Colloquy

Armed troops in the streets of an American city. A leader in a faraway capital determined to exercise his power over the people there. Screams of protest from residents who demand the force's withdrawal. Resistance, violence, and tragic deaths. These are the elements that made Boston the cauldron of the American Revolution in the 1770s. Are they playing out again in the United States today? And what are the limits of looking to history to better understand the current moment? Historian and former presidential adviser Ted Widmer joins us to consider these and other questions about the use of state power then and now.

In the decades after becoming the first Black US citizen to receive his PhD from Harvard, W.E.B. Du Bois helped transform sociology from theory and speculation to a social science rooted in rigorous methodology and hard data. But despite conducting groundbreaking research, particularly on the lives of Black people, Du Bois chose to leave the academy and become an activist, co-founding the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. What inspired him to make the change? And what can we learn today from Du Bois’s research, his writing, and his life during our own time of white backlash? The Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer David Levering Lewis joins us for part two of our look at the life of the early 20th century’s leading intellectual and spokesperson for Black liberation. 
(A word of caution: Several minutes into the show, Professor Levering Lewis describes an episode of racist violence. We have preserved that portion of the conversation, rather than editing it out, because it describes a turning point in Du Bois’s life and career.)

How did the Harvard PhD experience influence W.E.B. Du Bois, the man who would become one of the leading Black activists and intellectuals of the 20th century? And what connections did he make in the vibrant Black community outside of campus? Join us as we explore these questions in the first of a two-part conversation with New York University professor and National Humanities Medal recipient David Levering Lewis, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his two-volume biography of W.E.B. Du Bois.

As states around the country face off in a contest of Gerrymandering, what is the future of voting rights in the United States? Will the Supreme Court nullify what’s left of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965? How will accelerating climate change effect US politics? And what might happen in the all-important election of 2028? Harvard's Frank G. Thomson Professor of Government Stephen Ansolabehere, PhD '89, an expert in public opinion and elections and a consultant for the CBS News Election Decision Desk, recently joined Dean Emma Dench of the Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences to address these and other questions in a discussion of elections, energy, and the public mood.

Chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, is a neurodegenerative disease linked to repeated head injuries. It has been found in professional athletes, soldiers, and others who have experienced years of those traumas. New research from Harvard Griffin GSAS alumni Chanthia Ma and Guanlan Dong may help us better understand this condition. Their study looks at the smallest units of brain biology—individual neurons—and finds surprising clues written in the DNA itself. Using single-cell genome sequencing, they discovered that neurons in people with CTE carry distinctive patterns of genetic damage—patterns that may overlap with those seen in Alzheimer’s disease. In this episode of Colloquy, Ma discusses how her work not only sheds light on how brain trauma leads to long-term decline but also hints at possible shared mechanisms across different neurodegenerative conditions.