#  Director’s Letter 

 



 ##  

  expand\_more  

 
  

 

*August 26, 2024*

Dear Colleagues and Friends of the Mahindra Humanities Center,

Greetings! As we approach the new semester, we bring you this preview of some of the upcoming events at the Mahindra Humanities Center. These range from conversations with authors as part of Writers Speak to urgent reflections on the relationship between humanity and the rest of nature in the Environment Forum to cutting-edge scholarship on Psychedelics in Society and Culture. We have collaborated with the Harvard Film Archive for a film series Psychedelic Cinema that runs from September 6 to November 7: this provides a rare opportunity to see over a dozen films that explore the relationships between cinema, hallucination, and transcendence. The Psychedelics in Society and Culture initiative also awards funding for research projects by Harvard affiliates (stay tuned for the Call for Proposals).

We invite you to explore our outstanding seminar program, chaired by faculty from Harvard and around the Greater Boston area. These seminars offer lively presentations and discussions of participants’ current research, covering no fewer than 34 different themes at the heart of humanistic inquiry.

On a more personal note, I am thrilled to be back as Director at the Mahindra Humanities Center after a sabbatical year spent in Merton College, Oxford and delving into Schubert’s autographs in the archives of the historic Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna. I am particularly grateful to Bruno Carvalho for his vision, intellectual rigor, and kindness while he served as Interim Director of the Center.

For those of you returning to the Center, all of the Mahindra staff and I look forward to seeing you again. For faculty, postdocs, students, and staff arriving at Harvard for the first time, we are eager to meet new enthusiasts of the humanities. And to scholars and friends of the humanities in the Greater Boston area, we warmly invite you to join us in the Mahindra Center’s activities.

Please check our website for additional events and announcements as they are confirmed, but in the meantime we hope you enjoy perusing this preview.

With warmest wishes for the semester ahead,

**Suzannah Clark**  
Director, Mahindra Humanities Center  
Morton B. Knafel Professor of Music  
Harvard College Professor