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 & Sciences. The awardee holds the instructorship for one academic year.
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.
“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.
The last data release and final official survey paper from the major Arecibo Legacy Fast ALFA (ALFALFA) survey, led by Cornell astronomers, has just been published in Astrophysical Journal Supplement.
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.
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?
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.”
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 lecture hall boasted hundreds of seats, a room so large the professor had to wear a microphone to be heard. The class is the first of five large introductory lecture courses in the Department of Sociology, College of Arts and Sciences, that will be transformed with grant funding from the Active Learning Initiative (ALI) to include a larger share of activities that require student participation and engage students to learn by doing rather than passive listening.
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.
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 Division – and was one of the top five upper elementary teams nationally.
“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.
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 Mourning on the American Right.” Her lecture, “Anger at Government vs.
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.
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.
Professor Alejandro Madrid's book includes essays about experimental practices in Argentina, Mexico, Peru, Brazil, Cuba, Costa Rica and Colombia and among Latinos in the United States
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.
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.
“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.
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 at7pm at the Cherry Artspace on Ithaca’s West End.
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.
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 in the series are free and open to the public.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 #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.”
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 o
s 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 Feb. 16 in Day Hall, commemorating three decades of Cornell participation in Cassini’s historic mission.
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.
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).
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 the films were shown and how they were obtained.
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.
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.
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.
Geoffrey W. Coates, the Tisch University Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, has received the 2017 Newcomb Cleveland Prize of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
