The Paris Salons. The Dark Tower. The Well. The Harman Academy. From 18th century Paris to the Harlem Renaissance to 20th century internet platforms to our own 21st century Harman Academy at USC—these spaces have brought together diverse people to explore, debate, create, innovate, agitate for change, or simply feed one’s curiosities. One Harman Fellow expressed her experience in the Academy this way:
“I admittedly first stumbled on the Harman Academy as I was in search of free pizza but found the talks to feed a different type of hunger that kept me returning.”
For this year’s Polymathic Pizza Series, we will explore contemporary concerns by engaging the format and richness of the salon. Salons have a long history of being a space for writers, artists, philosophers, and activists to express their thinking and creative energies, to test run ideas with others with critical interrogation in a civil and open-minded environment. The salons in 18th century Paris and England, for instance, were gatherings driven by discussion around politics, philosophy, science, and literature. Regulars at these salons included Benjamin Franklin, Rousseau, Diderot, and the Thomases -- Jefferson and Paine. They were organized and run by prominent, educated women in their private homes, which allowed these salonnières a degree of power, agency, and freedom that was denied them beyond these spaces.
During the 1920s, salonnière A’Lelia Walker, heiress to her mother’s cosmetic empire, held weekly gatherings at her home in Harlem to bring together African American artists, writers, and political radicals. Writer Countee Cullen, one of the most representative voices of the Harlem Renaissance, dubbed Walker’s salon, The Dark Tower, and among those who regularly gathered there were Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurman, and W.E.B. DuBois. “A’Leila Walker,” wrote Hughes, “was “the joy goddess of Harlem” because her home was filled with the exchange of ideas, a “dynamic site for synergistic experimentation and politically radical creativity.” African American Literary scholar William J. Harris writes that these “salons played a critical role in the clustering of ideas, in linking people,” while also fostering a degree of empowerment, agency, and freedom that was otherwise denied African Americans beyond these demarcated spaces.
Salons then and now are social, technological, and intellectual laboratories. The Harman Academy, both in Doheny and Leavey Libraries, is in every sense a modern-day salon. For our 2024-2025 season, we issue a call to students and faculty to come together to carry on the salon tradition, where the exchange of ideas and the fostering of creativity remains alive and well.
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Assistant Professor of Clinical Obstetrics and Gynecology
Laila Al-Marayati, MD received her BS in Psychobiology from UCLA and her MD from UC Irvine. She completed her residency in Obstetrics and Gynecology at LA County-USC. She is Board Certified in her specialty and is a Fellow of the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Dr. Al-Marayati is the Medical Director of Women’s Health at the Eisner Pediatric & Family Medical Center in downtown Los Angeles where she currently oversees a large outpatient and hospitalist practice that includes physicians and midwives.
As an Assistant Clinical Professor at the USC Keck School of Medicine in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Dr. Al-Marayati focuses mainly on teaching advanced gynecologic surgery to the residents. She also has expertise in caring for women who have undergone any form of female genital cutting (also known as FGM), working in collaboration with local organizations like the Program for Torture Victims to meet their needs.
Dr. Al-Marayati is particularly interested in global health, having participated in several medical missions serving refugees in Europe, indigent populations in Latin America and others in the Middle East. She is the chair of KinderUSA, a non-profit humanitarian organization that provides health, education and other forms of assistance to Palestinian children and their families living in the West Bank, Gaza, and refugee camps in Lebanon.
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Associate Professor of Architecture
Alison B. Hirsch, FAAR, is a landscape theorist, historian and designer. Both her design and written work focus on how understanding cultural practices and social histories and memories can (and should) contribute to the design of meaningful places. As Director of the Landscape Architecture + Urbanism program, Alison has established the Landscape Justice Initiative which serves as a platform to address questions of environmental, spatial and climate justice at local and systemic scales.
Alison has recently immersed herself in work on the production landscapes of California’s Great Central Valley, focused most particularly on the San Joaquin Valley as a landscape of extremes that embodies the most pressing (socio)environmental questions of our day, particularly as they pertain to global food production. For this forthcoming exhibition and book on the future of the San Joaquin Valley, she was awarded a Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts Research and Development Grant in 2019 and the Landscape Architecture Foundation (LAF) Fellowship for Innovation and Leadership (2020-2021).
Alison is also currently working on a book, The Performative Landscape, which emphasizes sociocultural dynamics as catalysts for physical design, challenging common conceptions that participatory or socially-oriented design processes must sacrifice the spatial, material and formal qualities of the landscape architectural project.
Her 2014 book, titled City Choreographer: Lawrence Halprin in Urban Renewal America, was released by University of Minnesota Press and received grant support from the Foundation for Landscape Studies (David R. Coffin Publication Grant) and the Graham Foundation. The book provides an analysis of the creative process landscape architect Lawrence Halprin developed with his wife, dancer and choreographer Anna Halprin, and how aspects of this process have the potential to enrich contemporary approaches to structuring the city. It has additionally provided a foundation for Alison's ongoing research on participatory methods that contribute to the creative design process.
Alison is co-founder of foreground design agency, a critical landscape practice whose work is both situated and speculative, operating in an intermediate space between practice and theory and the physical and representational. Recipient of numerous recognitions, including prize-winners of the Pruitt Igoe Now competition, foreground provides Alison a platform to test her research in applied action. Prior to initiating her own practice, Alison worked in the design offices of W-Architecture and Landscape Architecture and James Corner Field Operations in New York City.
Alison co-edited a book of essays by James Corner, titled The Landscape Imagination (Princeton Architectural Press, 2014) and has published many book chapters and articles in numerous journals, including Landscape Journal, the Journal of Architectural Education (JAE), and Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes. With her partner at foreground, she has authored essays about the firm’s design research in Journal of Architectural Education, International Journal of Interior Architecture and Spatial Design, Geography Research Forum and forthcoming in Future Anterior.
Prior to joining the faculty at USC, Alison taught landscape architecture theory and design at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (GSD), University of Virginia and University of Toronto. Alison was a 2017-2018 Prince Charitable Trusts/Rolland Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome.
