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.
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 language sciences
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).
“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 humans can hear.
by :
Linda B. Glaser
,
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Karen Pinkus, professor of Italian and comparative literature, is deeply concerned about the environment and believes that the humanities can bring a critical research component to solving the problems of climate change.
by :
Linda B. Glaser
,
Arts & Sciences Communications
Carole Boyce Davies, professor of Africana studies and English, will receive The Caribbean Philosophical Association’s 2017 Frantz Fanon Lifetime Achievement Award at the association’s international conference, June 22-24 in New York City.
James Wells Gair, left, and longtime collaborator, linguist W.S. Karunatillake/Photo provided
James Wells Gair, Ph.D. ’63, professor emeritus of linguistics who throughout a long and distinguished career produced groundbreaking work on South Asian languages and their relation to other languages, died Dec. 10 in Ithaca. He was 88.
This Cornell Research story explores the many avenues that graduate students pursue in their research projects and the multitide of Cornell supports available to them.
More than 5,000 graduate students work at Cornell, studying in more than 80 fields.
The voices shaping the important conversations of our age, from racial unrest to income inequality and sustainability, are getting a little more diverse, thanks to Cornell University's Public Voices Thought Leadership Fellowship Program.
In this NY Daily News opinion piece, Sergio Garcia-Rios, assistant professor of government and Latina/o studies, says exit polls reporting that Donald Trump received a larger share of the Latino vote than Mitt Romney did in the 2012 were wrong.
Despite the distance, Cornell researchers are actively involved in the cutting-edge particle physics experiments taking place at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland.
This Cornell Research story explores the many projects and discoveries Cornell faculty are undertaking as they pursue answers to some of the universe's greatest mysteries.
Derek Conrad Murray’s MA ’04, PhD ’05 recently published book, Queering Post-Black Art: Artists Transforming African-American Identity After Civil Rights (2016), arose from his interest in “post-blackness,” a term that emerged in the art world in the early 2000s, and immediately became a controversial and hotly-debated topic.
Peter J. Katzenstein, the Walter S. Carpenter Jr. Professor of International Studies, offers a look into his world of teaching and research in international relations in this video on the Cornell Research site.
Thomas Pepinsky, associate professor of government, writes in this Vox opinion piece that Americans have a "fantastical" and "cartoonish" image of authoritarianism, while life for people living in authoritarian countries is similar to the daily life of many Americans.
A&S alum Dr. Lewis Cantley is a leader on the project, which could dramatically shorten the timeline for new drug treatments and possibly save millions of lives.
Everywhere we turn in modern Western society, we run into the influence of economics. Our worldview, and our very language, is colored by it. We worry that politicians can be bought and sold. We give credit to those who can afford a comfortable retirement. We debate the price of a free society as police clash with protestors.
In the short story “How to Win an Unwinnable War,” a seventh-grade boy named Sam enrolls in a summer school class called How to Win a Nuclear War. The story traces Sam’s morbid reflections spurred by the course—“He wonders what the stars will see the day the war begins, the whole planet brightening, then going gray like a dead bulb”—as he simultaneously grapples with the dissolution of his parent’s marriage.
One in 10 people on Earth live in China’s cities. Over the past decade, nearly 200 million people in China have moved from rural to urban regions, and 8 million more are expected to relocate every year between now and 2050. Just what this means for China and the world has the attention of the Institute for the Social Sciences’ newest collaborative project, China’s Cities: Divisions and Plans.
by :
Linda B. Glaser
,
Arts & Sciences Communications
Islam has been much in the American news lately, but Chiara Formichi says the stereotypes media reinforce do us a disservice. “It’s important that we as faculty help students to break up assumptions and see that Islam is not just what is portrayed in the media,” she says.
If you’ve ever wondered about love (and who hasn’t?), there’s a new university course for you this year. And if you ponder the issue of food justice and how it relates to our tiny town of Ithaca, there’s one for that too.
Those topics are two of the new ones covered this year through the University Courses Initiative, which was begun in 2012 and will offer 18 courses this year.
The Cornell Council for the Arts (CCA) 2016 Biennial, “Abject/Object Empathies,” will feature 12 new projects by invited artists, Cornell faculty members and students. Most of the works will be presented on campus between Sept. 15 and Dec. 22, all on the theme of the cultural production of empathy.
by :
Linda B. Glaser
,
Arts & Sciences Communications
Nearly half a century ago, student protests led to the creation of Cornell’s Africana Studies and Research Center. Since then, the Africana Center has trained generations of leaders in academia, the professions, business and public service.
Twelve Cornell assistant professors, including three from the College of Arts & Sciences, have been awarded research grants by the Affinito-Stewart Grants Program.
The program, administered by the President’s Council of Cornell Women (PCCW), aims to increase the long-term retention of women on the Cornell faculty by supporting the completion of research important in the tenure process.
The Ithaca campus and Weill Cornell Medicine-New York welcomed three special young guests recently: high school students from Qatar, visiting the United States for the first time to get a sneak peek into the world of academic medicine.
Faculty from more than 40 East Asian universities attended the inaugural one-week session of the East China Normal University (ECNU)/Cornell Summer School in Theory (ECSST) in Shanghai.
ECSST provides an opportunity for select humanities and arts faculty to interact and explore contemporary international debates in media, literary and visual studies; art and philosophy.
Of the approximately 7,000 languages in the world, many are endangered. An endangered language is one that is at risk of losing all of its native speakers.
Forty-seven Cornell faculty and graduate students will be among the 4,600 sociologists to descend on Seattle Aug. 20-23 for the American Sociological Association’s 111th annual meeting. Nearly 600 sessions and 3,000 research paper presentations will address society’s most pressing problems.
The Cornell Department of English Creative Writing Program launches the Fall 2016 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series on Thursday, September 1, 4:30pm, inRhodes-Rawlings Auditorium, Klarman Hall, with a celebration of the life and work of Goldwin Smith Professor of English Literature Emeritus James McConkey on the occasion of his 95th birthday.
