Photo: Godfrey L. Simmons Jr. and Judy TateCivic Ensemble’s new play festival, Civic Acts: New Plays Toward the Beloved Community, will feature two new political plays by women whose work centers on women and people of color. The first, “Fast Blood,” by four-time Emmy Award-winner Judy Tate, will be directed by Beth F. Milles, associate professor of performing and media arts, and will take place…
Gunhild Lischke, Senior Lecturer, Language Program Director, and Acting Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of German Studies, has been named the winner of the 2018-19 Sophie Washburn French Instructorship. The award, named in honor of Sophie Washburn French, is given annually to recognize excellence in language instruction among lecturer faculty in the College of Arts &…
For the last seven decades, Harold Scheraga has been doing research at Cornell, with over 1,300 scientific papers to his name – five so far in 2018. So when his alma mater decided to present him with an honorary degree and he couldn’t get to New York City, the president of City College of New York (CCNY) and numerous CCNY faculty came to Ithaca instead. The ceremony was held June 6 in the…
“Building Resilience,” a new episode of the “What Makes Us Human” podcast series, examines how to build resilient communities in the face of environmental and economic upheaval.“My work as a planner sits at this juncture of everyday lived experience and the need to adapt and change in the face of environmental and economic upheaval,” Neema Kudva, associate professor of city and regional planning…
The last data release and final official survey paper from the major Arecibo Legacy Fast ALFA (ALFALFA) survey, led by Cornell astronomers, was published July 2 in Astrophysical Journal Supplement. The paper marks the conclusion of a vast project that required 4,400 hours of telescope time and resulted in more than 100 papers co-authored by faculty, staff and students at Cornell. The survey was…
Forty years ago when Richard “Dick” Feldman arrived at Cornell, students learning a language had only a basement lab in Morrill Hall stocked with audio tapes to help them. When Feldman retires on June 30, new director Angelika Kraemer will take the helm of a robust Language Resource Center bustling with technology, programs, and resources. “I’ve loved my position here,” says Feldman. “I think…
Media – whether mass, social, or material – underpin our 21st century society, making media studies a critical field for today’s university. At Cornell, the field of media studies is flourishing, with new initiatives, new hires, and new courses. At the center of this energy lies the Media Studies Working Group, which includes faculty from four colleges: Arts & Sciences; Computing and…
A hike in a spectacular Utah canyon got Shimon Edelman thinking: Humans crave novelty; boredom creates unhappiness. But if happiness is only possible through the pursuit of new experiences, what role does memory have?The professor of psychology says we can’t have it all when it comes to happiness, identity, and extreme longevity, and explains why we’ll have to give up one to keep the others. …
In a wide-ranging conversation on May 2, associate professors of English Joanie Mackowski and Elisha Cohn explored how to write beyond the human at “In a Word.” The conversation in Klarman Hall’s Rhodes-Rawling Auditorium – which explored poetry and novels and touched on the environment, the anthropocene, Derrida and zoos -- was followed by a reception and more conversation in the English Lounge…
On May 2, a ceramics collection hidden away in a Cornell basement for decades got a new home, as the new Material Culture Laboratory in Goldwin Smith Hall had its grand opening. The lab belongs to Astrid Van Oyen, assistant professor of classics, and is the former home of the Temple of Zeus. Now, instead of soup, the space offers tantalizing glimpses of past cultures; instead of event posters,…
The lecture hall boasted hundreds of seats, a room so large the professor had to wear a microphone to be heard. But unlike some large classes, no one was zoning out in the last row. Instead, the students were alert, aware that at any moment they might have to use their iClickers to answer a question, or break into small groups for discussion. In this Introduction to Sociology class taught by…
College of Arts and Sciences faculty members Benjamin Anderson and Saida HodžIć have been awarded the Robert and Helen Appel Fellowship for Humanists and Social Scientists, and Vivian Zayas and Edward Swartz have been awarded the Robert A. and Donna B. Paul Academic Advising Award in the College of Arts and Sciences. They will be honored at a May 26 trustee-faculty dinner recognizing university…
Thirty-four four-person teams from 18 schools in upstate New York competed April 29 in Girls’ Adventures in Math (GAIM), a team-based math competition for girls in grades three through eight held at Cornell University and 10 other locations nationwide. The national results have just been announced, and Ithaca’s Cayuga Heights Elementary School finished first in the Cornell competition Elementary…
For Andrea Bachner, inscription – the moment in which a surface is being marked – is a metaphor, but it also draws on real practices and has real repercussions. In her new book, “The Mark of Theory: Inscriptive Figures, Poststructuralist Prehistories,” Bachner explores the role inscription plays, from literature and media to trauma theory, race and gender to psychoanalysis, sound and ultimately…
“Imagining the Future,” a new episode of the “What Makes Us Human” podcast series, explores how science fiction can help make sense of climate change. This second season of the podcast examines the question "Where Is the Human in Climate Change?" and showcases the newest thinking across academic disciplines about the relationship between humans and the environment.
“The bad news is…
“Planetary Health,” a new episode of the “What Makes Us Human” podcast series, explores the complex relationships between health and human interaction with the environment. The podcast’s second season -- "Where Is the Human in Climate Change?" -- showcases the newest thinking across academic disciplines about the relationship between humans and the environment. The series is produced by the…
Why do many Americans, especially white rural Americans, distrust the federal government? Can liberal and conservative Americans find common ground despite such divides? In the final lecture in the “Difficulty of Democracy” series of the Program on Ethics and Public Life (EPL), sociologist Arlie Hochschild will discuss her New York Times bestseller, “Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and…
The 1940’s saw Nazi concentration camps, the atomic bomb, and the U.S. invasion of South Korea: a pivotal era by any yardstick. In his new book, “Facing the Abyss: American Literature and Culture in the 1940s,” George Hutchinson asks how these epochal moments resonated in literary culture, and how artists brought shape and meaning to the world in the wake of such overwhelming events. Although…
What shapes our responses to climate change? Where do sustainability and human culture meet?The new season of the “What Makes Us Human” podcast and essay series from the College of Arts and Sciences in collaboration with the Cornell Broadcast Studios, titled "Where Is the Human in Climate Change?" will showcase the newest thinking across academic disciplines about the relationship between humans…
How does “the people” appear in public life? This question will be examined in this year’s Society for the Humanities Annual Invitational Lecture on Wed., April 18. Political theorist Jason Frank will speak on “The People as Popular Manifestation" at 4:30 p.m., in Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium, Klarman Hall. A reception in A.D. White House will follow; the events are free and the public is invited…
Poet Ishion Hutchinson, assistant professor of English, and novelist Emily Fridlund, visiting scholar in the Department of English, have each received Literature Awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The awards will be presented in New York City at the Academy’s annual Ceremonial in May.Hutchinson was awarded one of eight Arts and Letters Awards in honor of exceptional…
The 1960s marked a crucial political moment for Latin America, and aesthetic responses resulted in a broad range of musical experimentation. A new book, “Experimentalisms in Practice: Music Perspectives from Latin America,” seeks to broaden the traditionally Eurocentric interpretive framework applied to experimental music traditions.The book includes essays about experimental practices in…
A memorial commemoration for the late Theodore J. Lowi, the John L. Senior Professor of American Institutions Emeritus, will be held Saturday, April 21, in the chapel at Anabel Taylor Hall. “Theodore J. Lowi: Celebrating A Half Century at Cornell,” from 4:30 to 6 p.m., will be followed by a reception in the Founders Room in Anabel Taylor Hall. Lowi died in 2017 at the age of 85.Gretchen Ritter …
Approximately 74 million people in the United States use Medicaid. But as assistant professor of government Jamila Michener recounts in her new book, “Fragmented Democracy: Medicaid, Federalism and Unequal Politics,” there is no one Medicaid, but rather a patchwork of policies across states with differences even at the neighborhood level.“The book is about federalism, about how we structure our…
Nobel Laureate Roald Hoffmann’s autobiographical play, based on his experiences as a Holocaust survivor in Zloczow, Poland (now Ukraine), will be presented as a staged reading in Ithaca, directed by Beth F. Milles. “Something that Belongs to You” will be shown on Sunday, April 15 at 6pm at Ithaca College’s Clark Lounge, Campus Center, and on Tuesday, April 17 at 7pm at the Cherry Artspace on…
“Birds of Wonder,” a new novel by Cynthia Robinson, addresses sexual violence, porn addiction, and sexual tourism. “It’s an appropriate story for this #MeToo moment,” said Robinson, Mary Donlon Alger Professor of Medieval and Islamic Art in the Department of the History of Art.Set among the hills and lakes of upstate New York and told in six vibrantly distinct voices, “Birds of Wonder” chronicles…
Did the roots of Nazism lie in European colonialism? On April 11, political theorist Eleni Varikas will speak on “The Colonial Genealogies of Fascisms in Europe" as part of the 2018 Institute for Comparative Modernities (ICM) New Conversations Series. The talk, at 4:45 pm in G22 Goldwin Smith Hall, is free and the public is invited.According to Varikas, Hannah Arendt first introduced the idea…
Scholars in the new interdisciplinary field of environmental humanities argue that climate change, water security, environmental justice and other such challenges can’t be solved purely by economic and scientific solutions: Human culture is implicated in ecological conditions.The Spring 2018 Environmental Humanities Lecture Series will bring to campus two leading scholars in the field. All talks…
Three out of the 40 coveted Simons Fellowships in Mathematics for 2018 have been awarded to Cornell mathematics faculty members: Professor Marcelo Aguiar, Associate Professor Lionel Levine and Professor Alex Vladimirsky. The Simons Fellows Programs in both Mathematics and Theoretical Physics provide funds to faculty for up to a semester long research leave from classroom teaching and…
In a Medieval Studies Brown Bag Lunch, Eric Rebillard discussed his recent book, “Greek and Latin Narratives about the Ancient Martyrs,” a collection of texts that describe the martyrdom of Christians executed before A.D. 260. The collection includes texts in Latin or Greek with facing English translations, a hagiographical dossier of each martyr, critical information about the manuscript…
In a talk on “Gestural Communication and Pantomime in Great Apes” March 6 in Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall, evolutionary anthropologist Itai Roffman from the University of Haifa and three Cornell faculty respondents explored the implications of the latest findings on primate culture and communication.“This is profound and deeply moving research. It raises questions that by definition cannot be…
How do plants “know” it is time to flower? A new study uncovers exactly where a key protein forms before it triggers the flowering process in plants.Until now, no one has pinpointed which cells produce the small protein, called Flowering Locus T (FT). The study also points to an extensive intercellular signaling system that regulates FT production.The findings, published Feb. 26 in the…
Einstein predicted black holes and gravitational waves – bizarre deviations from Newton’s theory of gravity – but it took almost a century before experiments proved him right. Those experimenters won this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics, but why do gravitational waves matter? And why is the recent detection of waves from colliding neutron stars causing such a stir?In this spring’s Hans Bethe…
The Department of English will host more than 250 alumni, faculty and students March 23-24 in a celebration of a half-century of teaching at Cornell by Daniel Schwarz, the Frederic J. Whiton Professor of English Literature and Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow.The conference, “50 Years of Transformative Teaching,” will feature panels, lectures and other tributes, and will be held in Rhodes…
As the 19th-century editor for the “Norton Anthology of World Literature,” Caroline Levine has radically revised the collection’s structure and selections. For the recently released 2017 edition, she added a Poetry & Politics section; for the 2012 edition, she inaugurated a section on “orature,” oral poems and stories, which continues in the new volume.The anthology includes literary works…
Brett de Bary has translated one of the first two books in a new Einaudi Center imprint at Cornell University Press, Cornell Global Perspectives. “The Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant Disaster and the Future of Renewable Energy” is by former Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan, based on his Distinguished Speaker Series talk at Cornell in March 2017.De Bary, professor of Asian studies and comparative…
What impact does communicating science have on knowledge? In a talk delivered to the Cornell Association of Professors Emeriti at Boyce Thompson Institute Feb. 20, Bruce Lewenstein argued that public communication is fundamental to science and that public disputes about reliable knowledge are not unique to our time.Climate change, evolution and vaccines are all areas in which scientific consensus…
The #MeToo movement seems to have sparked a sea change in how we think of sexual harassment. But in this Academic Minute, Kate Manne, assistant professor of philosophy, discusses why our attitudes are still not where they need to be. She is the author of the recently published “Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny.”As Manne says, “In the wake of the #MeToo campaign, we must ask ourselves the question…
Nelson G. Hairston Jr., Frank H.T. Rhodes Professor of Environmental Science in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, has been elected a Fellow of the Ecological Society of America (ESA) for “outstanding contributions” in advancing ecological knowledge.The committee cited Hairston for his “influential experimental, conceptual, methodological, and synthetic contributions to our…
Robert Morgan, the Kappa Alpha Professor of English, will appear in the first episode of the new History channel docudrama, "The Men Who Built America: Frontiersmen” on Wednesday, March 7 at 9PM ET/PT. Morgan was tapped by the History Channel producers (who include Leonardo DiCaprio) for his expertise on Daniel Boone; he is the author of “Boone: A Biography” and “Lions of the West: Heroes and…
NASA’s Cassini spacecraft dramatically ended its scientific explorations just three weeks after Martha E. Pollack was installed as Cornell's 14th president on Aug. 25. As an inauguration gift, the Cornell Center for Astrophysics and Planetary Science (CCAPS), the Department of Astronomy, and the Spacecraft Planetary Image Facility (SPIF) presented President Pollack with a model of Cassini on…
Trevor Pinch, Goldwin Smith Professor of Science & Technology Studies, has been awarded the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) 2018 John Desmond Bernal Prize, a lifetime achievement award for his “distinguished contribution” to the field of science and technology studies (STS).“Trevor is one of the founders of our field, and one of the most versatile scholars in it,” said Bruce…
Israel and Egypt were at war in 1968, but every Friday night families across Israel gathered in their homes to watch Arabic-language Egyptian movies; Palestinians did as well. “Arabic Movie,” a documentary directed by Sara Tsifroni and Eyal Sagui Bizawi and shown Feb. 12 at Cornell Cinema, offers a glimpse into this phenomenon of cultural connection that lasted more than a decade, exploring why…
Sputnik proved a game changer for science fiction in Russia, merging science fiction with science fact. A new volume edited by Anindita Banerjee, “Russian Science Fiction Literature and Cinema: A Critical Reader,” examines Russian science fiction and its impact on global culture.“In Russia perhaps more than anywhere else, science fiction served as the battleground for competing attitudes toward…
With one small change in interpretive approach, Jill Frank breaks with tradition in her new book, “Poetic Justice: Rereading Plato’s ‘Republic.’” Taking seriously that Plato appears in none of his texts and insisting that nothing that anyone in any of the dialogues says – including Socrates – should be attributed to Plato, Frank aims to shift how Plato is read.Focusing on Plato’s “Republic,” one…
The idea of binding and reshaping a baby’s head may make today’s parents cringe, but for families in the Andes between 1100-1450 AD, cranial modification was all the rage.
Like Chinese foot binding, the practice may have been a marker of group identity. Its period of popularity in the area that is now Peru, before the expansion of the Inka empire, was marked by political upheaval, ecological…
Mainstream international relations continues to assume that the world is governed by calculable risk based on estimates of power, despite repeatedly being surprised by unexpected change. In the new book “Protean Power: Exploring the Uncertain and Unexpected in World Politics,” co-editors Peter Katzenstein and Lucia A. Seybert, Ph.D. ’12, argue for a new approach to international relations that…
The number of Americans over age 65 is expected to double by 2060, to 24 percent of the population, intensifying concerns about end-of-life care. In a talk on Feb. 23, sociologists Holly Prigerson and Libby Luth will speak on “Psychosocial Influences on End-of-Life Care: Leveraging and Application of Social Constructs,” at 3:30 pm in Rm. 302, Uris Hall. In the first part of the talk, Prigerson…
Margaret Washington, professor of history, is featured in the new PBS documentary film, "'Tell Them We Are Rising': The Story of Black Colleges and Universities," directed by MacArthur Award-winning filmmaker Stanley Nelson. The film documents the story of black colleges and universities, which began before the Civil War, and Washington was called on for her expertise in 18th and 19th century…
Twenty-five hundred years after they were written, Plato’s dialogues continue to yield insights that resonate with current philosophical discussions. In her new book, “Plato’s Moral Psychology: Intellectualism, the Divided Soul, and the Desire for Good,” Rachana Kamtekar, professor of philosophy, examines Plato’s approach to human motivation.According to the mainstream interpretation of Plato’s…
