The Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies will lead a campuswide effort to help doctoral students strengthen their dissertation research proposals with a new grant from the New York-based Social Science Research Council (SSRC).The Einaudi-SSRC Dissertation Proposal Development Program will offer seminars, workshops and mentoring to 12 students who are developing interdisciplinary…
Shonni Enelow, assistant professor of English at Fordham University, has been chosen as the winner of the 2015-2016 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism for her book “Method Acting and Its Discontents” (Northwestern University Press, 2015).The Nathan Award committee comprises the heads of the English departments of Cornell, Princeton and Yale universities and the award is administered…
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Linda B. Glaser
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Arts & Sciences Communications
Brad Ramshaw, assistant professor of physics, has been awarded the Lee Osheroff Richardson (LOR) Science Prize for 2017. The prize recognizes the novel work of young scientists working in the fields of low temperatures and/or high magnetic fields in the Americas and is administered by Oxford Instruments. The trophy and $8,000 prize will be awarded at the Association for Physical Society’s meeting…
In this opinion piece in The Hill, historian Barry Strauss, contends that Trump's appointment of his son-in-law as a senior advisor has plenty of precedent."History is full of examples of close family members advising the boss," writes Strauss, the Bryce and Edith M. Bowmar Professor in Humanistic Studies in the history department. "Moreover, family businesses are still one of the most common…
The Civil War came as a crushing blow to the moneyed elite of Boston, who had been deeply embedded in the cotton economy of the early 19th century as textile manufacturers.With the abolition of slavery and the decline of cotton manufacturing in New England, however, these Boston “Brahmins” revitalized themselves through new business opportunities in the mines, railroads and stockyards of the West…
“The history of the Negro is the history of America, and it is not a pretty story,” says the late writer James Baldwin in director Raoul Peck’s documentary “I Am Not Your Negro.”The 2016 film is based on Baldwin’s recollections of the civil rights leaders Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. A friend, intimate and comrade of all three, Baldwin explores race relations in America…
With protests multiplying around the country, this is a good time to be Sara Warner, whose research area is theatre and social change. “I study the art of activism,” says Warner, associate professor of performing and media arts in the College of Arts and Sciences and recently named a Stephen H. Weiss Junior Fellow at Cornell. “I’m particularly interested in the way political actors use…
Kurt Gottfried, emeritus professor of physics and a recognized expert on nuclear arms control, has been awarded the 2016 Scientific Freedom and Responsibility Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Gottfried, who has been at Cornell for 52 years, was honored by AAAS “for his long and distinguished career as a ‘civic scientist,’ through his advocacy for arms…
“Say it with chocolate,” goes the ad – but what are you really saying? We imbue objects with all sorts of meanings, especially around the holidays. A new study by Cornell psychology researchers finds that the closer to Valentine’s Day we get, the more chocolates – and red roses – spell out “l-o-v-e.”“Most people like chocolates and roses,” said Vivian Zayas, associate professor of psychology, …
Robert D. Guber ’15 studied alcoholic liver, diabetes, and obesity. Lipi Gupta ’15 worked on reducing beam emittance in the Cornell Electron Storage Ring (CESR), a 768-meter ring that is part of the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS), to produce brighter s-rays. Sang Min Han ’15 examined toadfish to create a mathematical model for vertebrate vocalization. Swati Sureka ’15 engineered…
In response to the recent Executive Order barring U.S. entry to citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries, Cornell’s Department of Near Eastern Studies will hold a teach-in Feb. 17 in the Groos Family Atrium in Klarman Hall from 10 a.m. to noon. The event is free and the public is welcome.
“This is an extension of our educational mission and our ethical obligation to our…
It is a truth universally acknowledged that many doctoral programs in the United States are stubbornly segregated by gender. Although women earn just under half of all doctorates in research fields, they are clustered in the language arts, while men are clustered in engineering programs, for example.But Cornell researchers have discovered that gender also plays a role in “prestige segregation,”…
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Jendayi Brooks-Flemister ’18
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A&S Student Ambassador
The Arts & Sciences Student Ambassadors share their thoughts on everything from roomates to coffee to the best classes in the Student Ambassador Blog, which is updated frequently with new columns. Here, sophomore MItchell Lee talks about the classes and people that make Cornell one of his favorite places to be. Read the blog weekly on the A&S website.It’s important to take tests and write…
Two books by Lanre Akinsiku, a recent graduate of the Department of English’s MFA program in fiction and currently a lecturer in English, earned top nods from the New York Public Library on its annual list of the best children’s and young adult literature.“Justin” and “Janae,” titles in Akinsiku’s “Blacktop” series, were selected by the library for its list of the top books of 2016. They were…
Winners of the Heermans-McCalmon Playwriting Contest will be showcased Friday during an event at the Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts.Staged readings of first-place winner Molly Karr’s ‘18 screenplay “Whole Hearted” and Aleksej Aarsaether’s ‘17 play, “The Diary of an American Girl” will be presented at 4:30 p.m. in the Class of ‘56 Dance Theatre. Aarsaether also won an honorable mention in…
The fall of the Berlin Wall marked the end of real socialism and the Cold War, but also the rise of a melancholic vision of history as a series of losses. For the political left, the cause lost was communism, and this trauma determined how leftists wrote the next chapter in their political struggle and how they have thought about their past since.In his new book, “Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism,…
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Linda B. Glaser
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Arts & Sciences Communications
The College of Arts and Sciences has announced a $2.7 million expansion of its Active Learning Initiative (ALI), which began five years ago with the conversion of four large course sequences in physics and biology. Thanks to the generosity of Alex and Laura Hanson, both Class of 1987, six new projects will be launched in the Departments of Music, Classics, Economics, Mathematics, Physics, and…
The language requirement in the College of Arts & Sciences helped ShawnaKim Lowey-Ball ’05 discover a culture that’s become her life’s work.Lowey-Ball, who came to Cornell with interests in physics and cognitive science, was already fluent in French, so she decided to venture in a completely different direction to fulfill her language requirement — Indonesian.“I wanted a language class with…
In reaction to the current immigration ban, Hirokazu Miyazaki, professor of anthropology, writes this opinion piece in the Japan Times, telling the story of Sidney Gulick, who, frustrated with the immigration ban of 1924, decided to turn his attention to the next generation."Gulick, who had spent 25 years in Japan as a Christian missionary, arranged to have 12,000 dolls sent as gifts from…
Fifty student musicians in the Cornell Wind Symphony (CU Winds) traveled to Haiti and the Dominican Republic Jan. 10-17 for a service-learning concert tour that was “genuinely transformative,” said James Spinazzola, director of wind ensembles.“Our students collaborated with 150 student and professional musicians in four concerts, built institutional relationships that are already leading to…
After eight years at the Vatican translating the pope’s messages – sermons, letters, even tweets – into Latin, Daniel Gallagher is bringing his expertise to Cornell. He joins the classics faculty this summer as the Ralph and Jeanne Kanders Associate Professor of the Practice in Latin.Gallagher’s prowess in spoken Latin will help the classics department meet rising demand from students who want to…
Two Arts & Sciences alumni were honored with reviews of their debut novels in the Jan. 29 New York Times Book Review.The novels of Sana Krasikov ’01, winner of the 2009 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, and Lydia Peelle ’00, author of the short story collection “Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing,” were both reviewed in the recent issue.Krasikov’s book, “The Patriots,” chronicles …
In discussions about climate change, many people seem to think the only real problem is replacing fossil fuels, and once that’s done nothing much really needs to change. “That’s not only false, it’s a really dangerous way of thinking,” said Karen Pinkus, professor of Romance studies and comparative literature in the College of Arts and Sciences.Her new book, “Fuel: A Speculative Dictionary,”…
Atop a cabinet, leaning against a wall of Dagmawi Woubshet’s office, is an enlarged framed cover of the May 17, 1963, issue of TIME magazine. Its portrait of writer James Baldwin stares into the room. Woubshet, associate professor of English, gestures to it several times as he talks about his research.In that TIME cover story, the magazine heralds Baldwin as a leading voice of the Civil Rights…
For the past few decades, scientists had believed that Mars’ carbon dioxide-filled atmosphere – chemically memorialized in its sedimentary outcrops – helped melt the planet’s bountiful ice into flowing rivers, streams and ponds billions of years ago.
Now there is doubt. In a new Martian mystery, the rover Curiosity detected no evidence of carbonate within the red planet’s rocks.
“A higher…
Like all researchers, Itai Cohen, associate professor of physics, has a lot of questions. But unlike many, his questions make big, topical leaps. From fruit flies to mosh pits, from origami to cartilage—Cohen dreams of preventing stampedes in Mecca, understanding the complex neuromechanics of fruit fly flight, and making self-folding robots from a single sheet of atoms. How can all this happen in…
“My name’s Ishmael, what’s yours?” -- or would “Call me Ishmael” better open a narrative about whaling? Tone, diction, style: these are the kinds of questions Cornell’s Historians Are Writers! (HAW) grapple with in their meetings. The grappling is the more difficult because there’s no one right answer to such questions, so experimentation, exploration and creativity serve as the group’s…
Hundreds of seldom-seen photographs documenting the journey of African-Americans from the slavery era to the 20th century are now digitized and freely accessible to students and scholars around the world.The Loewentheil Collection of African-American Photographs, part of Beth and Stephan Loewentheil’s 2012 donation of photography to Cornell University Library, contains a trove of vital…
Thanks to the Cornell Astronomical Society, Cornell’s Fuertes Observatory has a new museum featuring vintage observatory instruments, many collected in the 19th century by Estevan Fuertes, founding dean of Cornell’s civil engineering department.“This place has come alive. It used to be a storage facility. It’s no longer a storage closet with telescopes on top, this museum has a heartbeat,” said…
The 2016 presidential election and recent presidential actions have brought a great deal of attention to immigration and immigrants in American society, with much of the debate perpetuating harmful stereotypes, stoking fears about outsiders, and echoing a nativist rhetoric that many believed had disappeared from public discourse. In response, Maria Cristina Garcia, Howard A. Newman Professor of…
In academic fields from physics to genetics, researchers rely on computers for everything from data analysis to modeling. One area of scholarship that has gone largely untouched is the humanities, where today’s researchers are far more often hunched over stacks of books than scanning graphs and charts on a screen.That, however, is changing thanks to people like David Mimno, assistant professor of…
From our earliest history, humans have contemplated the cosmos. Before we had an inkling of the nature of our own solar system, we wondered at the composition of our sister planets. And long before we knew there were planets orbiting other stars, we wondered if we, earth-bound beings, were alone in the universe.This need to understand the nature of the universe and our place in it continues to…
Cornell in Rome celebrates its 30th anniversary in March, gathering program alumni, faculty and friends in the Eternal City for three days. The event features tours, receptions, lunches, and panels on art, architecture and the humanities.Presenters include Peter Eisenman ’54, B.Arch ’55; former Cornell provost Don Randel and distinguished faculty from the colleges of Arts & Sciences and…
Walk by a bakery, and you’ll smell fresh-baked bread. But would you smell it, if you’d never learned what bread was? “Not necessarily,” says Thomas A. Cleland, associate professor of psychology.“The very concept of having odors that you recognize and identify, even being able to pick them out of the messy olfactory world out there, absolutely depends on learning,” says Cleland in a Cornell…
With so much research and exploration being conducted online, having material available digitally is vitally important to faculty and students.The Grants Program for Digital Collections in Arts and Sciences has enabled a wide range of Cornell collections to be digitized, from punk music fliers to biblical-era excavations. College of Arts and Sciences faculty and graduate students are invited to…
A hallmark of human language is our ability to produce and understand an infinite number of different sentences. This unique open-ended productivity is normally explained in terms of “structural reuse”; sentences are constructed from reusable parts such as phrases. But how languages come to be composed of reusable parts in the first place is a question that has long puzzled researchers in the…
Benjamin Anderson’s recently published “Cosmos and Community in Early Medieval Art” (Yale University Press, 2017) has won the 2018 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award of the College Art Association (CAA). The award honors an especially distinguished book in the history of art, published in the English language. “Cosmos and Community” presents the first comparative study of cosmological art between 700…
The university has created a new resource page for faculty, staff and students concerning the Jan. 27 presidential executive order on immigration. Interim President Hunter Rawlings also sent the following message to the Cornell community Jan. 29:President Donald Trump’s recent executive order imposing a 90-day ban on immigrant and nonimmigrant entry to the United States from seven predominantly…
“We can hear the universe” declared researchers at LIGO (the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) announcing the first detection of a gravitational wave last year.By capturing a sonic translation of two black holes colliding more than a billion years ago, scientists had finally achieved what ancient scholars had long dreamed of: translating the “music of the spheres” into sound…
Maps of the Caribbean coast in the late 18th century were crafted with political purpose but did not always represent the geopolitical reality in which residents lived.In a new book, Ernesto Bassi traces the configuration of a geographic space he calls the “transimperial Greater Caribbean,” made up of sailors, traders, revolutionaries and indigenous peoples living a cross-border existence in…
There are at least two Cornell alumni who were thrilled when the Academy Award nominations came out earlier this week.Dan Cohen ’05 is an executive producer for “Arrival,” the science fiction movie starring Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner and Forest Whittaker, which was nominated for eight awards, including best picture. Cohen, who was also a producer for “The Spectacular Now” in 2013 and “Cut Bank” in…
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Linda B. Glaser
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Arts & Sciences Communications
“The curriculum belongs to the faculty, 100 percent,” declared Interim President Hunter Rawlings at a faculty forum Jan. 23 in the Rhodes Rawlings Auditorium in Klarman Hall. “This is a principle that is essential at every university.”The forum was held to discuss curriculum reforms being explored by the College of Arts & Sciences, including discussions about the mission of a liberal arts and…
Linguistics professor Herbert L. Kufner, Ph.D. ’56, died on Oct. 20, 2016, in Unterhaching, Germany. He was 88.Kufner was an expert on German linguistics who specialized in teaching methods for German. In addition to publishing dozens of scholarly articles, he was also the author or editor of five books: “Toward a Grammar of Proto-Germanic” (1972), “Das Deutschland unserer Tage” (1964), “München”…
Using a novel chemical procedure developed in her lab, Yimon Aye and her group are helping to blaze a trail in the emerging field of precision medicine by targeting and modulating single proteins to achieve desired responses.The procedure, targetable reactive electrophiles and oxidants – dubbed “T-REX” by the group – involves the use of a photocaged (light-activated) precursor that, when turned…
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has approved $1.1 million to extend the Mellon Collaborative Studies in Architecture, Urbanism and the Humanities (AUH) interdisciplinary seminar series at Cornell for four years.“The grant supports innovative, cross-disciplinary coursework on one of the most pressing problems of this generation: the rapid growth of global cities,” said Kent Kleinman, the Gale and…
Kyle Shen, associate professor of physics, creates and investigates artificial and unconventional materials with unusual electronic and magnetic properties. His research into these new materials and their potential applications is explored in this Cornell Resarch story.
W. Wolfgang Holdheim, the Frederic J. Whiton Professor of Liberal Studies Emeritus, died Nov. 12, 2016, in Reston, Virginia, at the age of 90.In a Festschrift in Holdheim’s honor published as a special issue of Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature in 1995, editor Richard Weisberg, M.A. ’67, Ph.D. ’70, said Holdheim, an expert on the theory and practice of narrative, was “a true pioneer of the…
Cornell Cinema will host several special events and series this semester, including “Skin” in partnership with The Society for the Humanities and an LGBT festival in partnership with the Feminist, Gender & Sexuality Studies Program and the LGBT Resource Center.
The highlight of the “Skin” series will be a screening of the new documentary by Raoul Peck, “I Am Not Your Negro” (2016) Feb…
Sarah Kreps, associate professor of government, and co-author Debak Das, a graduate student in government, write in this Washington Post piece about their research into Americans' thoughts about the need for retaliation against Russia for alleged cyberattacks."Consistent with recent YouGov data on partisan differences toward Russia, almost 85 percent of Democrats viewed Russia as being either…
