On her debut solo album, “Routes of Evanescence,” violinist Ariana Kim showcases six works by pioneering American women composers spanning three generations. Kim and guests Ieva Jokubaviciute (piano, harpsichord) and Jennifer Curtis (mandolin, violin) will perform live excerpts from the album and offer commentary on the pieces at a pre-release concert Sunday, Nov. 22, at 7 p.m. at the Carriage…
Alice in Wonderland is 150 years old this year but the ever-young adventurer recently led Cornell researchers to a part of the brain that helps listeners understand her story.Cornell faculty member John Hale’s study, “Modeling fMRI time courses with linguistic structure at various grain sizes,” published in Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics,…
With a residency from Chinese artists and visitors offering lectures and workshops on global performance traditions, the Department of Performing and Media Arts has expanded its international learning opportunities this fall.The next visitor to the Schwartz Center will be Diana Looser PhD ‘09, who specializes in theatre of the Pacific islands. Looser will visit Nov. 23 to deliver a public lecture…
When Karen Jaime graduated from Cornell in 1997, she never thought she’d be back. But now she’s an assistant professor with a joint appointment in performing and media arts and Latino studies, and her former adviser and mentors are colleagues and friends.“It’s been an incredible bonus for me to be an alum,” says Jaime. “I understand worrying about a prelim; I understand thinking about fall break…
One of the pressures college students face daily is what to do after graduation, especially with the amount of options available today. The physics department hosted a Physics Career Day on October 24, which brought together successful physics alumni, graduate and undergraduate students to explore what paths are available for students with a physics degree."This program is really to stimulate…
While studies have shown that humans may have an innate fear of snakes, such trepidation appears to have eluded Joe Fetcho, a Cornell neurobiologist.Fetcho’s childhood fascination for understanding snake locomotion eventually led him to his calling: using zebrafish to answer questions of how neuronal circuits in vertebrate brains produce behaviors.Though Fetcho began graduate school intent on…
by :
Linda B. Glaser
,
Arts & Sciences Communications
Visiting Professor of Anthropology Terence Sheldon Turner, emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago, died Nov. 7 at Cayuga Medical Center of a brain hemorrhage. He was 79.“Terry was a truly eminent anthropologist and one of the most insightful thinkers of his generation,” said Adam Smith, chair and professor of anthropology in the College of Arts & Sciences. “Terry’s…
Just because Cornell University is nonsectarian doesn’t mean its founders objected to the discussion, practice or study of religion.In fact, Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White both recognized religion’s importance, and White was an avid collector of religious texts, from 15th-century prayer books to a first edition of the Book of Mormon. Their once-controversial views inspired the latest…
Liliana Colanzi, a Ph.D. candidate in the field of comparative literature, received the Premio Aura Estrada de Literatura during the Oaxaca Book Fair on October 30, an award given to Spanish-language authors under 35 who live in Mexico and the United States. The prize includes an award of $10,000, publication of an article by Colanzi in Granta Magazine, and two months in each of four writers…
Anthropology professor P. Steven Sangren has been awarded the Boyer Prize from the Society for Psychological Anthropology (SPA). The award, which includes a $500 cash prize, will be announced at the AAA’s Annual Meeting in Denver, Colorado, on November 20.The SPA is one of the largest sections of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), the primary professional organization for…
N'Dri T. Assié-Lumumba, professor of Africana Studies, together with Nathan Andrews (University of Alberta, Canada) and Nene Ernest Khalema (Human Sciences Research Council, South Africa), has released the edited volume "Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in Retrospect: Africa's Development Beyond 2015" (Springer, 2015).
The book examines the impact that the Millennium Development Goals …
More than 180 middle school and high school students gathered at Cornell on Saturday, October 24 to attend classes taught by the university’s undergraduate and graduate students for Splash! at Cornell.Splash! at Cornell invites youth to the Ithaca campus to learn about virtually any field, from the social sciences and arts/humanities, to engineering, math, computer science and the physical…
Freshmen:Every student in Arts & Sciences is assigned a faculty advisor and advising dean. Take advantage of the resources around you! If you’re unsure about what classes to enroll in or have a tentative schedule that you’d like someone to look over, schedule an appointment with your advising dean or contact your faculty advisor (available on Student Center under “program advisor”). Every…
In the 1994 Rwandan genocide, neighbors killed lifelong neighbors, husbands killed wives and parents killed children. It was an intimate conflict, according to Philip Gourevitch ’86, staff writer for The New Yorker and an experienced reporter on the Rwandan genocide.Before the conflict, members of the Hutu majority and Tutsi minority lived as neighbors and intermarried. When the national…
As friends and scholars, doctoral students Elizabeth (Liz) Wayne and Christine (Xine) Yao found common ground amid their academic and cultural differences through a mutual fascination with myriad topics, from pop culture to how to survive in academia. And now, they discuss them for a worldwide audience every week.The African-American cancer scientist from Mississippi and the Chinese-Canadian…
Kenneth A. McClane ’73, quoting Montaigne’s essay on friendship, spoke of how “in a child’s self-involvement, he or she remembers whether someone was generous, kind or mean-spirited” in his Phi Beta Kappa lecture Oct. 28, and recounted his family’s role in the Civil Rights movement and how Duke Ellington often let him sit on his knee while playing the piano.McClane, the W.E.B. DuBois Professor…
“India has 26 official languages, but when I teach Indian literature, students can only access a very few works in English translation,” laments Anindita Banerjee, associate professor of comparative literature in the College of Arts and Sciences. “There are reams of other excellent literature I haven’t been able to teach because it’s not translated. Translation is critical to the transmission of…
Travis Gosa, assistant professor of Africana Studies, together with Erik Nielson (University of Richmond) will release their new edited volume “The Hip Hop & Obama Reader” (Oxford University Press), this November.“The Hip Hop & Obama Reader” is the first hip hop anthology to center on contemporary politics, activism, and social change. The volume includes a range of new perspectives from…
Cornell Neurotech, a collaboration between the Colleges of Arts and Sciences and Engineering, will launch thanks to a multimillion dollar seed grant from the Mong Family Foundation, through Stephen Mong ’92, MEN ’93, MBA ’02. The goal of Cornell Neurotech is to develop technologies and powerful new tools needed to reveal the inner workings of the human brain, with a particular focus on how…
When Samantha Sheppard, assistant professor in the Department of Performing and Media Arts, contemplated the movies she would include in a fall film and speaker series on Black cinema, she had a tough time choosing only five.“When we think about American cinema, we often push African American cinema out of that frame,” she said. “But African Americans have been in this game for a long time. If…
When Marilyn Jacox, Ph.D. ’56, applied for tenure-track positions at 75 universities in the late 1950s, she could only get interest from women’s schools.“Even a Ph.D. at Cornell didn’t open the doors at any of those universities,” said Anneke Sengers, an emeritus fellow at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, where Jacox spent most of her career as a pioneer and driving force in…
On a recent trip to Budapest, Malcolm Bilson, the Frederick J. Whiton Professor of Music Emeritus, received The Order of the Hungarian Gold Cross, an award given each year to seven or eight foreigners who are distinguished artists, scientists, writers and others for their contribution to Hungarian intellectual and cultural life.According to the citation letter, signed by the President of the…
With tens of thousands of migrants entering Slovenia this last week, Europe is scrambling for a solution. The European Commission called for a mini-summit on Sunday, but Cornell University sociologist Mabel Berezin says that despite the effort to bring states together, the crisis might be the last nail in the European Union’s coffin. “No matter what the European Union emergency summit on…
Andrew Willford, associate professor of anthropology, is a faculty member who led a group of seven Cornell students who studied and worked at the Nilgiris Field Learning Center in Tamil Nadu in southern India as part of a brand-new semester abroad program, which includes indigenous communities in the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve. Read more about the project in this Ezra Magazine article.
Travis Gosa is an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Cornell University, and is affiliated with the Cornell Center for the Study of Inequality. Gosa says that the study, “Family Disadvantage and the Gender Gap in Behavioral and Educational Outcomes” that shows boys from disadvantaged backgrounds suffer more than girls from the same backgrounds is most important for its focus on how poor…
During his time at Cornell, Udai Tambar '97 conducted research on nutritional science, played intramural sports and majored in both chemistry and Asian studies. Today, he plays an instrumental role in shaping New York City’s public policies as chief of staff to the deputy mayor for health and human services.To say that his path has been unpredictable would be an understatement, but Tambar…
Arvind Manocha '94, leads the Wolf Trap Foundation, a D.C. hub of music, theater and education, and lives in Virginia.Why D.C? The opportunity to run one our country's most unique arts organizations. Wolf Trap Foundation is many things – a partner in America's only National Park devoted to the performing arts, a provider of early childhood arts education across the country and a fabulous training…
Professor Emeritus of Music Marice Wilbur Stith, who as director of bands conducted the Cornell University Wind Ensemble and Symphonic Band over his 23-year Cornell career, died Oct. 7 at Cayuga Medical Center after a long illness. He was 89.A member of the Department of Music faculty as a professor of performance from 1966 to 1989, Stith also directed the Big Red Marching Band and taught brass…
“Time,” this year’s theme for the Society for the Humanities, was chosen to mark both Cornell’s sesquicentennial and the society’s 50th anniversary. The society’s annual theme conference, Oct. 23-24 in the A.D. White House, was titled “Celebrating Society@50: Time, on the Critical Edge,” and featured international speakers as well as Cornell faculty.“The humanities are a transformational force,…
Back in 1972, Benjamin Franco Suarez was diligently working toward his doctorate in sociology at Cornell, studying the fertility behavior of Bolivian women as part of his work on demography, economic development in developing countries and Latin American studies.He passed his B exams, but needed money and a job, so he took what he thought would be a short leave of absence to earn some money,…
Three young Cornell researchers have won National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director’s New Innovator Awards. Part of the NIH’s High-Risk, High-Reward Research Program, the awards provide up to $1.5 million over five years for innovative, high-impact projects.Melissa Warden in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and Jesse Goldberg in the College of Arts and Sciences, both assistant…
From last Wednesday to Dec. 8, the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS), also known affectionately as the “world’s coolest microscope” by CHESS Director Prof. Joel Brock, applied and engineering physics, will be holding a scheduled x-ray run for users around the nation. CHESS is a high-intensity x-ray source funded by the National Science Foundation that is operated and managed by the…
The USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archives is an unparalleled resource of some 53,000 individual testimonies of survivors of the Nazi Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, the Nanjing massacre and the Armenian genocide. Cornell will mark the launch of its access to the archive Tuesday, Nov. 3, with a talk by noted New Yorker columnist and Rwandan genocide expert Philip Gourevitch ’86.The lecture…
Amazon is suing more than 1,000 people for allegedly trading fake reviews of products online and thus misleading Amazon’s customers. Trevor Pinch, sociologist and professor of science and technology at Cornell University, has done research on the nature and behavior of Amazon reviewers.“Amazon’s decision to sue purveyors of fake reviews is welcome, but is too little too late," he says. "This move…
“When you graduate college, you don’t have to know what you want to do, but you need to be willing to try a lot of things,” said Nancy Aronson Chilton ’82, chief communications officer at The Costume Institute, Metropolitan Museum of Art.Chilton, a government major, visited with students Oct. 2 as a part of a Career Conversation event hosted by the College of Arts and Sciences Career Development…
Physics professor Peter Lepage has won the 2016 J.J. Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics. The $10,000 prize is awarded by the American Physical Society “to recognize outstanding achievement in particle theory” and will be presented at its annual meeting in April.The Sakurai Prize is the only award in Lepage’s subfield in the U.S. He received it “for inventive applications of quantum…
The College of Arts & Sciences is thrilled to announce that it has met its Cornell NOW goal of $225 million, which ends in December.Among the projects funded through this campaign is Klarman Hall, the college’s new humanities building slated to open in January. Other major campaign initiatives included:The Sesquicentennial Faculty Fellows program, which resulted in 125 new faculty hires…
As Patrick Braga ’17 stood waiting to perform at an outdoor concert last summer, he noticed a homeless woman talking to herself, so he started listening and taking notes.“I thought about how we decide what constitutes acceptable text to set to music,” said Braga, a double major in music and urban and regional studies. “In spite of efforts to resolve homelessness, this is still a voice that hasn’t…
This piece by David H. Holmberg and Kathryn S. March, both professors of anthropology, reflects on the Nepali earthquakes and their impact in north central Nepal.
"History, like earthquakes, recurs at merciless intervals in the homelands of the Tamang in north central Nepal," they write. "Military conquest, government intervention, and cultural dissonance have repeatedly…
As a graduate student Peter Wittich, associate professor of physics, worked at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO), located in an active nickel mine in Ontario, Canada. The observatory is deep underground to block out background radiation from other particles.To reach the clean room and the SNO instruments, Wittich descended 6,800 feet straight down through solid rock in a tiny elevator, then…
American poet Robert Frost was not above toying with his friends, or his readers. And one of his best-known works may be his grandest joke of all, as detailed in a new book by David Orr, “The Road Not Taken: Finding America in the Poem Everyone Loves and Almost Everyone Gets Wrong” (Penguin).“It’s an unbelievably popular poem. Hardly a graduation speech goes by that it is not quoted. But in fact,…
The College of Arts & Sciences has announced a new senior-level position to enhance and support its long-standing commitment to education innovation. Peter Lepage, professor of physics and former dean of the College of Arts & Sciences, will serve as the College’s first Director of Education Innovation.“Peter is a real leader in educational excellence both within the college and nationally…
An interdisciplinary collaboration between Cornell University and the University of Notre Dame has awarded nearly $2 million to 18 projects in five countries to examine the theoretical, empirical and practical dimensions of hope and optimism.“We think we’ve found a fantastic group of interdisciplinary scholars and topics to explore,” said Andrew Chignell, associate professor of philosophy at…
Prof. Jonathan Culler, English and comparative literature, spoke Wednesday about his new book The Theory of the Lyric as part of Cornell University Library’s Chats in the Stacks book talk program.The Theory of the Lyric, published by the Harvard University Press in June, explores the Western lyric tradition across millennia, continents and cultures. Culler drew upon 40 years of research on a wide…
In a surprising move, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy dropped out of the race for Speaker following John Boehner’s resignation. Elizabeth Sanders, an election expert and professor of government, says McCarthy’s exit could make it harder for the GOP to find a presidential candidate and message they can rally behind.Sanders says:“This does not bode well for the Republican Party, coming on top…
Will Gluck ’93, writer and director of the reimagined “Annie” movie, as well as “Easy A” and “Fired Up,” visited campus Oct. 16 to share career advice with students as this year’s Munschauer Career Series Speaker for the College of Arts and Sciences Career Development Center.Gluck, who is based in Los Angeles, spoke to students about the challenges and rewards of working in the entertainment…
James R. Houck, a noted astronomer in the field of infrared spectroscopy for astrophysics, died in Ithaca Sept. 18 at age 74 from complications of Alzheimer's Disease.Houck received his Ph.D. from Cornell in condensed matter physics in 1967, then switched fields to astronomy. After post-doctorate work at the Naval Research Laboratory, he worked at Cornell until he retired as the Kenneth A…
Joseph Margulies, civil rights attorney and professor of government and law, comments on the Justice Department’s decision to release 6,000 inmates. He says the move is a step in the right direction, but adds that it does not solve the problem of mass incarceration in America. Margulies says:“This is all well and good, but really more of the same. A third of the inmates who will be released…
Holly Case, associate professor of history, writes this piece in Dissent Magazine about Hungarian thinker and former statesman, István Bibó.Case is the author of Between States: The Transylvanian Question and the European Idea During World War II (Stanford University Press, 2009).
Grad student Rachel Abbott and undergrads Andy Wong ‘17 and Diamond Oden ‘17 have become experts in identifying various creatures of the Adirondacks – the calanoid copepods that they’re studying, as well as myriad others that were biting them as they spent hours taking water samples in canoes.“It’s very easy to get grumpy up there,” said Abbott, a doctoral student in the field of ecology and…
