Alex Nik Pasqualini, a Ph.D student in the music department in the College of Arts and Sciences, will give a talk as part of the Soup & Hope series on Feb. 23 at noon in Sage Chapel. Their talk will be about how they turned toward learning and education in some of life's most challenging moments.
Pasqualini’s research is focused on the intersections of popular music, activism and queer…
New York Times best-selling author Ross Gay will kickstart the Spring 2023 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series on Thurs., Feb. 9 at 5 p.m. in the Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium, G70 Klarman Hall. A poet and essayist, Gay will read from his most recent collection of essays, “Inciting Joy” and other works. The Reading Series is sponsored by the Creative Writing Program in the Department of…
In response to a spate of recent layoffs in the tech industry, Arts & Sciences Career Development is offering a free online session Thursday for students interested in finding internships and jobs in the tech sector.
“Finding a CS Internship Beyond Big Tech” is scheduled for 4:30 p.m. Feb. 2. Students can sign up for the virtual event on Cornell’s Handshake platform.
“Students are…
Project Kei/Creative Commons license 4.0
A quadcopter drone
Iranian officials claim Israel was behind a weekend drone strike on a defense factory. The attack comes as tensions between Iran and the West are growing over Tehran’s advancing nuclear program, ongoing crackdown on peaceful anti-government protests, and the supply of arms for Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Paul Lushenko is a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army, senior policy fellow at Cornell…
The College of Arts and Sciences has embarked upon a $110 million transformation of McGraw Hall, with several Cornell families pledging more than $40 million in foundational gifts to enable the comprehensive renovation.
“McGraw Hall is a treasured icon at the heart of Cornell’s campus and a centerpiece of Cornell’s history,” said Ray Jayawardhana, the Harold Tanner Dean of Arts and…
Meta will be reinstating former president Donald Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts in the coming weeks with what the company calls “new guardrails” to deter repeat offenses. The following Cornell University experts are available to discuss the news.
Alexandra Cirone, assistant professor of government and expert on the spread of disinformation online, says Facebook is still struggling to…
George Baird/Creative Commons license 3.0
Michelle Yeoh at the Cannes Festival in 2017
On Tuesday, as the Academy released its picks for Oscars contenders, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” clearly lead the pack with 11 awards nominations.
Kristen Warner, associate professor of performing and media arts at Cornell University, studies racial representation and employment in the creative media industries. She warns while it may seem like diversity has arrived in Hollywood, that…
Torbjørn Kjosvold for the Norwegian Military Media Archive/Forsvarets Mediearkiv
A Leopard 2 A4 NO tank from Telemark Battalion Tank Squadron 1 in a training area outside Camp Rena.
Ukraine has asked Germany to send Leopard 2 tanks to help it break through Russian lines and recapture territory. The Leopard 2 offers significant advantages over the older, Soviet-era tanks currently in service with both the Russian and Ukrainian armies.
David Silbey, associate professor of history at Cornell University and director of teaching and learning at Cornell in Washington,…
Historian Robert Travers has been awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Grant to work on his newest book, a deeper look at the impeachment trial of Warren Hastings from 1787-1795.
Travers, professor of history in the College of Arts and Sciences, has long been curious about the British empire in India. Hastings, who rose through the ranks of the East India Company and served as the…
The research of Geoffry Coates (center) is recognized to be at the forefront of innovation in the development high-performance sustainable materials.
Chemist Geoffrey W. Coates will receive the 2023 National Academy of Sciences Award for the Industrial Application of Science. The award, which includes a $25,000 prize, will be presented during the NAS 160th Annual Meeting on April 30.
“Coates’ research is recognized globally to be at the forefront of innovation in the development high-performance sustainable materials. It embodies how…
Lindsay France/Cornell University
Composer Roberto Sierra, at home
Composer Roberto Sierra’s new work, “Cuatro Piezas para cello y piano,” will be featured at a concert in Barnes Hall on Sunday, Jan. 29 at 3 p.m., performed by the Sierra Duo – John Haines-Eitzen, cello, and Matthew Bengtson, piano. They will also perform George Walker’s “Sonata for Cello and Piano” and Beethoven’s “Sonata in A Major, Op. 69.”
The new Sierra piece was a surprise gift to…
Traverso's award-winning book, English translation
Enzo Traverso, the Susan and Baron Winokur Professor in the Humanities, has received the 2022 Premio Napoli award for nonfiction for his book “Rivoluzione 1789-1989” (Feltrinelli, 2021).
Traverso accepted the award Dec. 15 at the Mercadante Theater of Naples, where the ceremony took place in the presence of Gaetano Manfredi, the mayor of Naples. A committee of Naples’ distinguished writers,…
Patrick Shanahan
First-year students, from left, Nic Oke, Richlove Nkansah, Kira Pawletko and Hamid Rezaee.
For a first-year student, arriving on campus brings with it a mixture of emotions – excitement about challenging their intellect and meeting people from all over the world and nervousness about the exact same things.
Talk to first-year students at the end of their first semester and you’ll find they’ve figured out a lot of things – how to handle the rigor of their classes, how to manage their…
Chemical reactions are happening around us all the time – it’s obvious when you think about it, but how many of us do when we start a car, cook an egg, or fertilize the lawn?
Richard Kong, a specialist in chemical catalysis, thinks about chemical reactions all the time. In his work as a “professional mixer,” as he puts it, he’s not just interested in reactions that happen on their own, but in…
Chris Kitchen
Dave Taylor at his retirement party Dec. 14
Staff and faculty in the College of Arts & Sciences wished a happy retirement Dec. 14 to Dave Taylor, the College’s associate dean of administration, who leaves the position after 12 years. His successor, Warren Petrofsky, who currently serves as the chief infrastructure officer in the School of Arts & Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, will join Cornell Jan. 11.
“Dave has had…
Ivan Bazarov, professor of physics, has received a $410,000 grant from the Office of Nuclear Physics at the Department of Energy for research on long lifetime spin-polarized electron sources in particle accelerators.
“Particle accelerators have a remarkable track record of yielding measurements that enable an increase in the understanding of the fundamental laws of nuclear physics,” Bazarov…
Anthropologist Noah Tamarkin's book "Genetic Afterlives: Black Jewish Indigeneity in South Africa" (Duke University Press, 2020) has received the Jordan Schnitzer Book Award from the Association for Jewish Studies in the category of social science, anthropology, and folklore. His book also received a Diana Forsythe Prize honorable mention.
“Genetic Afterlives” ethnographically examines the…
Chris Kitchen
Some of the artifacts discovered at the site this fall.
Cornell faculty and students continued to work this semester with community members on an archaeological excavation project at St. James AME Zion Church in downtown Ithaca.
Uncovering more than 2,000 additional artifacts, this semester’s work also featured an end-of-semester mini-field course for local children and youth presented by Cornell students Aaliyah Brown ’23 and Milan Taylor ’24. The…
Provided
A photo from the 1980s shows, from left to right, Knight '69, Austin '39 and Todd '68 Kiplinger. In the background is a portrait of Austin's father, W. M. Kiplinger, who founded the Kiplinger publishing organization.
An expanded scholarship fund will support undergraduates with financial need in the College of Arts & Sciences.
The Todd L. Kiplinger '68 Scholarship was established 13 years ago and has supported nine students, including some students for multiple years of their college experience. A new bequest from Todd Kiplinger’s estate will allow the scholarship to expand to support either a greater…
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Arden Podpora, center, with other delegates to the COP27 conference.
Arts and Sciences students Arden Podpora ’23 and Eva Fenningdorf ’23 returned from the 27th Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP27) enthusiastic about an agreement that countries will pay for the damage that climate change causes to poorer countries.
“This was certainly something we had discussed in class and were hopeful of happening, but…
We gathered recommendations from faculty in the College of Arts & Sciences for the best books and poetry to read in 2023. We hope you will enjoy them!
Leslie Adelson, Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of German Studies, Department of German Studies
Valzhyna Mort is an extraordinary wordsmith of grit and grace. Forged in the fires of history and imagination, her alchemical…
Provided
Axaraly Ortiz, far left, presented her research at a mid-Atlantic region conference.
Preparing for life after graduation can be a costly endeavor for many students – with graduate school tests to pay for, academic conferences to attend, interview clothes to purchase and travel costs to get to those interviews. To help cover some of these expenses, the College of Arts & Sciences offers professional development grants.
The grants, established by generous alumni donations,…
Associate Professor Jesse Goldberg shared his research at this year’s Mitzi Sutton Russekoff ’54 Lecture at the Cornell Club in New York City Nov. 15.
Attendees at the event, hosted by the Alumni Affairs and Development office of the College of Arts & Sciences, heard about Goldberg’s work during his talk, “Courtship overrides thirst: What thirsty songbirds can teach us about human brain…
Sreang Hok/Cornell University
A student uses a VR headset as Jackwin Hui, right, a student technology specialist at CTI who helped to set up and troubleshoot the headsets, looks on.
Safely and effectively preparing a sample for cryo-electron microscopy involves a series of precise steps, resulting in specimens frozen at around minus 180 degrees Celsius. If done out of order or imprecisely, the scientist can obtain inaccurate results, ruin expensive equipment or even get hurt.
The technique isn’t often available to young researchers, but students in the Protein Structure…
Melissa J. Moore, emeritus chief scientific officer of Moderna, will visit campus Dec. 1-2 as this year’s speaker for the Efraim Racker Lecture in Biology and Medicine.
Moore’s public lecture, “mRNA as Medicine: COVID-19 Vaccine and Beyond,” will take place at 8 p.m. Dec. 1 in Room G10 of the Biotechnology Building. The talk is free and open to the public.
The Racker Lecture Series is…
Bryn Rosenfeld, assistant professor of government in the College of Arts and Sciences, recently won the Ed A. Hewett Book Prize from the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) for her book, “The Autocratic Middle Class: How State Dependency Reduces the Demand for Democracy” (2020, Princeton University Press).
Rosenfeld’s book argues, contrary to conventional…
Chris Kitchen
Anil Menon presents some of his current research at a Klarman fellows workshop.
After World War II, more than 12 million ethnic Germans were forced to move from across Eastern Europe into postwar Germany, one of the largest forced migrations of modern history. Political scientist Anil Menon wondered how this experience might shape the identity of this group years or even decades later – including the way they vote.
“I’m interested in examining both the organic and…
Baobao Zhang, a Klarman Postdoctoral Fellow in government in the College of Arts and Sciences, has been named to the first cohort of 15 AI2050 Early Career Fellows by Schmidt Futures.
As an AI2050 Fellow, Zhang will work with the Center for New Democratic Processes (CNDP) to test whether public assemblies, known as “deliberative democracy workshops,” can be an effective method for increasing…
Ze-Wen Koh ’23 is one of three winners of the SETI Forward Award, given to undergraduates to support their work focused on the search for life beyond Earth.
Koh, a physics and computer science major in the College of Arts and Sciences, is interested in dynamic habitability, the evolving structure of planetary surfaces, atmospheres and interiors, and their resulting viability as hosts for life…
Territory of American Canada/Creative Commons license 4.0
US and China flags
President Joe Biden will meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Monday before the Group of 20 summit in Indonesia, their first in-person encounter since Biden took office.
Jessica Chen Weiss, professor of government at Cornell University and former senior policy adviser to the U.S. State Department, is an expert on Chinese politics. She says this meeting is an important opportunity to…
Judith Byfield, professor of history in the College of Arts and Sciences, won the Martin A. Klein Prize in African history from the American Historical Association (AHA) for her book, "The Great Upheaval: Women and Nation in Postwar Nigeria" (Ohio University Press, 2021).
The book details the years immediately following World War II in Nigeria, where the women of Abeokuta staged a…
Gillian Harrill
Actors from "Ghosts" walk around the schoolhouse during filming in Oklahoma.
The story of three Kiowa children who escaped a government boarding school in the winter of 1891 and died from the cold is one that faculty member Jeff Palmer heard many times growing up.
“This is a story that’s been told from generation to generation, but every family has their embellishments,” said Palmer, associate professor of performing and media arts in the College of Arts and…
Students from throughout the university can now minor in data science, a field that faculty say has become increasingly important for students in nearly any major, from humanities and social sciences to sciences, engineering and math.
“This is a minor created with students from across the liberal arts and sciences in mind, to help them build quantitative and computational skills and, most…
Lt. Col. Leslie Pratt
An MQ-9 Reaper unmanned aerial vehicle flies a combat mission over southern Afghanistan in 2008.
General Atomics, the U.S.-based manufacturer of the most advanced armed and networked drone in the world – the MQ-9 Reaper – announced it intends to deliver the capability to Ukraine as part of a broader U.S. defense aid package.
Paul Lushenko is a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army and senior policy fellow at Cornell University’s Tech Policy Lab, as well as a doctoral student and co…
Students in the College of Arts & Sciences who are interested in summer research can now start applying for the Nexus Scholars Program.
In its second year, the program matches undergraduate students with summer opportunities to work side by side with faculty from across the college (humanities, social sciences, and STEM) on their research projects.
Along with the summer research…
Concerns about violence are growing as Election Day nears, especially in light of the recent attack on Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's husband in their San Francisco home.
Mabel Berezin is a comparative sociologist at Cornell University whose work explores fascist, nationalist and populist movements and associated threats to democracy.
Berezin says: “The expectation of violence…
Chris Kitchen
Margaret Keymakh in the Crickard lab.
Margaret Keymakh ’23 remembers well the day when her assays starting returning the results she was hoping for – and how excited she was when her replications of those experiments corroborated those findings.
“I was doing this experiment getting real data that matched what we had expected by reading through the literature,” she said. “I just wanted to get some good work done in the lab, but it…
Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine/Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
Benjamin Netanyahu, January 2018
Former Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu is on the verge of returning to office and the country is likely to be led by one of its most conservative governments. Netanyahu’s comeback appears powered by politician Itamar Ben-Gvir and the far-right.
Uriel Abulof is a visiting professor in Cornell University’s government department and professor at Tel-Aviv University. Abulof studies the politics…
Provided
Model for how inducible genes are regulated and distinct from constitutive (housekeeping) genes. Environmental signals induce transcription factors and cofactors to provide a helping hand in loading the transcription machinery. Otherwise they remain poised and ready, awaiting the signal. Most genes are constitutive and lack this helping hand, so they can only be transcribed infrequently.
Yeast – that simple organism essential to making beer and bread – has revealed for Cornell researchers a key mechanism in how genes are controlled.
Gene transcription – the elaborate process that our cells use to read genetic information stored in DNA – was long thought to be turned on only when certain regulatory factors traveled to specific DNA sequences. In new research, published Oct. 27…
Physicist Kin Fai Mak has received a $1.25 million grant from the Moore Foundation Experimental Physics Investigators Initiative to further his research into electron behaviors by studying two-dimensional crystals.
“Kin Fai Mak and his colleagues have made tremendous, even astonishing, strides in exploring the quantum realm over the past decade,” said Ray Jayawardhana, the…
A visiting scholar from Brazil will offer a public lecture Nov. 3 about Brazilian socio-political issues and the political response of Black feminist organizations. Her talk is one of three in the African Diaspora Knowledge Exchange Series, created by Carole Boyce-Davies, Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters and Professor of Africana Studies and Literatures in English.
The talk…
This past summer Israeli archaeologist Mordechai Aviam and his colleagues made headlines by finding possible evidence, near the Sea of Galilee, of the house of St. Peter. But that is hardly Aviam’s first discovery in Galilee. Perhaps his most exciting work took place at Yodefat, an ancient city that, in the year 67, was a center of resistance in the Great Jewish Revolt against Rome.
…
Shiny Things
The World Bank Group headquarters building in Washington, D.C.
In a speech outlining U.S. priorities and concerns ahead of the COP 27 climate negotiations, U.S. special climate envoy John Kerry called for the World Bank and other multilateral institutions to expand financing for low-carbon projects in developing countries.
Richard T. Clark is a political scientist who studies policymaking at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and how…
Photo by Road Trip with Raj on Unsplash
Monday early morning in Shanghai.
With the 20th National Congress of China’s Communist Party over, the country has finally reported that its third-quarter gross domestic product grew, beating expectations.
Jeremy Wallace, associate professor of government at Cornell University, is an expert on Chinese politics. He is author of the forthcoming book “Seeking Truth and Hiding Facts: Information, Ideology, and Authoritarianism in…
An Ethiopian government delegation and Tigray forces are meeting in South Africa for the first formal peace talks since war broke out two years ago. The talks are being mediated by the African Union (AU).
Oumar Ba, assistant professor of government in the College of Arts & Sciences, studies law, violence, race, humanity and world order in international politics. He says the AU is still…
Scott Emr, the Nancy M. and Samuel C. Fleming Professor of Molecular Biology and Genetics in the College of Arts and Sciences and former director of the Weill Institute for Cell and Molecular Biology, recently received a lifetime achievement award from the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB).
Emr was honored for his discovery and characterization of the Endosomal…
The Asian American Studies Program (AASP) in the College of Arts & Sciences will celebrate its 35th anniversary this year with a symposium featuring current and former students, staff and faculty. A special guest will be the program's second director, Gary Okihiro, visiting professor of American studies, ethnicity, race and migration at Yale University.
The program, founded in 1987,…
Madi Fulchiero ‘23 is investigating Disney’s use of space and movement in the movies “Coco” and “Encanto” as she works on her senior thesis, a bilingual project in English and Spanish in the College of Arts and Sciences. Her focus is on the films’ representations of — or failures to represent — the countries where the films take place.
“I’m trying to determine whether or not these movies are…
Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division
Frederick Douglass in 1877
Three professors in the College of Arts and Sciences provide insight on Frederick Douglass’ life and attest to his influence in the film “Becoming Frederick Douglass,” which premiered on PBS Oct. 11.
Gerard Aching, the W.E.B. Dubois Professor in the Humanities, Edward Baptist, professor of history, and Derrick R. Spires, associate professor of literatures in English add their voices to a…
