Who made Harvard what it is today? Harvard’s history is a story of professors, students, courses, and research that has led to world-changing innovations. But it is also a story of student unrest, gender unease, and exclusion. Some Harvard stories have been told; others have been forgotten. Dr. Zachary Nowak will talk about some of the best tales he’s found in the archives. Hear how Harvard students rioted because of rotten cabbage in their soup, created modern American football (twice), and--with Radcliffe students--led one of the most famous student strikes in American history.
Zachary Nowak PhD '18 is an environmental and spatial historian of the United States in the nineteenth-century. He received his doctorate from Harvard's Program in American Studies in May 2018 and served as the College Fellow and Lecturer in the History Department, and currently teaches at the Harvard Extension School. He has been the Associate Director for the Food & Sustainability Studies Program at the Umbra Institute, in the central Italian city of Perugia. He is currently the Advisory Board chair for the Institute's Center for Food & Sustainability Studies (CFSS).
Nowak is the author of Truffle: A Global History (Reaktion, 2015), the translator of Why Architects Still Draw by Paolo Belardi (MIT Press, 2014), the editor and translator of Inventing The Pizzeria: A History of Pizza Making in Naples (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), and a co-editor of Representing Italy Through Food (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017). He is working on a new book called A Student's History of Harvard College. His personal website is here: https://scholar.harvard.edu/zacharynowak/home
This event is open to Harvard/Radcliffe reunioning alumni and members of the Crimson Society.