Colloquy
Conversations with visionary scholars and thinkers from the Harvard PhD community
- Update frequency
- every 21 days
- Average duration
- 21 minutes
- Episodes
- 63
- Years Active
- 2021 - 2025
Weary at Work
As a member of the "people operations" (human resources) staff at Google in the mid-2010s, Harvard Griffin GSAS historian of science Tina Wei was struck by how many perks employees received in the of…
A More Accurate Map of the Universe
Claire Lamman is part of a team of astrophysicists using data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument to map as many as 50 million galaxies. In this talk, delivered in April 2024 at the annual …
Punished in Utero
Who cares for babies while their mothers are incarcerated? How stable are these households? And how does being exposed to a mother's incarceration in utero impact child development? These are the que…
A Faster, Greener Way to Meet the World’s Demand for Data
Humanity generated over one septillion bits of data this past year alone. All that information takes energy to transmit. Lots of energy. In fact, data-associated technology could account for up to 20…
Speaking of the Rightless, Envisioning New Rights
Like the poetry of his fellow Latin Americans, the scholarship of Mauro Lazarovich, PhD '24, is not only humanist but also humanitarian. “I wanted to make a contribution to the humanities by saying t…
African American Encounters with Property and the Long Shadow of Slavery
In advance of Juneteenth 2024, we speak with University of Texas Professor Shirley Thompson, PhD '01, author of the forthcoming book No More Auction Block for Me, about how the experience of being tr…
Meditation Changes Your Brain. Here's How.
If you're one of the 32 percent of US adults who experienced symptoms of anxiety or depression last year, your doctor or mental health care provider may have recommended you learn meditation to help …
What Abraham Means to Jews, Christians, and Muslims
We're in the midst of the Muslim holy days of Ramadan, just past Western Christians' celebration of Easter, and looking forward to the Jewish Passover holidays in late April. We often refer to these …
Glide Path: How to Get the Most from ChatGPT
Tufts University Professor James Intriligator, PhD ’97, a human factors engineer, says that GPT is not a search engine, although many of us use it that way. It's more like a glider. It can take us to…
How Slavery's Legacy Lives on in the Racial Wealth Gap
In 2022, white residents of the Greater Boston area had about 19 times as much wealth as Black residents, $214,000 to $11,000, according to the Urban Institute. While the gap is particularly large in…
How Universities Can Address the Crisis in Democracy
According to the 2023 Democracy Report of the VDEM Institute based at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, the advances and global levels of democracy made over the past 35 years have been wiped o…
Why We're Obese—and What We Can Do about It
Obesity in the United States has reached epidemic proportions, affecting millions of Americans and costing the healthcare system billions of dollars each year. As is so often the case with disease in…
A Healing Attempt for Race-Based Anxiety
This month on Colloquy, we speak with PhD student Grant Jones about Healing Attempt, his collaboration with Grammy Award-winning artist Esperanza Spaulding and Buddhist leader Lama Rod Owens that com…
What We Learned from the COVID Economy
The US economy is strong. Unemployment is close to a 50-year low, real wages are rising for those at the bottom of the income ladder, and inflation is down though still not entirely in the rearview m…
Buying Time in the Fight Against Climate Change
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, July 2023 was actually the hottest month ever recorded on Earth. The heat wave caused hundreds of deaths, thousands of hospitalizatio…
A Short History of Technology and Thought
Every technology is accompanied by a cultural technique says the artist and media scholar Emilio Vavarella, a PhD candidate in film and visual studies and critical media practice at the Harvard Griff…
An Air Conditioner That Won’t Warm the Planet
The global average temperature for July 2023 was the highest on record—and maybe the highest for the last 120 years according to the United Nations’ weather agency. In the United States, temperatures…
Laboratories of War
In the years following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, thousands enlisted in the US military, were deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq, and became embroiled in conflicts that were often fou…
How 'Hot Vax Summer' Turned Cold
Starting July 4, 2021, and lasting past the holiday, members of the LGBTQ community converged on Provincetown, Massachusetts, for a holiday that was supposed to be a celebration of the end of the lon…
Suspicious Minds
Growing up in Ferguson, Missouri, Harvard Griffin GSAS PhD student Steven Kasparek witnessed violence. He experienced it himself. He was left with some burning questions about which children go on to…