News

Top stories of 2016

Top stories of 2016

December 22, 2016

In many ways, 2016 was one for the history books. Few years have seen so much political upheaval, cultural shifts, and scientific progress. As New Year’s Eve approaches, the Gazette looks back on some of the year’s most popular and substantial articles.

True to form, students and faculty excelled, with five students named Rhodes scholars and Professor Oliver Hart awarded the Nobel Prize in economics. A College fencer represented the U.S. at the Olympic Games in Rio, while three Harvard Divinity School students took a Nimbus 2000 to the top of the iTunes...

Read more about Top stories of 2016

Harvard and MIT Turn MOOC Data into Knowledge

December 22, 2016

 

Data generated from MOOCs, which operate around the clock, gather information on the page views, clicks, comments, and engagement of the tens to hundreds of thousands of students around the world taking courses at any given time.

Institutions are striving to realize that information's potential to improve course content, student experiences, and academic outreach to traditional and underserved communities. But first, they must separate the sea of data into meaningful categories presented in a usable form. Teams at Harvard and MIT aim to make this task easier by sharing...

Read more about Harvard and MIT Turn MOOC Data into Knowledge
Monica Bell guests on Undisclosed

Monica Bell guests on Undisclosed

December 22, 2016

Undisclosed (S2, Addendum 21) | Monica Bell, Ph.D. candidate in Sociology & Social Policy, talks class, race, and geography and how these shape trust/distrust in the criminal justice system. On the criminal justice podcast Undisclosed. Learn more about Monica Bell's research at her homepage: scholar.harvard.edu/bell 

Men *still* aren't comfortable with ambitious women

Men *still* aren't comfortable with ambitious women

December 22, 2016

Slate | Discusses new study by economist Amanda Pallais of Harvard, coauthored with Leonardo Bursztyn  of the University of Chicago and Thomas Fujiwara of Princeton, which "found that single women in an elite MBA program responded to a career survey with lower salary targets and acceptable levels of work travel if they thought their responses might be visible to their classmates.

View the research: "'Acting Wife': Marriage Market Incentives and Labor Market Investments."

McCormick, Michael - Slavery from Rome to Medieval Europe and Beyond (Book Chapter 13)

December 21, 2016

book jacketMcCormick, M. (2016) Slavery from Rome to Medieval Europe and Beyond, in On Human Bondage: After Slavery and Social Death (eds J. Bodel and W. Scheidel), John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ, USA. doi: 10.1002/9781119162544.ch13 Link to Book

 

Summary

Captured by slave hunters in Britain as the Roman Empire collapsed, Saint Patrick was sold into slavery across the sea. The autobiographical declaration casts his personal story as one of conversion, and spiritual and physical liberation. It is possible that the genetic traces of the forced migration of early medieval Europeans to the economic and political centers of the Islamic world live on in the genomes of modern inhabitants of North Africa and Mesopotamia, just as those of their African ancestors live on in African Americans. Sugar plantations helped finance the kingdom of Jerusalem's ecclesiastical institutions and the French-speaking feudal Lords of Tyre; the Crusaders profited from exporting the new sweetener to Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. When the Muslims reconquered the mainland Crusader states and their sugar plantations, export production for Europe simply shifted offshore to the Crusader kingdom of Cyprus.

... Read more about McCormick, Michael - Slavery from Rome to Medieval Europe and Beyond (Book Chapter 13)

Residential Mobility by Whites Maintains Segregation Despite Recent Changes

Residential Mobility by Whites Maintains Segregation Despite Recent Changes

December 21, 2016

NYU Furman Center | By Jackelyn Hwang (Ph.D. '15), essay for the NYU Furman Center discussion series "The Dream Revisited." Hwang is postdoctoral research fellow at Princeton University, and in fall 2017 will join the Stanford University faculty as Assistant Professor of Sociology.