songs, and tobacco — followed.  Egypt sells, Brier said, and people hustled to cash in.

Much of the talk dealt with history, but Brier was quick to point out that the artifacts and mystery of ancient Egypt haven’t lost any of their power.

“Egyptomania is still alive and well today,” he said.

When he was in high school, Ozdemir Vayisoglu ’16 dug into the past, uncovering buried secrets at an archaeological site in his native Turkey. This summer, he was digging again. But instead of carefully sifting through dirt thousands of miles away, he was poring over archives at Harvard’s Semitic Museum.

Working with its director, Peter Der Manuelian, Vayisoglu helped research and develop an exhibit that examines the museum’s founding in 1903 by Professor David Gordon Lyon.

“We really want to recapture [Lyon’s] vision in creating this museum,” said Vayisoglu, an economics concentrator from Eliot House who also loves history, archaeology, and museum studies. “He saw this museum as an educational tool.”

Egyptian stelae, cuneiform tablets, Israelite figurines, Roman glass, historic travel photos, and ethnographic objects from the Middle East all will be part of the vivid exhibit set to open this fall.

For 10 weeks, Vayisoglu scoured Lyon’s diary entries and the registration cards of museum objects to help develop themes for the display and the exhibit’s accompanying text. “His diaries were amazing. It was like digging up the past in the archives. It was just a different kind of excavation … you never know what you are going to find out.”

Vayisoglu is one of 11 Harvard undergraduates who worked closely with Harvard faculty and administrators this summer as part of the Summer Humanities and Arts Research Program (SHARP). Sponsored by the Office of Undergraduate Research and Fellowships, SHARP, now in its second year, connects students seeking research opportunities in the arts and humanities with Harvard scholars and experts looking for help.

The initiative is the latest addition to the summertime undergraduate research program, which began nine years ago with the Harvard College Program for Research in Science and Engineering. The Harvard College Behavioral Laboratory in the Social Sciences soon followed, along with the Program for Research in Markets and Organizations, in collaboration with Harvard Business School.

Adding a humanities and arts component to the summer research programs has long been a goal for its administrators. Harvard faculty members have also been eager to get involved. The number of SHARP research partnerships more than doubled since the program began last year. This summer, students researched primitive navigation techniques for a Science Center exhibit in December organized by the Harvard Museums of Science & Culture, and worked with the Peabody Essex Museum to explore how visitors engage with the museum. The students studied African musicians, the legacy of World War I, and folklore.

“Focus was the great gift of the SHARP Program,” wrote Maria Tatar in an email. Harvard’s John L. Loeb Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures and of Folklore and Mythology researched African-American folktales undergraduates Ali Zimmerman ’15 and Rebecca Panovka ’16. “The three of us were able to live and breathe the air of the research program, and weekly meetings gave us the chance to exchange information, ideas, discoveries, and obsessions. … It did not take long for us to reach the point where we felt collectively that this was the richest and most intellectually rewarding work we had ever done.”

Since 2005, more than 1,000 students have taken part in the competitive research programs that allow busy Harvard undergraduates to focus on one research project free of other obligations and demanding class schedules. The work is a perfect primer on the rigors of steady, self-directed academic research. For some students, that flexibility proves challenging.

Zimmerman, who spent much of her summer online researching how the “The Frog Prince” evolved from a Brothers Grimm fairytale to a reworked Disney film, as well as the evolution of the “Tar-Baby” story, based on a character from the Uncle Remus stories by Joel Chandler Harris, as it migrated around the world and experienced a type of “culture shock.” When school is in session, “You have to balance four classes, extracurriculars, make time to eat,” said Zimmerman who also works during the semester. This schedule “has been a shift for me,” she added, “and my biggest challenge.”

Working so closely with a Harvard expert seeking input and feedback also took some getting used to. Initially, Zimmerman found herself a little overwhelmed to “be in the room with the person who wrote the book and have her say, ‘Well, what do you think about this?’ And you’re like ‘What do you mean, what do I think? What do you think? That’s what matters.’”

But Tatar’s inclusive style put the rising senior at ease. “She was so welcoming and generous with her time and thoughts and really considering of what you have to say,” said Zimmerman.

Students also learn from each other. Each year the undergraduates live and socialize in “the research village,” more commonly known as Mather House, and the Dudley House dining hall. The area transforms into a living laboratory where friendships and the exchange of ideas flourish between young scientists and sociologists, authors, and engineers.

“The key to what happens in the house environment is the fellows themselves,” said Greg Llacer, director of the Office of Undergraduate Research and Fellowships. “We really emphasize that the cohort drives their own identity, and they drive it through their own interactions.”

Those interactions extended beyond campus, with trips to the Arnold Arboretum, Tanglewood, and a local chocolate factory, among other outings. Llacer recalled two students comparing their areas of research on a visit to Fenway Park. “To me that was a success story beyond my wildest imagination … they are talking about their intellectual interests, no matter where they are.”

The program also organized weekly discussions for the budding scholars, such as a public speaking primer for researchers, and a research integrity training session, as well talks in specific research fields. This summer SHARP attendees met with several Harvard luminaries including the authors Louis Menand, the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of English; Jill Lepore, the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History; and Diana Sorensen, dean of arts and humanities and James F. Rothenberg Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and of Comparative Literature.

“They are really getting the top people in the field to come talk to us in a very intimate setting,” said Rachel Gibian ’15, a religion and literature concentrator who engaged her passion for the stage during her summer research work. Gibian joined forces with Tim McCarthy, Harvard lecturer on history and literature and on public policy, helping him research and craft a play titled “Four Harriets” about prominent female abolitionists during the Civil War. The play will premiere at the American Repertory Theater this season as part of a series of Civil War-themed productions. Gibian also trolled the Schlesinger and Houghton libraries looking for information that would help McCarthy with a spring course he is developing in tandem with the series.

Gibian said her summer experience lived up to the finding of the 2009 Harvard Arts Task Force that encouraged a greater emphasis on art-making in the undergraduate curriculum.

“This seemed like a great way to bring art-making in to academic research. So yes, you are spending hours and hours at Houghton and Schlesinger library … but the end result is a play and the research question you are asking is ‘What would Harriet Beecher Stowe say to Harriet Tubman?’ … ‘How do we make these characters come alive?’ ”

The Semitic Museum is sponsoring a free, docent-led tour of “The Houses of Ancient Israel: Domestic, Royal, Divine” on 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.

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.

In the earliest days of civilization, walls told stories. Spreading for miles on the distant and now ghostly palaces of Mesopotamia, bas-reliefs narrated epic tales of kings wielding power through war and ritual.

At the Harvard Semitic Museum, part of the Harvard Museums of Science & Culture, the writings on the wall are being read again.

“From Stone to Silicone” — the only exhibit of its kind in North America, according to Adam Aja, assistant curator of collections at the museum — was five years in the making. The show features striking silicone replicas of millennia-old reliefs from majestic Assyrian palaces in Nimrud and Nineveh (present-day Iraq).

“We have an incredible collection here that really emphasizes the art and empire of ancient Mesopotamia,” Aja said. “It’s a connection to a culture that is tremendously important.”

The exhibit expands on the vision of the museum’s first curator, David Gordon Lyon, to thoroughly explore the many cultures of the ancient Near East. The newly renovated atrium gallery on the third floor of the 1903 building was completely redesigned to serve as a permanent setting against which to display the art and culture of Mesopotamia.

Between the paws of the six-story Great Sphinx in Giza, a slab of hieroglyphs tells the story of how King Thutmose IV dreamed his destiny.

The eight-foot Dream Stela was erected in 1401 B.C., 1,000 years after the Great Sphinx. Age has left the bottom third of the text unreadable.

Under the leadership of Harvard Semitic Museum curator Adam Aja, students created a reproduction of the monument, following a cast that dates to the 1840s. The work is now on display on the museum’s second floor. As an accompaniment, visitors can access an augmented-reality app that sheds light on the Sphinx throughout history.

Extension School student Caitlin Stone was one of 12 students who spent hours last fall poring over two molds Aja brought back from KU Leuven, a university in Belgium, which owns one of a group of mid-19th-century replicas.

“I just love casting,” said Stone, who is working on a master’s in museum studies. “It’s what got me interested in working with Adam. And the added element of the app is amazing in action.”

Aja concocted a blue urethane resin for his team to use in the project. The process demanded intense focus. Students from the College, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and the Division of Continuing Education had between seven and 10 minutes to “paint” the poured resin into the molds’ tiny crevices.

Aja reminded students to “even out.”

“We don’t want clear brushstrokes,” he said. “Curing time is 10 minutes from mixing time to application. After that, the veneer will layer thicker.”

The Harvard Semitic Museum has changed its name to the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East (HMANE) to better “reflect its core mission in clearer terms,” said Director Peter Der Manuelian. “We wanted a more inclusive and descriptive name, one that accurately reflects the diversity of our collection.” Founded in 1889, the museum was conceived as a teaching tool to study the ancient histories and cultures of people who spoke Semitic languages, among them Israelites, Moabites, Arabs, Babylonians, and Phoenicians. The new HMANE name was a decision years in the making, as Manuelian explained in a chat with the Gazette.

Q&A

Peter Der Manuelian

GAZETTE: What prompted the name change?

MANUELIAN: When the Semitic Museum opened at 6 Divinity in 1903, the name was meant as a blanket term for all the peoples of the ancient Near East who shared the somewhat extended family of “Semitic” languages. Our focus remains on the wide variety of diverse peoples living in the eastern Mediterranean region, parts of modern-day Iraq, and even of north Africa: the ancient Sumerians, Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Hittites, Philistines, Israelites, Phoenicians, and others.

Our original mission has not changed, but the term “Semitic Museum” is less widely understood in the public domain. People either had no idea what they might see in a “Semitic” museum, or they (incorrectly) believed the museum was exclusively devoted to Jewish exhibitions. Many had heard the word “anti-Semitic” but “Semitic” was less common. The ancient Near East provides the world’s first examples of centralized political authority and written language, with sophisticated science and literature. The social, literary, political, artistic changes and innovations are foundational to global human history. And the region continues to be the basis for modern identities — we can’t understand current political events there in a cultural or historical vacuum.

GAZETTE: Why is the name being changed now?

MANUELIAN:  The change is not a reaction to any particular event, but rather our attempt to reflect our core mission in clearer terms. The process took a great deal of time and thought. Over a period of many years, we held discussions with stakeholders and distributed questionnaires about the museum to visitors and others, both on campus and off. We held focus groups, organized discussion dinners with faculty across the Harvard community, from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences to the Law and Business Schools. We even devoted Museum Studies courses to the issue.

Regarding the name, we know that no name is perfect. For example, the “Near East” is not particularly “eastern” to colleagues living on the other side of the world. But in our defense, our building stands in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We considered the term “Middle East” but it tends to refer to modern times more than “Near East” does. And the term “Ancient World” casts the net too far across the globe given the specific collections we have. We ran a range of names by different sectors of the community, gathered opinions, and studied the branding of many like-minded institutions. We believe “Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East,” or “HMANE” for short, to be the clearest and most inclusive description of what we have and what we do.