The career of David DeVries, associate dean of undergraduate education in the College of Arts & Sciences, was celebrated with music from the Big Red Pep Band, as well as kind words and a serenade from Glenn Altschuler, at a retirement event May 8 in Klarman Hall.“David is one of the most compassionate people I have ever encountered,” said Altschuler, the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of…
Cornell hosted students from five other universities for the annual Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Mid-Atlantic Regional Conference April 21-22 on campus.During the conference, students presented formal papers about their research, offered feedback to fellow students and heard from a keynote speaker. This year’s speaker was Krista Thompson, the Weinberg College Board of Visitors Professor…
Andrew Hicks, assistant professor of music and medieval studies, has been awarded a prestigious Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin. Hicks is one of 21 scholars, writers and artists awarded Berlin Prizes for 2017-18. Academy president Michael P. Steinberg called them “a particularly stunning class of fellows.” The highly competitive Berlin Prize is awarded annually to scholars,…
Elissa Sampson, visiting scholar and lecturer in the Jewish Studies Program, will be honored May 18 with a Lower East Side Community Hero Award as part of the Lower East Side History Month celebration in New York City. The award recognizes community members “whose contributions have been deeply meaningful and yet are often the ‘unsung’ heroes of the neighborhood,” according to the award…
In her lab in the basement of Uris Hall, Lindsay Rait ’17, experiments with rats as she studies the role of the brain’s hippocampus in contextual memory. One day a week, she welcomes Lehman Alternative Community School junior Mohammed Williams into the lab, where he soaks up information about her research methods and also explores whether a career in research might be the right pathway for him…
From stories of budding romances to a vampire huntress out for revenge, the Department of Performing and Media Arts will screen films written and directed by students from Advanced Filmmaking (PMA 4585) and photographed by students from Cinematography (PMA 4420).The free screenings will take place at 7 p.m. May 15 in the Kiplinger Theatre, Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts.Students…
Two students in the College of Arts and Sciences took first place in the Big Idea Competition April 28, sponsored by Entrepreneurship at Cornell.Sam Langer ’17, a psychology major, won first place in the for-profit category for MindShift, a business featuring a method that can help users train their minds to reach a desired state. Neil Chand ’18, a computer science major, earned the top prize in…
Liana Brent, a PhD candidate in Classics, has been honored with the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation Pre-Doctoral Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome for her project, “Corporeal Connections: Tomb Disturbance, Reuse, and Violation in Roman Italy.”The American Academy in Rome, founded in 1894, is the oldest American overseas center for independent study and…
New research helps answer a long-standing mystery of how honeybees sense the size and strength of their colony, a critical cue for the bees to switch from investing solely in survival to also investing in reproduction.In a paper published May 3 in the Journal of Experimental Biology, a Cornell-led research group reports on how workers detect that their colony has reached a threshold to invest in…
For almost 20 years, Stacey Langwick, associate professor of anthropology, has conducted research on medicine and healing in East Africa. In a lecture sponsored by the Institute of Comparative Modernities April 11, she explored how concerns over toxicity shape public conversations about the forms of nourishment and modes of healing that make places livable. The talk was based on…
After 4.5 billion years of existence, Earth’s fate may be determined this century by one species alone – ours. The unintended consequences of powerful technologies like nuclear, biotech and artificial intelligence have created high cosmic stakes for our world.
The United Kingdom’s Astronomer Royal, Lord Martin Rees, will explore our vulnerabilities and possibilities in the first Carl Sagan…
Cornell’s first Conference on Creative Academic Writing, exploring the relationship between artful prose and scholarly production, will be held May 13 in Klarman Hall. The community is welcome, and the conference is free.Although all graduate students are expected to become professional writers, few of them have the opportunity to study writing as an art and a craft, notes conference organizer…
The election of President Trump has triggered outrage in some quarters that white nationalists/white supremacists have taken up residence in the White House. They fear these idealogues will enact laws and govern from a perspective that elevates white identity above all others. At a panel discussion on May 1, Cornell faculty will discuss how white supremacy was actually the norm in 20th century U…
Italy, land of piazzas and volcanoes, is also home to the oldest Jewish community in the Diaspora. Yet few readers outside of Italy know that some of the most important works of modern Italian literature were written by authors who are Jewish. At 6:30 p.m. on Monday, May 1, Kora von Wittelsbach will explore how the work of these Italian-Jewish writers relates to modern Italian and world…
Historian Nancy Isenberg will take on the topic of class and privilege in America at the Krieger Lecture in American Political Culture.The lecture, “White Trash: Class Politics, American Style,” will take place at 4:30 p.m., May 4, in the Lewis Auditorium, Goldwin Smith Hall. Isenberg’s previous lectures have addressed and challenged long-held beliefs about a “land of opportunity” and the …
A celebration of National Poetry Month and language learning on April 21 at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art featured multilingual poetry, song, dance and an international dessert reception. The goal, said Dick Feldman, director of the Language Resource Center (LRC), was “to experience the beauty of poetry in many languages and to celebrate success in learning those languages.”
According…
A generous gift from Joel I. Picket ’60 and David L. Picket ’84 has endowed the Picket Family Chair in the Department of English, in honor of the family’s long association with Cornell and their commitment to the humanities. The gift will help the department to pursue its mission of fostering thoughtful and passionate conversation about books, writers and literary ideas both in and out of the…
Rachel Bean, professor of astronomy, has been named the first senior associate dean of undergraduate education for the College of Arts & Sciences and will begin her position on July 1. The appointment is the next step in a restructuring of the college’s admissions and advising office, which is undergoing a reorganization this year to better serve the needs of current and future students…
At Boynton Middle School on a recent Thursday, a few kids are shooting hoops on basketball courts outside the cafeteria, but sixth-grader Ja-kai Correio is inside, focused on his computer.“For English, I had to make up my own God, like the ones in Percy Jackson, and now I need to write five paragraphs about what he can do,” Correio said as he types away, all under the watchful eye of Rebecca Burd…
Students offered feedback and asked questions about the College of Arts & Sciences’ proposed curriculum changes at a student-led forum in Uris Hall auditorium April 19. Student members of the Arts and Sciences’ Dean’s Student Advisory Council began by outlining the draft proposal, then opened the floor to a Q&A with members of the Curriculum Committee, including Madeline Gerrick ’17 and…
CJ Chivers ‘87, senior reporter for The New York Times, was awarded the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for a piece that details the story of a Marine Corps veteran diagnosed with PTSD.Chivers’ feature, “The Fighter,” received the award “for showing, through an artful accumulation of fact and detail, that a Marine’s postwar descent into violence reflected neither the actions of a simple criminal nor a…
David Mermin, the Horace White professor of physics emeritus, has been named the recipient of this year’s Dagmar and Václav Havel Foundation VIZE 97 Prize. Mermin learned that he is the 2017 recipient in a letter from the former Czech first lady, Dagmar Havlová. He is the 19th recipient of the award. Mermin, whose research interests and work lay in theoretical condensed-matter physics and the…
As part of its ongoing effort to advance and disseminate knowledge on equality of opportunity, the Center for the Study of Inequality will host the “Social Mobility in an Unequal World: Evidence and Policy Solutions” conference April 20-22. The conference is free but RSVPs to inequality@cornell.edu are required.The conference will bring together university-based academics, policy researchers and…
In 2000, the world learned that scientists had completed an initial analysis of the sequence of the human genome – the totality of our inherited DNA. This development marked the “end of the beginning” of the rise of genomics, a field that has transformed the life sciences and promises to usher in big changes in medicine, agriculture and industry.By the time U.S. President Bill Clinton and U.K…
The Dean’s Student Advisory Council in the College of Arts & Sciences will host a student forum to discuss the proposed curriculum changes in the college from 5-6 p.m. April 19 in Uris Hall G01.The Curriculum Review Committee (CRC) in the College of Arts & Sciences released a draft Arts and Sciences curriculum proposal March 7, organized around modes of inquiry – distinct approaches to…
“Pan-African Connections,” a symposium in honor of Africana professor Locksley Edmondson, was held April 13-14 at the Africana Studies and Research Center.“Professor Edmondson has been a major contributor to the articulation of Africana studies at Cornell,” said event organizer Carole Boyce Davies, professor of Africana studies and English. She cited his expertise on the Pan-African aspects of…
Dan Cohen ’05, a producer whose latest projects include the Oscar-nominated sci-fi movie “Arrival” and the hit Netflix series “Stranger Things,” will talk with students about his career and screen one of his films along with the short film that inspired another during an April 21 visit to campus as the 2017 Arts & Sciences Career Development Center’s Munschauer Speaker.Cohen, who majored in…
Students representing 11 startup companies with products ranging from organic skin care products to concussion detection devices pitched their businesses to a panel of judges March 20, vying for the 2017 Student Business of the Year, given by Entrepreneurship at Cornell. The students, who represented many of Cornell’s schools and colleges, as well as graduate programs, were nominated by their…
Alumni from the College of Arts & Sciences have generously donated $75,000 to the college to help students who are taking unpaid summer internships.For the past two years, the College’s Career Development Center has managed the summer experience grant program, using funds from alumni donations as well as funds from the Student Assembly to help students with unpaid internships afford housing,…
For 100 years, Cornell’s Fuertes Observatory has been wowing students – and the Ithaca community – with galactic wonders.
To ensure that Fuertes’ gifts keep giving for another century, the Cornell Astronomical Society is launching a crowdfunding campaign to raise money for renovations. The campaign kicks off with the annual Yuri’s Night event, this year on Friday, April 14, from 7 p…
Rachel Mitnick ‘17, has been named a junior fellow by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, DC. She will work in the endowment’s Executive Office, supporting William Burns, endowment president.The James C. Gaither Junior Fellows Program provides a year of paid research experience to qualified graduating seniors and individuals who have graduated during the past academic…
The old adage, “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know” has long fueled the parental drive for children to attend Ivy League schools. But it turns out where you went to school is less important than who else went to the same school – at least, if you’re in Congress.It’s no surprise that legislative success is correlated with friendship networks: Vote for my bill, I’ll vote for yours. But a new…
Three graduate students in the Department of Anthropology were recently named recipients of Engaged Graduate Student Grants for 2017. The grants were awarded to 16 graduate students across the Cornell community in various disciplines.Anthropology doctoral students Amir Mohamed, Elif Sari, and Mariangela Mihai were awarded grants of $15,000 each to further their projects. The grants provide…
Note: This event will now be held in the German Studies Lounge, 177 Goldwin Smith Hall The Department of Comparative Literature is celebrating its 50th anniversary this semester with an event, “Comparative Lit at 50: Early Modern Studies,” from 3-7 p.m., April 13 in Klarman Hall featuring speakers from other universities, a roundtable discussion and reception.Professors Geoffrey Hartman and Paul…
One day during a school break from Cornell his freshman year, Nigel van der Woude ’17 discovered some old boxes in his grandparents’ house. They were filled with letters from his great-grandparents, written in Italian. His grandfather had died when van der Woude was 3, so never really got to know him.Already a lover of language, van der Woude started teaching himself Italian so that he could read…
In the two years since its founding in the summer of 2015, Marginalia, an undergraduate poetry review society, has produced four issues and drawn together undergraduates from all majors and colleges with a shared passion for poetry.“Marginalia was founded on building community and bridging some of the exclusivity that sometimes can be latent in publishing a magazine of this kind,” said Jesse…
As the first-born child in a Chinese-American family, alum Vincent Chong ’14 has memories of receiving lots of small gold gifts as a young child – monkey pendant necklaces, “all kinds of little red containers,” he said.He thinks these memories have a lot to do with his current interest in small objects and intricate work and design, which he’s pursuing after winning a scholarship to study in…
Cornell is an intellectual powerhouse of economic research on China, but until Oct. 1, 2015, when the Cornell Institute for China Economic Research (CICER) launched, experts on the Chinese economy at Cornell had no designated platform through which they could engage with others, including outside stakeholders such as researchers and policymakers. Now, CICER helps coordinate the efforts of…
New research by Judith Byfield, associate professor of history, offers a different lens through which to understand women’s political history in post-World War II Nigeria. She discussed her findings at a crowded Tuesdays with Faculty Lunch hosted by the Feminist, Gender & Sexuality Studies Program in Rockefeller Hall March 21.Byfield’s talk, “Gender, Spectacle and Nation-making in Post-World…
Individuals and corporations contribute more money to charitable organizations than they ever have before. Is this golden age of gift-giving a positive or negative force in modern culture?For Timothy Campbell, professor of Romance studies in the College of Arts and Sciences, the answer is complex and relates to a passion he has recently focused on in his research: Italian film. In his new book, …
Pop quiz: Are crocodiles more closely related to lizards or to birds? The answer may surprise you. Although traditional taxonomy classifies birds separately, they are actually closely related to crocodilians, sharing such groupwide characteristics as nest construction, parental care, a four-chambered heart and acoustic communication.Traditional taxonomy “is an exercise in memorization, and we don…
"An art show, like a book, has to tell a story," says Salah Hassan, Goldwin Smith Professor in the Department of History of Art and Visual Studies and professor of Africana studies, noting that when art produced by white artists is defined as "American" and art produced by African-Americans is defined as "ethnic," that story is one of exclusion.Which is why, he says, the "African Americans and…
The collaboration between Cornell's Jewish Studies Program and the Center for Jewish History in New York City continues Monday, March 20, at 6:30 p.m. with a lecture by Lauren Monroe, associate professor and chair of the Department of Near Eastern Studies, on “The Joseph Traditions and the Genesis of Ancient Israel.” The talk will be held at the Center for Jewish History, 15 W. 16th St.Monroe’s…
Mircea Pitici, Ph.D. ‘15, distinctly remembers going to a bookstore in 2004 and seeing books with titles such as like “Best American Science Writing” and “Best American Essays.” As a lover of mathematics, he wanted to see a similar series on math; when he asked the clerk for such a book, she explained there was no such thing.Intrigued, Pitici went to the library and did some research, which…
The Cornell University Wind Symphony (CU Winds) will pay tribute to the late Steven Stucky and Karel Husa in a series of concerts featuring memorial commissions honoring the former Cornell professors.“Professors Husa and Stucky were not only distinguished composers, but also dedicated teachers,” said James Spinazzola, director of CU Winds. “Their legacy will live on in their music and in the many…
The award-winning poetry of Ishion Hutchinson, set to music by graduate student composers, will be featured in the Sat., March 18 concert in Barnes Hall, “Songs of the Land: Poems of Ishion Hutchinson.” The concert features pianist Xak Bjerken and guest mezzo-soprano Rachel Calloway. The event is free and open to the public.“I envy and value music for its secret inwardness, that instancing of…
Donald Trump has put economic issues at the center of American political life. But what does his vision mean for the country?The Cornell Program on Ethics and Public Life (EPL) will shed light on this question in a two-part series featuring two eminent economists, beginning with a talk by Gordon Hanson (University of California, San Diego) Monday, March 20, on “Globalization and the American…
“I really like starting and building things,” says Val Mack ‘16, an Arts & Sciences alum and current MPS student at Cornell. So it comes as no surprise that she is currently a co-founder of a startup called, “Dimitri.”Mack founded Dimitri with three other students, Jingyang Liu Leo, Khalil Hajji, and Mutahir Kazmi, other graduate students who met through a class. Mack pitched the idea to…
Students in Cornell’s German Club have created a new online journal to allow their peers to share and practice their writing in German.“Submissions can be in any format – stories, essays, poems, critiques,” said Lydia Morgan ‘17, club president. “This isn’t something that you would write for a class.”The group hopes that the journal, Übung, will attract numerous submissions, with the best being…
Many freshmen and sophomores join faculty projects as soon as they canAs a precocious high school junior, Arthur Campello ’20, wanted to get some experience with his 3D modeling and coding skills outside of the classroom. Graduating a year early from Lansing High School, just outside of Ithaca, Campello contacted Cornell physics professor Jim Alexander, who connected him to staff at the Cornell…
