-The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study
is an amazingly exciting place.
It is intergenerational, it is international,
and it is a place where people come together
in every discipline to work together
and to learn from each other.
-What the Radcliffe Institute can do
is make sure that the best minds of our society
have place and time to do important work.
-When I applied for a Radcliffe fellowship,
I had been a playwright for 20 years.
I was needing to force myself to be creative on an airplane
or in that moment before my son woke up in the morning.
This has given me an opportunity to just actually
breathe and be an artist and be still and imagine.
-My project for this year, I've been
writing a book called Born Translated,
The Contemporary Novel in the Age of World Literature.
-I'm pursuing a radical alternative in which the Big
Bang is a big bounce.
-A book on medical tourism.
-Can we take what we've learned from computer systems
and bring that into biology?
How does that help us understand biology better?
-This is the young lady with the nice smile
and the pleasing drawl who came to us last year
from Mississippi.
Her Southern-ness as well as her blackness made her stand out.
-My days are so filled with anthropology and those things
that when was the last time I ever went
to go hear something about computer science or physics?
-As an undergraduate, I was very appreciative to have
this opportunity to work one on one with a professor.
It also gave me a perspective on the academia life
that I never had before.
-I feel that you're missing this great opportunity
to talk about some other kind of revolutionary moment.
Often, in the middle of a project,
you realize that you have sort of accretions of old ideas
that you've never quite thought through.
And so this was really fantastic opportunity
to have people push at those and push me in new directions.
-It's been a terrific year.
I had fairly ambitious plans for what
I was trying to accomplish this year,
and I think that, for the most part, that I exceeded them.
-The Schlesinger Library collects the raw materials
of women's lives across the long course of American history
right up to today.
The women whose raw materials we collect sometimes
know that they're making history.
Most of the women we collect would
be surprised to know that people consider them
an important part of the story.
-Harvard undergraduates and graduate students
use the collection.
There are outside researchers, faculty
from other institutions, independent scholars that
come and use the collection.
-I was working on the Betty Friedan collection
in the manuscript department right about the same time
that I was reading The Feminine Mystique in class.
I really value getting to really get up close to the history.
-We are working extra hard to digitize as many collections
as we can.
By making it available online, people can view it,
they can do research, they can just scroll through photos,
they can use it in whatever way that they need to use it.
-What made this seminar unique was
that it was a real mixture from people
who are basically neuroscientists
as well as people who are economists,
people who are public policy types, and law types.
The hope was that that could create some synergy and also
some future research that would maybe
help the-- this is an ambitious way to think about it--
but maybe help the country and the world do a bit better
in the future.
-When Iran and the US negotiate--
-We were trying to understand if neuroscience, at the point
that it is now, whether we have something
to say to policymakers.
-When these two tribes come together--
-So I think we started a communication.
I think that's probably the most important goal.
-Should the government just let him die?
-Just a few minutes after the sessions,
people are already thinking about collaborations
to do new work.
There's a kind of openness on the part of the Radcliffe
Institute to intellectual experiments
which maybe go off a beaten path but which can in the end
have tremendous payoff.
-At the Radcliffe Institute, not only are we committed
to the creation of new knowledge and new ideas,
we are firmly committed to sharing those ideas
with a larger public, both with audiences here in Cambridge
and through live streaming through the internet.
-If you come to the Radcliffe Institute
you should be coming to interact.
-New breakthroughs or advances, actually,
often happen at the boundaries between
traditional disciplines.
And Radcliffe is just about the perfect setting
for that to happen.
-It has the opportunity to be like a stone dropped
into a pool, where an action, an experiment, a conference,
an initiative can then have lasting influence, or not.
And so the kind of experimentation and innovation
that's possible at Radcliffe offers a great deal.