Hutchins Center for African & African American Research

05/26/2026

Hutchins Center advisory board member James Manyika on 'AI, Science & the Future of Discovery'

https://www.amacad.org/publication/daedalus/introductory-notes-ai-science-future-of-discovery

05/13/2026

On his PBS series, Finding Your Roots, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. shows how we’re shaped by the ancestors on our family trees — ancestors known and unknown. In h...

05/12/2026

A great interview with one of the 2025-2026 W E B Du Bois Research Institute Fellows, Hollis Robbins.

Universities have become generic, one professor and former dean argues. In the A.I. era, students may demand something they can’t get elsewhere.

04/16/2026

In the Rotunda, the 2026 Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal winners cited Jefferson’s continuing influence in architecture, citizenship and law.

04/08/2026

Join us Thursday for a screening of 'The Dutchman' followed by a conversation with the film's director, Andre Gaines.

Please join us, in partnership with ArtsThursdays, and the Film Study Center, for a special screening of The Dutchman with Andre Gaines, director, producer, and co-writer of The Dutchman.

03/25/2026

In her new book, award-winning novelist Namwali Serpell takes on Toni Morrison, one of the towering figures in American literature. Serpell guides readers through Morrison’s extraordinary body of work, offering close readings that illuminate the depth of Morrison’s imagination, innovation and cr...

03/06/2026

In this dialogue, LL COOL J reflects on his 40-year career with James Manyika, Google’s Senior Vice President of Research, Labs, Technology & Society. An art...

02/19/2026

National Constitution Center content fellow Trey Sullivan takes a look at the complicated relationship between William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass, and their acutely different perspectives on the place of the Constitution in our society.

11/24/2025

Join us on December 4 at 4 PM as we commemorate the 125th anniversary of the Cuban Teachers Expedition of 1900, when more than 1,200 Cuban educators traveled to Harvard for the Cuban Summer School.

Organized after the Spanish-American War, the program offered Cuban teachers a rare opportunity to engage with U.S. educational practices at a moment when the United States was emerging as a global power.

This event brings together Alejandro de la Fuente, Lillian Guerra, and Marial Iglesias Utset, with welcoming remarks by Virginia Hunt and moderated by Erin Goodman, to reflect on the historical significance of this extraordinary expedition.

https://loom.ly/9sddyGw

Weatherhead Center for International Affairs Hutchins Center for African & African American Research

11/21/2025

When will all eyes turn to Sudan—as the social media campaign asks us to do? Is it now that the blood of those killed by the Rapid Support Forces can be seen from space? Or will even that image pass into the void once we have scrolled past it? Until now, Gaza and Ukraine have drawn the bulk of the world’s attention, the genocide in Sudan continuing on without much discussion or genuine outrage—as if its complexities are too hard to parse. Who is the bad guy? Who is the good guy? The answers are not easy, and do not break upon simple moral fault lines. In this special issue on Sudan, historical and political complexities are laid bare, and the people who have found themselves and their families in the crosshairs of such complexities tell their stories. Many in the West have dismissed this war as another African war that does not concern them, but in fact, this war and its genocide are emblematic of the complex, new imperialisms sweeping the globe and taking democracy with them.

In the introduction, Guest Editor Rogaia Abusharaf writes: the accounts you will find in this collection “refuse academic abstraction, emerging from lived experience, families fleeing checkpoints, artists documenting torture, communities confronting incomprehensible change…” She asks, “Will Sudan survive?” As noted in many of the essays, the Sudanese have a great capacity for organizing and a deep history of revolution, but that will not suffice. Sudanese survival “demands that the international community move beyond the failed paradigm of elite negotiations and recognize that Sudan’s crisis reflects broader patterns of extraction and abandonment that pervade the global order. The same forces that enable external actors to fuel proxy wars through weapons shipments, that allow multinational corporations to profit from humanitarian catastrophe, that permit the systematic weaponization of famine, operate across Africa and the Global South.”

With personal essays, memoir, and short fiction by Rogaia Abusharaf, Jamal Mahjoub, Fatin Abbas, Ahmed Abdel Aal, Wagas Elsadig, Suzi Mirghani, and David Mikhail. Poetry by Mohammad al-Fayturi, Lameese Badr, Nadaa Hussein, and Safia Elhillo. And historical and political analysis by Nisrin Elamin, Alex de Waal, Hamid Ali, Ahmad Sikainga and Hassan Musa, along with forward-looking essays by Alden Young and Lynda Iroulo.

Art by Kamala Ishag, Ibrahim El-Salahi, Salah Elmur, Amel Bashier, Reem Aljeally, Mosab Abushama, Metche Jafaar, Yasmeen Abdullah, Issam Abdelhafiez, Ahmed Shibrain, Osman Wagialla, and more.

You can buy a copy at the TRANSITION store, which can be reached from transitionmagazine.fas.harvard.edu

COVER: Kamala Ibrahim Ishag, Procession (Zaar), 2015. Oil on canvas. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Mohamed Noureldin Abdallah Ahmed. © Kamala Ibrahim Ishag.