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Photo courtesy of Sabine R. Huebner

Climate, Environment, and the Transition to Late Antiquity: Roman Government’s Response to Climate Disasters and Agricultural Resilience in Roman Egypt

Zoom

Sabine R. Huebner is a professor of ancient history at the University of Basel in Switzerland whose project at Harvard Radcliffe Institute aims to craft a groundbreaking monograph on third-century Roman Egypt, exploring the dynamic interplay of climatic shifts, political upheavals, and socioeconomic transformations during a pivotal era. Drawing on a rich tapestry of sources—including literary works, papyri, numismatics, epigraphy, and a variety of paleoenvironmental proxies—this ambitious study seeks to unveil new insights into the complexities of this transitional period in one of the Roman Empire’s critical regions.

Future of the American City Cape Ann Conversations: Mobilizing Power for Climate Action

Virtual

Please join us on Wednesday, November 20, 2024, 12:30-2:00 PM ET for a virtual presentation by Harvard’s Julie Battilana. Julie Battilana is a professor of organizational behavior at Harvard Business School and social innovation at Harvard Kennedy School, where she is also the founder and faculty chair of the Social Innovation + Change Initiative. Professor Battilana's research examines the politics of change in organizations and in society. She’s especially focused on organizations and individuals that initiate and implement changes that diverge from the taken-for-granted norm—that break with the status quo.

Cape Ann Conversations are hosted by the Harvard GSD’s Office For Urbanization. These convenings form a portion of the ongoing multi-year climate adaptation research project for Cape Ann, Massachusetts undertaken in collaboration with TownGreen, the Water Alliance, and the Town of Manchester-by-the-Sea.

Dr. R. Claire Bunschoten

Food Literacy Project Speaker Series: Dr. Claire Bunschoten on Vanilla and How it Shapes American Life

Smith Campus Center, 2nd Floor, Mt. Auburn Room

Dr. Bunschoten is the Abbott Lowell Cummings Postdoctoral Fellow in American Material Culture at Boston University’s American and New England Studies Program. Her manuscript project “examines the politics and social worlds of vanilla—as an ingredient, a flavor, a fragrance, and a euphemism for race—in the context of everyday life in the United States. Cumulatively it explores how vanilla contains multitudes yet communicates the ordinary alongside normative ideological positions as they are tied to class status, ethnicity, gender, and race in the United States.” Registration is encouraged, as seating is limited.

Digital drawn green urban landscape

The Environment Forum with Emanuele Coccia | Metropolitan Nature: How Different Species Build Cities

Emerson Hall, Room 105

Human beings were able to develop a stable relationship with the land and abandon the hunter-gatherer lifestyle only when some communities decided to faithfully and stably tie their existence to a relatively small number of trees and shrubs that could provide them with food and shelter. This is how the first city was born: it was this strange act of spatial fidelity to plant life that gave rise to the urban environment. That means that the relationship between different species is not tangentially urban. It is the original urban fact. If this is true, then what we call the countryside is a form of urbanism in which, in addition to the number of people and stones, we also have to conceive how many plants should exist, which ones, how fast they should grow, and so on. Consequently, any form of opposition between city and countryside (or the wilderness") is illusory. The solution to climate change lies not in replacing cities with the countryside or “wilderness,” but in designing cities more radically: extending the culture of urban congestion to a culture of species congestion and biodiversity density. How can we rethink the technological urban model to build planetary interspecies density?

This event is co-sponsored by the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability.