Faculty Research Initiatives

	Cultural Agents Cultural Agents is an interface between academic learning and civic engagement. The Initiative promotes arts and humanities as social resources. In courses, conferences, and community-based projects, we join a range of creative collaborators to feature art and interpretation as fundamental to active citizenship. In everything from education, medicine, science and law to political leadership and business, art is a force that drives innovation. With a long humanistic tradition dedicated to civic development, and thanks to contemporary mentors who show how the challenges of scarcity, violence, and disease respond to creativity, Cultural Agents links resourcefulness with service.
	Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative The Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative is a multi-year project funded by Harvard University and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to expand understanding about urban life, social and political structures, design, and history across diverse sites and scales. The Initiative aims in particular to link humanistic approaches to cities with spatial investigations of the built and natural environments.
	metaLAB metaLAB is a research and teaching unit at Harvard University dedicated to exploring and expanding the frontiers of networked culture in the arts and humanities. It was founded on the belief that many of the key research challenges and opportunities of our era—fundamental questions regarding experience in a connected world, democracy and social justice, the boundaries between nature and culture—transcend divisions between the arts, humanities and sciences; between the academy, industry, and the public sphere; between theoretical and applied knowledge.
	The main goal of the Charlie Archive at the Harvard Library project is to preserve manuscript, printed, digital, and ephemeral materials produced in the aftermath of these events. These materials will be archived by Harvard Library, and made available for research and education to scholars, teachers, and students. For scholars, the archive will be used as a resource for research in various fields and disciplines. For teachers and students, the archive will serve as a database and resource for the development of teaching materials. For all future users of the library, it will document a peculiar moment in the early twenty-first century, when the word “Charlie” all of a sudden took on tragic significance, and became charged with conflicting emotions, opinions, and agendas.