“India has 26 official languages, but when I teach Indian literature, students can only access a very few works in English translation,” laments Anindita Banerjee, associate professor of comparative literature in the College of Arts and Sciences. “There are reams of other excellent literature I haven’t been able to teach because it’s not translated.
On a recent trip to Budapest, Malcolm Bilson, the Frederick J. Whiton Professor of Music Emeritus, received The Order of the Hungarian Gold Cross, an award given each year to seven or eight foreigners who are distinguished artists, scientists, writers and others for their contribution to Hungarian intellectual and cultural life.
The USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archives is an unparalleled resource of some 53,000 individual testimonies of survivors of the Nazi Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, the Nanjing massacre and the Armenian genocide. Cornell will mark the launch of its access to the archive Tuesday, Nov. 3, with a talk by noted New Yorker columnist and Rwandan genocide expert Philip Gourevitch ’86.
As a graduate student Peter Wittich, associate professor of physics, worked at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO), located in an active nickel mine in Ontario, Canada. The observatory is deep underground to block out background radiation from other particles.
James R. Houck, a noted astronomer in the field of infrared spectroscopy for astrophysics, died in Ithaca Sept. 18 at age 74 from complications of Alzheimer's Disease.
Houck received his Ph.D. from Cornell in condensed matter physics in 1967, then switched fields to astronomy. After post-doctorate work at the Naval Research Laboratory, he worked at Cornell until he retired as the Kenneth A. Wallace Professor of Astronomy in 2012.
In her new book, The Ethical Dimension of the Decameron, Marilyn Migiel, professor and chair of the Romance Studies department, examines the dialogue about ethical choices that Giovanni Boccaccio's Decamerongenerates for readers.
On Monday, Oct. 5, leading human rights lawyers and prison ethnographers will gather for an international symposium to discuss “Carceral Worlds and Human Rights across the Americas” at the Africana Studies and Research Center, 310 Triphammer Road, from 10 a.m. to noon.
Someone’s asked you a question, and halfway through it, you already know the answer. While you think you’re politely waiting for your chance to respond, new research shows that you’re actually more impatient than you realize.
As a leader in research at the intersection of computer/information science and the social sciences, Cornell has helped to define and create the field of computational social science.
On Sept. 11-12, Cornell will host a conference showcasing cutting-edge research in the field and featuring alumni and other noted scholars in the discipline.
To understand the past – and, often, the present – we group people together, attributing the same characteristics to individuals in a group as we do to the group as a whole, especially when it comes to religion.
Éric Rebillard challenges this approach in a new book, co-edited with Jörg Rüpke, titled “Group Identity and Religious Individuality in Late Antiquity.”
Like many good mysteries, it began with innocent curiosity. Michael Fontaine was on paternity leave and, wanting “a small project” to occupy him between baby duties, thought he’d write about “Mater-Virgo,” a 17th-century play by Lutheran pastor Joannes Burmeister, based on a work by the Roman playwright Plautus.
Some hidden Cornell treasures soon will be available to scholars around the world, thanks to the Cornell University Library and the College of Arts and Sciences’ GrantsProgram for Digital Collections, which this year awarded four grants.
by :
Linda B. Glaser
,
Arts & Sciences Communications
Cornell government professors commented on the market volatility in China and the Chinese government’s response.
Jeremy Wallace, associate professor of government and faculty member of Cornell’s China and Asia Pacific Studies Program, is the author of “Cities and Stability: Urbanization, Redistribution, and Regime Survival in China.”
Wallace says:
“Don’t worry about the Chinese stock market collapse, worry about government incompetence.
by :
Linda B. Glaser
,
Arts & Sciences Communications
The Brock Turner rape case at Stanford triggered a firestorm of criticism; an op-ed by assistant professor of philosophy Kate Manne in the Huffington Post helps to explain why.
The case, she wrote, “vividly illustrates…all of the ways we collectively ignore, deny, minimize, forgive, and forget the wrongdoing of men who conform to the norms of toxic masculinity, and behave in domineering ways towards their historical subordinates: women.”
Lori Khatchadourian teaches the Exploring Archaeology mini-course at the Elizabeth Anne Clune Montessori School of Ithaca.
The week of June 15-19, professors Adam T. Smith, anthropology, and Lori Khatchadourian, Near Eastern studies, led a mini-course on archaeology at the Elizabeth Anne Clune Montessori School of Ithaca. Nine children ages 5-8 spent five mornings exploring aspects of archaeological research.
“We’re down one Democrat. It’s going to be a slaughter,” someone called out.
The students in Suzanne Mettler’s Introduction to American Government and Politics class huddled in small groups in eight different classrooms, bargaining, brokering deals and negotiating, trying to overcome gridlock and partisan loyalties to pass a budget.
Hundreds of students have just completed new courses in the College of Arts and Sciences’ Active Learning Initiative (ALI), part of a strategic effort by the college to embrace engaged learning models and emerging technologies. The ALI five-year pilot project is funded by Alex and Laura Hanson, both Class of 1987.
Among the billions and billions of stars in the sky, where should astronomers look for infant Earths where life might develop? New research from Cornell University’s Institute for Pale Blue Dots shows where – and when – infant Earths are most likely to be found. The paper by Blue Dots research associate Ramses M. Ramirez and director Lisa Kaltenegger, “The Habitable Zones of Pre-Main Sequence Stars,” is forthcoming in Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Math, to a mathematician, is an aesthetic, creative endeavor. But for too many high school students, math has become a reviled, boring subject.
It doesn’t have to be that way, as Steven Strogatz aims to show the students in his new College of Arts and Sciences course, Mathematical Explorations. The course fulfills the math distribution requirement and has attracted seniors who put off taking a math class as long as they could, as well as freshmen intrigued by the course’s title.
The fearless honey badger steals lions' prey and gobbles cobras for dinner. Tenacious and determined, it devours honeycombs despite countless bee stings. This is the totem animal of Sally Wen Mao, MFA '13, and an inspiration for her first book of poems, "Mad Honey Symposium," published in May by Alice James Books.
“Welcome to Cornell Ruins National Park,” Adam T. Smith tells his students. “We’re lucky today. We have a cache of objects to examine discovered in the ruins of McGraw Hall.”
This “Rise and Fall of ‘Civilization’” class examines traditional archaeological topics, like kingship and the origins of cities, partly by looking at our current civilization through the lens of a single site – the Cornell campus as it would look 1,000 years from now.
A poor childhood in Guyana spent watching his mother get pushed around gave Frank Douglas, Ph.D. '73, M.D. '77, an early awareness of injustice. At age 12 he was challenging his school principal on fairness, despite the risk to his academic future.
Captain Lauren Morgens '02 stands on the quarterdeck surveying her ship, red sash around her waist and a tall feather in her pirate hat. It is a cloudy August afternoon in Lewes, Del.; her crew has finished scrubbing the Kalmar Nyckel's deck, and the last sailor has come off the rigging. Once the tall ship clears the shallows, Morgens' command to "set the mizzen" rings across the ship in a sing-song cadence that seems as old as the sea itself.
James R. Michaels '68, a member of Cornell's 100th graduating class, always knew he wanted to be a rabbi. He dutifully chose a philosophy major when he entered Cornell but found that the department's emphasis then on linguistic evaluation wasn't a good fit.
Cathy Choi '93 entered Cornell with numbers on her mind. But an English class cross-listed with theater turned Choi away from her planned math major. "I had never read a play before in my life, but I got bitten by the bug and really fell in love," says Choi. "I ended up as a theater major."
Saul Teukolsky and other physicists at Cornell, MIT and elsewhere have confirmed Hawking's area theorem for the first time, using observations of gravitational waves.
The advent of queer theory “caused a shock wave which has affected all intellectual disciplines,” as Didier Eribon, a leading French intellectual, once said. A look back at the undergraduate years of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘71, a founder of queer theory, reveals a unique glimpse of where that shock wave first began.
