Eleven teaching faculty from across the university have been awarded Cornell’s highest honors for graduate and undergraduate teaching, Interim President Michael I. Kotlikoff announced Oct. 22.
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Lenora Warren, assistant professor of literatures in English in the College of Arts and Sciences, is an expert in Early American and Early African American literature with a focus on the literatures of abolition, insurrection and the politics of resistance.
In 1829, abolitionist David Walker’s “Appeal to the Colored People of the World” went viral, enabling enslaved people to imagine freedom and why they deserved it.
Small, simple forms of social connection can lessen the negative feelings and thoughts that come with being excluded, according to Cornell psychology researchers.
The 5,139 admitted students will bring with them a variety of lived experiences that will enrich the vitality and innovation of Cornell’s intellectual community.
Nancy Wang ’24 and DALL-E3/College of Human Ecology
Nancy Wang ’24 used the AI DALL-E3 and the prompt “create a schematic of one layer of flexible battery, one layer of woven conductive thread, and one layer of textile” to create this image.
“This is a tool that students are using already, and it’s probably not going away,” said doctoral candidate Amelia C. Arsenault, M.A. ’23, a teaching assistant in the government department.
Jason Koski/Cornell University
Michell Chresfield is a scholar of the history of racial formation and identity-making in 20th century America. She is assistant professor of Africana studies in the College of Arts and Sciences.
A Cornell historian says one of the most important aspects of Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy was his insistence on speaking up against social and economic injustice.
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Misha Inniss-Thompson ’16, assistant research professor of psychology, gave the keynote address at the Office of Academic Diversity Initiatives’ annual Honors Award Ceremony on May 5 in the Statler Hotel.
At a May 5 ceremony, Misha Inniss-Thompson ’16, assistant research professor of psychology in the College of Human Ecology urged students to prioritize their passions and interests.
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Taylan Özgür Ercan ’25, left, president and founder of the Turkish Students Association and an economics major, and Majd Aldaye ’25, a computer science major
With about 70 students on campus from Syria and Turkey affected by the devastation in their countries, students, faculty and administrators have mobilized to create relief efforts.
Alex McAlvay/New York Botanical Garden
A farmer holds multiple varieties of wheat and barley from his field in Kutabir District, Amhara, Ethiopia.
A paper by Cornell researchers suggests maslins have the unique capacity to adapt in real time to extreme weather.
Provided by the family of Dr. Edward Hart
Martin Luther King Jr. and colleagues stand outside Anabel Taylor Hall on Nov. 13, 1960, during King’s first visit to Ithaca. Left to right: Kenneth Hagood ’60, a Cornell student organizer; Martin Luther King Jr.; the Rev. Joseph Lowery, a co-founder with King of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; Dr. Edward Hart, an Ithaca ophthalmologist and chair of the Cornell Committee Against Segregation.
King’s historic visit on Nov. 13, 1960, and a second, on April 14, 1961, came during a period when he was honing ideas that would take center stage at the March on Washington in 1963
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Cornell Votes members Dana Karami ’23, center, vice president of operations; Patrick Mehler ’23, founding member and president; and Lauren Sherman ’24, incoming vice president of external operations, gather in Willard Straight Hall.
Four A&S faculty members have been honored for their excellence in undergraduate teaching and mentoring.
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Authors Michelle Cronin, left, and Tyler Hill are among the 14 authors from upstate New York participating in the Oñgwaga•ä’ Writers Workshop
“These professors have demonstrated an extraordinary commitment to teaching and mentoring their students.”
Noël Heaney/Cornell University
Kofi Acree, director of the John Henrik Clarke Africana Library and curator of Africana Collections in Cornell University Library, speaks with gardeners outside the installation at the Cornell Botanic Gardens.
Arts & Sciences student Jakara Zellner ’23, co-leader on the Garden Ambassador team, who served on the advisory committee and narrated the audio tour of a Cornell Botanic Gardens featuring 21 plants significant to the Black experience in the Americas.
Ryan Young / Cornell University
Fernando Santiago ’86 received the Cornell New York State Hometown Alumni Award on June 22, at a ceremony at the Genesee Valley Club in Rochester.
The holiday reminds professor Riché Richardson of exciting celebrations of her youth, but also of obstacles that stand in the way of fully achieving Black freedom.
Lindsay France
Marie Dorvilne, standing, helps Yanick Pierre-Louis, as her home care worker.
The researchers' finding has implications for the 2022 midterm elections.
Lindsay France/Cornell University
Students and faculty engaged with the new Cornell Center for Cultural Humility are, left to right: Sanvi Bhardwaj ’24, event coordinator; Natalie Gosnell ’23, community outreach coordinator; Iman Alsmadi, first-year doctoral student, cultural humility trainer; Jerel Ezell, assistant professor of Africana studies in the College of Arts and Sciences, director; and Ru Liu, first-year doctoral student, cultural humility trainer.
Andrés Quijano ’22 will compete at 7:30 p.m. on “Jeopardy!” and Catherine Zhang ’22 will compete at 8 p.m. on the “Jeopardy!” National College Championship, on ABC and Hulu.
The nine undergrads will be arriving on campus through December, thanks to robust international and cross-campus collaborations. Cornell has pledged support until they graduate.
Ryan Young/Cornell University
Lillie Steen ’23, an undergraduate in the College of Arts and Sciences majoring in archaeology and art history, sifts through excavated soil at St. James A.M.E. Zion Church in Ithaca.
Church members and a multidisciplinary team of Cornell faculty and students are learning more about St. James A.M.E. Zion Church by doing an archaeological dig.
… of engaging 200,000 alumni by the close of the campaign in 2026. Even the COVID-19 pandemic hasn’t dampened …
Provided
St. James A.M.E. Zion Church is believed to be the oldest religious structure in Ithaca and one of the first A.M.E. Zion churches in the country.
A multidisciplinary team of Cornell students and faculty and local schoolchildren began an archeological dig Sept. 18 at St. James AME Zion church in Ithaca.
Black people in early America used July Fourth to argue that they should be freed from enslavement and had as much right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” as white people.
The holiday celebrates the day enslaved people gained their freedom. But they lacked political power then, as Black people too often do today, says associate professor Jamila Michener.
The university’s acknowledgment states that the Ithaca campus is located on the traditional homelands of the Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫɁ, also known as the Cayuga Nation.
Jeff Palmer grew up taking long walks with his father in the Wichita Mountains of southwestern Oklahoma. Palmer’s father, a linguist and a native Kiowa speaker, told him ancient Kiowa stories about the granite-capped peaks and rolling hills around them.
Nicholas Sturgeon, Susan Linn Sage Professor Emeritus in the Sage School of Philosophy and an expert in the foundations of ethics, died Aug. 24 of complications from Parkinson’s disease at a local hospice. He was 77. Sturgeon was a professor in the Department of Philosophy, in the College of Arts and Sciences, from 1967 until his retirement in 2013.
This summer was going to be crucial for Areion Allmond ’21. With a major in biology and society, she had planned to live on campus in student housing to continue her research on the effect of the nutrient choline on children’s cognitive development. This kind of research can make or break a student’s chances of getting accepted into a M.D./Ph.D. program – which is Allmond’s goal.
… seniors in Cornell’s Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) program receive their commissions together, in a … officer and professor of naval science in Cornell’s Naval ROTC program, said he wishes the circumstances could have … said Roach, who presided at each ceremony. “Succeeding in NROTC is not the high-water mark of their military careers. …
Historian Barry Strauss, who specializes in ancient and military history, notes that plagues and epidemics have often been linked to wars. The current pandemic will accelerate the use of computer models and big data in the field of history; however, he says, COVID-19 has taught us that models are only as good as the assumptions on which they’re based.
In February, Longsha Liu ’21 was well aware that COVID-19 was coursing through China and around the world. His mother had been giving him regular updates about the virus’s spread in China, where most of his immediate family live – including his 77-year old grandmother, who continued to practice as a physician.
Rachel Beatty Riedl, an expert in international studies, says Africa is the first place to look for an effective response to the COVID-19 pandemic, given Africa’s success in dealing with the Ebola virus.
Historian Lawrence Glickman says the simultaneous public health disaster and economic meltdown may lead us to rethink the country’s values. However, “given … how rare it is for fundamental transformations to happen, my money would be on this pandemic not fundamentally altering our basic structures of society,” he says.
Political scientist Gustavo A. Flores-Macías compares the economic consequences of COVID-19 to the 2008-09 recession. The pandemic, he says, will result in a poorer and more unequal U.S. society, and it highlights the importance of solutions that require collaboration across borders.
Interdisciplinary scholar Noliwe Rooks discusses how people curate their home spaces, now that much of work and school is conducted from home via video conferencing. The pandemic has also underlined our need for human contact, she says. Rooks is the W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of Literature in the College of Arts and Sciences.
Jamila Michener, assistant professor of government in the College of Arts and Sciences, discusses COVID-19 and potential changes in the role of the federal government. The pandemic may prompt people to re-examine investments in institutions, such as the public health system, on which we now rely, she says. Disinvestments in these institutions include the steady closure of rural hospitals for the past five years, she says.
Cornell leaders have announced changes to the academic calendar (see below) and to policies related to drop deadlines and grading options.Below is the latest information; for the full list of frequently asked questions, visit the university’s coronavirus resources and updates webpage.
Fresh off winning a Guggenheim fellowship, democracy scholar Suzanne Mettler, Ph.D. ’94, has just received another honor: a Radcliffe Institute fellowship.
Suzanne Mettler, Ph.D. ’94, the John L. Senior Professor of American Institutions in the Department of Government, has been awarded a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
An engineer-turned-sociologist whose career has been defined by interdisciplinary thinking is now leading a Cornell center that brings together economists and sociologists, from across campus and around the world.
Chinese Communist Party officials often invoke the outrage of the Chinese people when disputing a foreign government’s actions or demands. International observers are often skeptical of these claims about the overarching feelings of 1.3 billion people.But not much is known about what citizens of the People’s Republic of China actually think about their country’s foreign policy. A Cornell scholar of Chinese politics and foreign relations is among the first to ask that question.
A groundbreaking Cornell-led study shows that nearly 1 in 2 Americans have had a brother or sister, parent, spouse or child spend time in jail or prison.
Tapan Mitra, the Goldwin Smith Professor of Economics and a leading economic theorist of his generation, died of cancer Feb. 3 in Ithaca, New York. He was 70.
With big data, machine learning and digital surveillance pervasive in all facets of life, they have the potential to create racial and social inequalities – and make existing discrimination even worse.
How will the rise in sea levels due to climate change affect the fiscal health of U.S. cities? Can virtual reality help architects “try out” a building’s design before construction has even started? How do social processes affect artificial intelligence in high-stakes areas such as sentencing for criminals and job applications? These are a few of the questions Cornell’s social science faculty are exploring this fall, thanks to funding from the Institute for the Social Sciences (ISS). The ISS’s Fall 2018 Small Grant Awards are designed to support faculty as they develop new research and seek external funding.
It’s a little-known fact of U.S. history that in the early 1800s, while most African-Americans were enslaved, freed black men in some states had the right to vote.
When Pulitzer Prize-winning author James Forman Jr. was a public defender in Washington, D.C., in the 1990s, he defended a 15-year-old named Brandon, who was charged with possessing a small amount of marijuana and a gun.
The Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, housed at Cornell, has been awarded a grant to provide an easily searchable portal on the public’s views about health dating back to 1935.
When the United Nations and other international players rebuild war-torn countries, they frequently require that women have greater representation in the country’s security forces. The idea is integrating women helps improve peace and security for everyone.But critics of these gender-equity reforms often suggest that women harm the cohesion of the police force.
A new book by Sarah Kreps, associate professor of government, argues that part of the reason for America's current long-running wars is the lack of a war tax – a special levy historically paid by the American people during times of war.
According to a radical new model of emotion in the brain, a current treatment for the most common mental health problems could be ineffective or even detrimental to about 50 percent of the population.
The campus community has expressed strong interest in and engagement with a report from a faculty committee tasked with identifying organizational structures that might position Cornell’s social sciences for excellence in the next 10 to 15 years, say key administrators after holding 23 listening sessions with stakeholders.
When Carisa (Triola) Steinberg ’97 was growing up, no one in her family had attended college. They didn’t expect her to, either. Her grandfather had college funds only for the boys in the family.She applied to Cornell anyway and was accepted – with full funding.
Why is expertise that used to be authoritative now sometimes dismissed as “fake news”? Is it possible to save an endangered language by bringing a native speaker to Cornell to document it? And what does it mean to work in a Bosnian weapons factory when the source of one’s livelihood is lethal to others and the environment?
The report identified ways to better connect faculty, provide faculty with support and improve Cornell's external visibility and recruiting power in the social sciences.
Five Arts & Sciences faculty were chosen for the honor and will have the opportunity to finish books, research projects or work on other initiatives.
Myron Rush, a Kremlinologist whose careful lexical analysis of public leadership statements determined that Nikita Khrushchev had won the power struggle to succeed Joseph Stalin, died Jan. 8 of kidney failure at his home in Herndon, Virginia. The professor emeritus of government died a week after his 96th birthday.
Languages have an intriguing paradox. Languages with lots of speakers, such as English and Mandarin, have large vocabularies with relatively simple grammar. Yet the opposite is also true: Languages with fewer speakers have fewer words but complex grammars.Why does the size of a population of speakers have opposite effects on vocabulary and grammar?
Toppling a widespread assumption that a “lactation” hormone only cues animals to produce food for their babies, Cornell researchers have shown the hormone also prompts zebra finches to be good parents.
Are supporters of President Donald Trump increasing in prejudice? What’s the best way to end violence in Liberia during elections? Is Colombia ready for a sustainable boom in cocoa production?These are a few of the questions Cornell social science faculty are answering, thanks to small grants from the Institute for the Social Sciences.
The algorithm is having a cultural moment. Originally a math and computer science term, algorithms are now used to account for everything from military drone strikes and financial market forecasts to Google search results.
The concept of “race” – the idea that humans are naturally divided into biologically distinct groups – has been definitively proven false. But the 21st century has seen a disturbing increase in scientists inaccurately presenting race as the reason for racial inequality, says an acclaimed scholar of race, gender and law.
David A. Usher, retired associate professor of chemistry and chemical biology, died Oct. 6 at his home in Dryden, New York. He was 80, one month shy of his 81st birthday.
Roger H. Farrell, professor emeritus of mathematics, died Sept. 28 at Hospicare in Ithaca. He was 88.Farrell, who joined the Department of Mathematics at Cornell as an instructor in 1959, spent his entire career at Cornell.
Richard Thaler, professor of economics at Cornell for nearly two decades, was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences Oct. 9 for work he began at Cornell.Joining the Cornell faculty in 1978, Thaler was a young assistant professor who had decided to try to make a go of research on a new scholarly concept, behavioral economics, that married psychology and economics. He went looking for a job that would allow him to pursue it.
At the height of the Great Recession, psychologist Amy Krosch noticed that people of color seemed to be getting much harder hit than the white population on a number of socioeconomic indicators.
In a new opinion piece in a major publication, Morten Christiansen, professor of psychology, describes how the study of language has fragmented into many highly-specialized areas of study that tend not to talk to each other. He calls for a new era of integration in the paper, published July 31 in Nature Human Behaviour.
Martha E. Pollack plumbed the depths of Cornell history and spoke to current times in her inaugural address Aug. 25, following her installation as the university’s 14th president.Quoting a speech written during the dark days of World War II by Cornell historian Carl Becker, Pollack said there is just as much need today for universities to “maintain and promote the humane and rational values” that preserve democratic society.
On the heels of President Donald Trump’s decision to pull the United States out of the Paris climate agreement, a new Cornell study finds that climate-science labels do matter.The U.S. public doubts the existence of “global warming” more than it doubts “climate change” – and Republicans are driving the effect, the research found.
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.
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.
America has been talking about racial segregation and its effects for decades. Now another kind of separation is grinding away at America’s neighborhoods: income segregation, where people are separated by their wealth, or lack of it.
Kendra Bischoff, assistant professor of sociology and the Richard and Jacqueline Emmet Sesquicentennial Faculty Fellow in the College of Arts and Sciences, has been chosen as a 2016 National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow.The $70,000 fellowships are the oldest source of support for education research, nationally and internationally, for those who have recently earned doctoral degrees.
The real estate maxim about the importance of location is true for teenagers too. Their intellectual and physical health depends on location, location, location.Teens living in disadvantaged neighborhoods face a higher risk of obesity and reduced cognitive ability, according to new research by a Cornell sociologist. In addition, adolescent girls in the most disadvantaged environments are more likely than boys to become obese, he found.
