Because a lack of diversity continues to be a global issue among the ranks of faculty in academia, the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship (MMUF) program exists to transform this reality by empowering students of diverse backgrounds to pursue graduate programs. As this year’s class of Mellon Mays fellows prepare to graduate, we spoke to several of them about the program and their plans for the future.
The May 4 episode of All Things Equal featured Derek Chang, Cornell Associate Professor of History and Asian American Studies. Chang discussed the context and history of the rise in anti-Asian/Pacific Islander bias during the past year.
Facebook’s Oversight Board voted to uphold the social media company’s suspension of former President Donald Trump on its platforms but insisted the company must review the suspension to determine an appropriate length of time and develop clearer policies to balance freedom of expression and public safety. Professor of government Sarah Kreps says that Facebook’s Oversight Board acts like a private firm without real accountability of its own and that its consequential decision making over Facebook’s policies require additional independent oversight.
On Monday, the Biden administration announced a significant increase in the number of refugees allowed to enter the United States. The announcement comes as the administration also begins to reunite parents separated from their children under the Trump administration’s family separation policy. Maria Cristina Garcia, professor of history and Latino studies, and Chiara Galli, sociologist and Klarman Postdoctoral Fellow, comment.
In his new book “Iberian Moorings,” professor Ross Brann compares the histories of the Jewish and Muslim traditions in the Iberian Peninsula between the tenth and thirteenth centuries, tracing how Islamic al-Andalus and Jewish Sefarad were invested with special political, cultural and historical significance across the Middle Ages.
The archives of the Jewish Peoples Fraternal Order (JPFO), which flourished for two decades before the Cold War, are now housed at Cornell’s Kheel Center, Catherwood Library. Videos from a December 2020 conference focused on the archives are now available online.
Though the pandemic made it difficult to celebrate, 2020 marked a significant milestone – 100 years of women’s suffrage in the United States. The anniversary prompted co-instructors Shirley Samuels, professor of Literatures in English, and recently retired Johnson Museum Gale and Ira Drukier Curator Nancy Green, to create a History of Art course, “The Museum and the Object Practicum on American Women and Work.”
More than 30 students who have conducted research will present their work in a virtual conference May 6-7. One panel investigates the ideas of Goldwin Smith, while other presentations focus on migrant workers in Singapore, political violence in Africa and other topics.
In a Scientific American op-ed, sociologist Landon Schnabel reports that during the COVID-19 pandemic religion was good, on balance, for people’s mental health—but not so good for physical health.
Klarman Fellow Vijay Varma applied a new method of studying binary black holes to analyze data gathered by the LIGO and Virgo gravitational wave detectors.
The Cornell Center for Social Sciences has awarded spring grants supporting research and conferences involving more than 30 faculty and researchers across campus, including collaborations within new and expanded superdepartments.
New Cornell research shows many Americans remain confused about when COVID-19 vaccines provide strong protection.
Ursa Space/provided
Dozens of oil tankers and commercial cargo ships line up at Great Bitter Lake to enter the Suez Canal in this early April satellite image
More than a dozen space industry leaders, capital investors, startup entrepreneurs, a Jet Propulsions Lab manager and Cornell professors gathered virtually for Cornell’s first Space Tech Industry Day/K.K. Wang Day symposium on April 23 – featuring this year’s event theme, “New Opportunities in Space Technology.”
Amartya Sen, professor of economics and philosophy at Harvard University and recipient of the 1998 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, will give the annual Bartels World Affairs Lecture on May 5. His talk, “Attacks on Democracy,” is Hosted by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies; this year’s virtual lecture is part of the center’s democratic resilience global research priority.
Peter K. Enns, professor of government, and Katherine Zaslavsky, graduate student in sociology, write in the Washington Post that since the coronoavirus pandemic began, Asian, Asian American and Pacific Islander communities have endured a spike in hate crimes, with elderly people attacked on the street and an Atlanta gunman killing eight people, six of them women of Asian descent. Are Americans aware of the trend? they ask.
Philosophy professor Shaun Nichols argues that we can explain many of the features of moral systems and how humans form them in terms of rational learning from evidence.
This fall, Cornell's new Yiddish program is setting its sights higher, riding a generational trend in interest and changing attitudes towards the language.
The Spring 2021 Zalaznick Reading Series culminates with a reading by poet, memoirist, translator, and human rights advocate Carolyn Forché on Thursday, April 29.
