Upcoming Lectures & Talks
5 upcoming lectures and talks from Harvard Museums of Science & Culture, with dates, venues and ticket links taken from the organization’s own pages and refreshed weekly. All lectures in Greater Boston →
Tue Oct 13
Peabody Museum curator Diana DiPaolo Loren draws on her new book to reexamine tobacco use in Puritan New England, using clay pipes from 17th-century Massachusetts sites as evidence of tobacco as a tool of bodily care despite religious condemnation. Archaeologist Stephen W. Silliman joins the conversation. Offered in person and online.
Wed Oct 21 · 6:00pm
Egyptologist Suzanne Onstine, who directs the University of Memphis mission to Theban Tomb 16, presents new research on its painted plaster scenes. Built under Ramesses II around 1250 BCE for the priest Panehsy and his wife Tarenu, a chantress, the tomb was reused by the Theban elite for over a thousand years, looted around 1900 and again in the 1970s, and has been documented and conserved by her team since 2008.
Wed Nov 4 · 6:00pm
Four speakers discuss how racial categories become embedded in clinical algorithms, search engines, computer vision and artificial intelligence, and the harms that follow: the historian of science Evelynn Hammonds, the sociologist Ellis Monk, Massachusetts General Hospital physician Darshali Vyas and Latanya Sweeney, former chief technology officer of the Federal Trade Commission and director of Harvard's Data Privacy Lab. The new exhibition Measurement on the Color Line is open to attendees afterwards.
Thu Nov 12 · 6:00pm
Tied to a new exhibit spotlight on gold extraction at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, the program opens with Harvard environmental chemist Elsie Sunderland on mercury contamination from illegal gold mining in Amazonian rivers. Jewelry designers Pippa Small and Ashley Alexis McFarlane, PeaceGold founder Greg Valerio and Brazilian federal police forensic geologist Erich Adam Moreira Lima then discuss traceable, responsibly sourced gold. A reception follows.
Wed Nov 18 · 6:00pm
Betsy Bryan, professor emerita of Egyptian art and archaeology at Johns Hopkins, examines the festivals of drunkenness held at the Temple of Mut, sanctuary of the mother goddess, from the early New Kingdom into the Roman era, among them the annual Drunkenness Festival and the Beautiful Feast of the Valley. Bryan's field project at the temple in South Karnak ran from 2001 to 2025.
