Memories and Milestones: Asia and Asians at Harvard

Harvard’s connections with Asia reach back over a century and a half, shaping the ways the University has thought about knowledge, culture, and the world beyond its walls. Memories and Milestones invite visitors to pause with these histories—stories of students, scholars, and artists from across Asia whose presence has left a lasting imprint on campus life—and to contemplate the many ways Asia itself has been imagined, studied, and encountered at Harvard.

Photographs, letters, and archival fragments offer glimpses into these exchanges: a class in an early language course, a gathering at the Faculty Club, an artist at work, a student writing home. Each speaks to the movement of ideas and people across boundaries and generations, and to the ways those movements have changed Harvard in return.

An interactive timeline extends this conversation. Visitors are invited to add memories, events, and overlooked moments, which will contribute to a growing record of Harvard’s evolving relationships with Asia as layered, complex, and still unfolding.

Presented in conjunction with the Asia and Asians at Harvard Conference, November 13–14, 2025.

The Harvard University Asia Center gratefully acknowledges the collaboration and support of the Harvard Art Museums; the Harvard University Archives; Houghton Library at Harvard University; the Schlesinger Library at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute; the Korea Institute’s Korean Alumni Biographies Project at Harvard University; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology; the Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center at the UMass Amherst Libraries; Boston Children’s Hospital; and the individuals who contributed to this project.