Explore 2012 programs
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Future Programs
Most programs run every year. But some are offered every other year or are occasionally put on hold to help a faculty member finish research or program revisions.
Borneo
This program immerses students in the biology, culture, and conservation issues of Borneo. The habitats of this vast island have some of the highest biodiversity on Earth—from orangutans to coral reefs. But they are being degraded rapidly, and they exemplify the challenges facing nature conservation in the tropics.
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, major Brazilian cities, provide students with the ideal atmosphere for full immersion in Portuguese language and Brazilian political and cultural life. Students interact with Brazilians from all walks of life through community service, lectures by renowned scholars, instructional excursions, and classes taught by Harvard faculty.
Bonn, Germany
The University of Bonn is the host of a novel collaboration with Harvard Summer School and the Harvard Life Sciences Division. This program combines laboratory experience in biomedical research with the acquisition of intercultural skills in Bonn, a United Nations host city that has a profound international presence.
Students participate in an intensive scientific project in a university lab and partake of a range of cultural activities, including language instruction and excursions to cultural sites in and around Bonn, as well as a 4-day visit to Berlin. The University of Bonn has a long tradition of biomedical research and extensive experience hosting study abroad programs. Those accepted to the program benefit from the intensive commitment of their academic supervisors, their professors, and the chairs of the participating departments.
Students meet weekly to discuss topics related to their work and to the research landscape in Germany. While this facet of the program focuses on scientific issues, it also brings into play aspects of politics and ethics that create a unique opportunity for intercultural communication.
Ghana
Past programs in Ghana have explored the history and material culture of slavery and slave trade in West Africa (Ghana) and the Caribbean (Danish Caribbean and Jamaica). The description of the 2013 will be posted when it is available.
Copán, Honduras
Since their rediscovery in the 1830s, the ruins of Copán, Honduras, have been the setting for many of the major breakthroughs in the study of classic Maya civilization. The beauty and sheer abundance of the city’s stone sculptures were unsurpassed in the pre-Columbian Americas, leading early scholars to dub Copán “the Athens of the New World.” For the past 3 decades the study of the sculptures and their extensive hieroglyphic texts has formed part of a comprehensive multidisciplinary research program. Since 1975, Harvard scholars have endeavored to describe and explain the rise and fall of this distinguished ancient center of arts and sciences.
Research began in the Copán Valley by studying the settlement patterns of the supporting population and conducting household archaeology to examine their ways of life. It expanded into a multidisciplinary, multi-institutional program in the 1980s and 1990s that investigated the architectural and dynastic history of the civic-ceremonial center in great detail. Today, Copán is recognized as the best-understood city of the Ancient Maya and one of the best represented in site museums.
Jerusalem, Israel
Jerusalem—sacred city and modern metropolis—is one of the world’s most enchanting cities, where one encounters almost simultaneously the ancient, the medieval, and the modern.
To experience Jerusalem—central in different ways to Jews, Christians, and Muslims—is to experience history in all its complexity. At the same time, Jerusalem is about more than history and conflict. It is pulsing with all the chaotic vibrancy of a great modern city.
This program is ideal for students who would like to:
- Study ancient and modern Jewish history in Jerusalem
- Broaden their perspectives on global politics and the creation of national narratives
- Spend a summer getting to know one of the Middle East’s most beautiful cities
Umbria and Abruzzo, Italy
Sapere (to know, to understand) and sapore (to taste) have the same root, but in Italy, the “flavor” of each region is quite distinct. What you know through language study will be tasted figuratively, literally, and genuinely, in the university town of Perugia, Umbria, and the seaside resort of Vasto, Abruzzo, a region emblematic of the dramatic landscape that is Italy.
San José de Moro, Peru
This archaeological field school offers students hands-on experience in excavations at one of the most exciting prehistoric sites of ancient Peru. San José de Moro is a small village on the banks of the Chaman River in La Libertad on the northern coast of Peru. It is also one of the most important cemeteries and ceremonial centers of the ancient Mochica culture (circa AD 100–800) as well as later societies. The excavations and related studies at this site have helped scholars understand traditions, beliefs, artwork, and organizational and governmental forms of ancient societies of the area. Tombs, objects, and architectural evidence of these cultures are still buried at the site. The large quantity of domestic areas associated with funerary practices (which display complex stratification) make San José de Moro an excellent location to learn and develop basic skills in the practice of archaeology.
St. Petersburg, Russia
As the capital of the Russian Empire, St. Petersburg was the seat of military might, ceremonial pomp, and official state policy. But “Piter,” as insiders have always liked to call it, was also the literary capital of tsarist Russia and, as such, the setting for major works by Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy. Established by Peter the Great in 1703 on remote swampland at the northwestern edge of Russian territory, the new Russian capital became the hub of a great empire and a showpiece city with strikingly western baroque and neoclassical architectural ensembles and a network of canals that many have likened to Venice and Amsterdam. Renamed Leningrad in the 1920s and famously blockaded by the Nazis during World War II, St. Petersburg returned to its original name in the early 1990s and celebrated its tercentennial and rich history in 2003.
