Brown-Nagin, Fellows Praise Radcliffe’s Interdisciplinary Work at Anniversary

Radcliffe Institute Dean Tomiko Brown-Nagin and former Radcliffe fellows lauded the Institute and its interdisciplinary research projects on Friday, the second day of an event commemorating the Institute’s 25th anniversary.

The event was kicked off by a speech by Brown-Nagin, who praised Radcliffe’s history as an institution that gave women access to a Harvard education before it merged with the College.

“Since its inception, Radcliffe has challenged not only traditional definitions and disciplinary boundaries, but also the very ideas of who and what belongs in higher education,” she said.

Brown-Nagin’s speech was accompanied by a video highlighting recent efforts by Radcliffe affiliates, including the Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery initiative, which University President Alan M. Garber ’76 also praised on the first day of the event.

The anniversary celebrations come just a week after a Crimson investigation revealed the project has been plagued by infighting, high staff turnover, and tensions with top Harvard administrators.

The panel after Brown-Nagin’s speech, moderated by novelist and English lecturer Claire Messud, focused on the potential of the fellowship to inspire interdisciplinary scholarship. A handful of former fellows at the Institute said their fellowships were the basis for lifelong friendships across scholarly disciplines.

“I was the only computer scientist, and it was such a thrill to talk to lawyers and musicologists and art historians and mathematicians and all kinds of people,” Francine Berman, a 2020 Radcliffe Fellow and professor at UMass Amherst said.

Messud, who worked on her novel “The Emperor’s Children” during her Radcliffe fellowship from 2004 to 2005, said she remembered her time as a fellow fondly.

“It really was transformative and such an amazing gift in my life, both for the ability to work, to have an office and a protected space, but also to have a community,” Messud said.

“​​I can’t express what that year meant to me,” she added.

Sharon Weinberger, a national security editor at the Wall Street Journal, pointed out that as a journalist, she was not exposed to much interdisciplinary research or scholarship until she became a Radcliffe fellow.

“When I came to Radcliffe, it was having an instant community of people who were doing exactly that, who were reaching beyond their disciplines to other areas, and asking some of those same questions,” she said.

During the event, English professor Tracy K. Smith ’94, a current Radcliffe Fellow, shared four poems in the spirit of “the ways that writers invite one another.”

“Thinking about those questions helps me to imagine what role I wish to play in our culture, or in the culture that we make and share, and also helps me understand who I’ve been,” Smith said.

Towards the end of the panel discussion, Messud asked how panelists were thinking about being “​​productively future oriented,” especially after their fellowships were over.

“You go back after Radcliffe to the original constraints you were under,” Berman said. “And I think I look at myself as flying the flag for interdisciplinary, certainly in my job now.”

“I think probably that’s part of what Radcliffe should be: trying to take some of the lessons we learned back to our institutions,” Berman added. “It’s imperfect because people have the reward systems they have, but we can always try.”

—Staff writer Saketh Sundar can be reached at saketh.sundar@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @saketh_sundar.

—Staff writer Sheerea X. Yu can be reached at sheerea.yu@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @_shuhree_.