Austin Bunn, associate professor and Koenig Jacobson Sesquicentennial Fellow in the Department of Performing & Media Arts, will take over leadership of the Milstein Program in Technology and Humanity July 1. The program, launched in 2017, offers a unique multidisciplinary curriculum to a cohort of 100 students, 25 in each class.
The Trump administration announced this week that its first in-person campaign rally since the coronavirus lockdown will occur in Tulsa, Oklahoma on June 19th – a day celebrated by many Americans as the day that marked the end of slavery in the United States.
As protests continue across the United States and around the world in response to systemic racism in policing, activists and political leaders seek out ways to affect permanent change.
“Our instructors have shown extraordinary dedication and leadership this year, teaching, advising and inspiring our students despite unprecedented challenges.”
"It’s a perfect time to start this because college grads have been left with canceled jobs and high school students are trying to figure out what to do when school is out.”
Clashes between police and protesters escalated this week across the United States, as public outrage continued over police brutality and systemic racism.
Junting Huang, a doctoral candidate in the field of comparative literature, has received a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship for his dissertation, “The Noise Decade: Intermedial Impulse in Chinese Sound Recording.”
Apple released a new operating system on Wednesday, iOS 13.5, which makes adjustments meant to ease use during the current pandemic — facilitating face ID unlocking while wearing a mask and fixing glitches on Facetime. It also enables support for Exposure Notification, also known as digital contact tracing, which if adopted would alert users to exposure to positive Covid-19 cases without allowing for government-controlled location and data tracking.
On Thursday, China announced it was preparing to enact a controversial national security law for Hong Kong, bypassing the territory’s own legislative process. The announcement was made ahead of the country’s annual National People's Congress meeting, which is set to start on Friday.
In this time of increasing political polarization, the participation of scientists in political advocacy has become yet another flashpoint, with some critics accusing scientists of being self-serving if they advocate for increased science funding.
Sophomores in the Milstein Program in Technology and Humanity were supposed to be spending the summer of 2020 living in the House on Roosevelt Island in New York City and taking a special set of classes at Cornell Tech.
As a college senior stuck home during quarantine with an interest in infectious diseases and past experience with the World Health Organization (WHO), Dalton Price ’20 thought it was completely obvious that he would sign up to help in any way he could during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Christine “Xine” Yao, M.A. '13, Ph.D. '16, was named one of the 2020 BBC Radio 3/AHRC New Generation Thinkers. The program, now in its 10th year, affords early career academics a platform to share their ideas via BBC Radio 3 and other outlets. “It is an amazing opportunity to work with the BBC to share my expertise and hopefully provoke different ways of understanding the world,” Yao said.
Festival 24, the semiannual student-run theater festival from the Cornell University Department of Performing and Media Arts, is launching online under a new title, Festival 24.0. The Festival, which is normally held at the beginning of each semester, will happen on Saturday, May 9, at 8:00 p.m. EST via Zoom to provide a performance opportunity for students while in-person theater events are suspended.
The COVID-19 virus arrived in Latin America later than Europe and the United States, but it is currently spreading across the region, with peaks expected to come later in May. Brazil, the continent’s most populous country, has the largest numbers of cases so far. This week, the country’s Senate is expected to vote on an economic package for states and cities to compensate for economic losses.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia held arguments by phone on Tuesday in a case pitting the Trump administration against the House of Representatives over the latter’s power to enforce a subpoena for former White House Counsel Donald McGahn’s testimony.
Faced with a devastating and unresolved pandemic, governments worldwide are grappling with how to begin re-opening their economies, while protecting the health of their citizens. And many are looking to the smartphones in our pockets as a contact tracing tool to keep tabs on the coronavirus and limit its spread.
Margaret Washington, the Marie Underhill Noll Professor of American History, was recently featured in the History Channel documentary “Black Patriots: Heroes of the Revolution,” and will appear in a CNN program focusing on women’s history.
The more than 200 members of Cornell’s choral groups may not be able to sing together each week, but they are still spending time listening and sharing their love of music virtually, with a host of guest visitors this semester.
On Monday, President Trump said in a tweet that he would sign an executive order temporarily suspending immigration to the United States in the midst of the coronavirus outbreak. The executive order is anticipated to include halting new green cards and work visas.
European Union leaders are meeting on Thursday to discuss how to power the bloc’s economic recovery and help its hardest-hit members weather the current crisis. On the agenda are various proposals to raise a recovery fund, including the option of joint ‘coronabonds’ as well as a stimulus package to address the economic damage caused by the pandemic.
An Ithaca theatre company is creating a live-streamed performance of a new work from six international playwrights, including a Cornell professor. The piece will premiere May 1.
Ding Xiang Warner, professor of Chinese literature in the Department of Asian Studies, was honored April 10 with a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies.
When Michael Fontaine began translating the Latin poem “How to Drink: A Classical Guide to the Art of Imbibing” by Vincent Obsopoeus, he could not have known it would be published in the middle of a pandemic. Ironically, much of the advice offered in this 500 year-old text seems eerily appropriate to this time of social distancing -- Obsopoeus tells readers that the best way to drink is at home.
Nozomi Ando, assistant professor of chemistry and chemical biology, has received the 2020 Margaret C. Etter Early Career Award from the American Crystallographic Association. The purpose of this award is “to recognize outstanding achievement and exceptional potential in crystallographic research demonstrated by a scientist at an early stage of their independent career.”
In Monday’s coronavirus press briefing, President Trump said that he has “total authority” to reopen the economy, in contrast to plans being made by governors and local officials across the country to lift restrictions.
With the coronavirus pandemic challenging the wellbeing of people and countries around the world, global financial institutions face the tremendous task of coordinating economic policies and offering relief for the most vulnerable countries. Such effort will be on display this week, as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank hold their annual spring meetings.
On April 8, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders announced that he is ending his presidential campaign, all but ensuring that former Vice President Joe Biden will face President Donald Trump in November.
As part of the nation’s record $2 trillion relief bill, Congress has set aside $500 million for the CDC to develop a “public health surveillance and data collection system” meant to track the spread of coronavirus. While it’s not clear what this system will look like or how it will function, it puts Americans on a historic path towards giving up certain privacies for the benefit of public health.
On Monday, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson was moved into an intensive care unit after his coronavirus symptoms worsened. Johnson, who secured his premiership last December with a landslide victory for the Conservative Party, ran on a populist and pro-Brexit platform. As coronavirus started to spread in the country, Johnson initially opposed lockdown-type measures suggesting that a speedy spread of the virus would create “herd immunity.”
Earlier this week, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe declared a state of emergency in major cities across the country in an effort to limit the spread of COVID-19. Abe asked people to refrain from going outside in Tokyo and six other prefectures worst hit by coronavirus.
The matching tool site encourages diversity, so people can connect with others from a different part of the world, different culture or with new interests and insights.
Last month, as Cornell faculty learned they needed to move quickly to remote instruction, Sara Warner, director of LGBT Studies and associate professor in the Department of Performing and Media Arts, realized she had more technical skills than some of her peers.“In our department, it’s hard to translate what we do to online teaching, especially the live, embodied participant experience,” she said. “I could see the look of concern on some of our faculty members’ faces.”
When Ray Thompson ’21 was a freshman coming to Cornell from Alabama, he couldn’t wait to be in a quad with a bunch of roommates — he and his siblings all had their own rooms at home. But, Thompson ended up in a single room in Clara Dickson Hall and worried a bit about making friends.
When you arrive on campus as a new Arts & Sciences student, you learn that you are one of the 15,043 undergrads here, that there are 1,684 faculty ready to lead your classes and that you can choose from 40 majors, 59 minors and almost 4,000 classes. But what you have to discover over time, for yourself, are all of the places on campus where you can do this work — places to eat, study, relax, meet with your friends or study partners or places to just enjoy the beauty of Ithaca.
