At a ceremony including family and friends, Cornell inducted its 2017 class of Phi Beta Kappa students March 1, juniors and seniors whose grades are at the top of their class.The ceremony was hosted by Barbara Baird, senior associate dean for math and science in the College of Arts & Sciences, and Daniel R. Schwarz, the Frederic J. Whiton Professor of English, Stephen H. Weiss Presidential…
Melanie Cervantes' visit has been cancelled. The lunch will take place, without Cervantes; an informal conversation about the art display and Dignidad Rebelde will be held.
"Art in Action,” the weeklong campus visit of artist and activist Melanie Cervantes, will feature lunch and informal conversation with the artist April 18 at 12:30 p.m. on the fourth floor of Rockefeller Hall, and…
James Matheson DMA‘01 said that during his time at Cornell, “I learned how to think like a composer.”Matheson, a New York-based composer who has written commissions for New York and Los Angeles Philharmonics, the Chicago and Albany Symphony Orchestras, Carnegie Hall and the St. Lawrence and Borromeo String Quartet, visited with students earlier this semester at a music department Composers Forum…
The Curriculum Review Committee (CRC) in the College of Arts & Sciences today has released a draft Arts and Sciences curriculum proposal, organized around modes of inquiry – distinct approaches to framing questions and solving problems across the disciplines – rather than topical content. The proposal also offers students more choices at different points in their academic careers.The new Arts…
The 1971 Attica prison uprising resulted in more than 40 deaths – the majority killed by law enforcement. Author Heather Thompson will speak about her award-winning 2016 account of the uprising, “Blood in the Water,” March 7 at 4:45 p.m. in Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium, Goldwin Smith Hall.
Sponsored by the American Studies Program as part of the interdisciplinary Freedom Interrupted …
Professor of physics Jeevak Parpia, M.S. ’77, Ph.D. ’79, is one of three winners of the 2017 Fritz London Memorial Prize. The prize, administered by Duke University and awarded every three years, recognizes scientists who have made outstanding contributions to the field of low-temperature physics.The prizes will be presented at the opening ceremony of the 28th International Low Temperature…
“No one hears the howling of a black girl ghost in the nighttime,” said performance artist Porsha “O” Olayiwola in “Rekia Boyd,” a piece about Boyd’s death at the hands of a police officer. Olayiwola’s work focuses on the injustice of violence against black women and girls and how it is too often ignored. She will present an evening of her spoken-word poetry at 6 p.m. Thursday, March 9, in Rhodes…
Associate Professor of history Russell Rickford’s book, “We Are an African People: Independent Education, Black Power, and the Radical Imagination,” has received the 2017 Liberty Legacy Foundation Award from the Organization of American Historians, given to the best book by a historian on the civil rights struggle. In his book, Rickford discusses the Pan African nationalist private schools which…
Caitlin Strandberg '10 has great fondness for the faculty and staff who helped her start Slope Media as an undergrad. She also has great fondness for the professors who didn't allow her to slack off in class just because she was spending so much time with Slope Media."Barry Strauss [the Bryce and Edith M. Bowmar Professor in Humanistic Studies in history] didn't let me get away with anything,"…
As someone who admits he's "one of those people who runs toward fires," Tim Mayopoulos '80 didn't think twice when Fannie Mae offered him the post as its chief legal counsel in 2009, even though the government-sponsored company had just been placed in conservatorship during the financial crisis."I see challenge as an opportunity, so I thought it would be a great place to be," said Mayopoulos,…
“I had no idea what I wanted to do as a career when I first came to college, and began taking a variety of classes,” Elizabeth Bodner ‘80 explained when she spoke with students during a Feb. 3 visit to campus as part of a Career Conversations event hosted by the College of Arts & Sciences Career Development Center. Although she enrolled at Cornell planning to study science, she had to…
For three days every year, members of Cornell’s Posse community meet off-campus with other students, faculty and staff to recharge and dive deep into a topic, usually one on the top of everyone’s minds.This year’s PossePlus Retreat Feb. 17-19 was no exception, as the 65 people who traveled to a conference center in Painted Post, N.Y. discussed the theme of “Us vs. Them: Division, Community and…
Nick Admussen, assistant professor in the Department of Asian Studies, has been named one of 15 recipients of the 2017 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for his translation of “Floral Mutter,” a collection of poems by Sichuanese poet Ya Shi. PEN America, the association responsible for awarding these grants, noted that “Admussen’s translations, which are perfectly balanced and polished, recreate…
When you’re creating a play about the shared experiences of people encountering borders, 7,837 miles between the collaborators is nothing – at least for Debra Castillo, who’s been co-teaching (with Anindita Banerjee) the Bodies at the Border distance learning class for years.For Castillo, the solution to having writers and actors on separate continents was simple: hold meetings and rehearsals via…
Like a black hole – which cannot be perceived directly, but is known only by the way it warps space-time – the object of psychoanalysis is an object we know solely by its effects. In the Society for the Humanities’ Annual Invitational Lecture, Tracy McNulty, Cornell professor of French and comparative literature in the College of Arts and Sciences, will explore the analytic act and its legacy…
Shonni Enelow, assistant professor of English at Fordham University, has been chosen as the winner of the 2015-2016 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism for her book “Method Acting and Its Discontents” (Northwestern University Press, 2015).The Nathan Award committee comprises the heads of the English departments of Cornell, Princeton and Yale universities and the award is administered…
The Civil War came as a crushing blow to the moneyed elite of Boston, who had been deeply embedded in the cotton economy of the early 19th century as textile manufacturers.With the abolition of slavery and the decline of cotton manufacturing in New England, however, these Boston “Brahmins” revitalized themselves through new business opportunities in the mines, railroads and stockyards of the West…
“Say it with chocolate,” goes the ad – but what are you really saying? We imbue objects with all sorts of meanings, especially around the holidays. A new study by Cornell psychology researchers finds that the closer to Valentine’s Day we get, the more chocolates – and red roses – spell out “l-o-v-e.”“Most people like chocolates and roses,” said Vivian Zayas, associate professor of psychology, …
Two books by Lanre Akinsiku, a recent graduate of the Department of English’s MFA program in fiction and currently a lecturer in English, earned top nods from the New York Public Library on its annual list of the best children’s and young adult literature.“Justin” and “Janae,” titles in Akinsiku’s “Blacktop” series, were selected by the library for its list of the top books of 2016. They were…
Winners of the Heermans-McCalmon Playwriting Contest will be showcased Friday during an event at the Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts.Staged readings of first-place winner Molly Karr’s ‘18 screenplay “Whole Hearted” and Aleksej Aarsaether’s ‘17 play, “The Diary of an American Girl” will be presented at 4:30 p.m. in the Class of ‘56 Dance Theatre. Aarsaether also won an honorable mention in…
The fall of the Berlin Wall marked the end of real socialism and the Cold War, but also the rise of a melancholic vision of history as a series of losses. For the political left, the cause lost was communism, and this trauma determined how leftists wrote the next chapter in their political struggle and how they have thought about their past since.In his new book, “Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism,…
The language requirement in the College of Arts & Sciences helped ShawnaKim Lowey-Ball ’05 discover a culture that’s become her life’s work.Lowey-Ball, who came to Cornell with interests in physics and cognitive science, was already fluent in French, so she decided to venture in a completely different direction to fulfill her language requirement — Indonesian.“I wanted a language class with…
After eight years at the Vatican translating the pope’s messages – sermons, letters, even tweets – into Latin, Daniel Gallagher is bringing his expertise to Cornell. He joins the classics faculty this summer as the Ralph and Jeanne Kanders Associate Professor of the Practice in Latin.Gallagher’s prowess in spoken Latin will help the classics department meet rising demand from students who want to…
In discussions about climate change, many people seem to think the only real problem is replacing fossil fuels, and once that’s done nothing much really needs to change. “That’s not only false, it’s a really dangerous way of thinking,” said Karen Pinkus, professor of Romance studies and comparative literature in the College of Arts and Sciences.Her new book, “Fuel: A Speculative Dictionary,”…
“My name’s Ishmael, what’s yours?” -- or would “Call me Ishmael” better open a narrative about whaling? Tone, diction, style: these are the kinds of questions Cornell’s Historians Are Writers! (HAW) grapple with in their meetings. The grappling is the more difficult because there’s no one right answer to such questions, so experimentation, exploration and creativity serve as the group’s…
With so much research and exploration being conducted online, having material available digitally is vitally important to faculty and students.The Grants Program for Digital Collections in Arts and Sciences has enabled a wide range of Cornell collections to be digitized, from punk music fliers to biblical-era excavations. College of Arts and Sciences faculty and graduate students are invited to…
Benjamin Anderson’s recently published “Cosmos and Community in Early Medieval Art” (Yale University Press, 2017) has won the 2018 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award of the College Art Association (CAA). The award honors an especially distinguished book in the history of art, published in the English language. “Cosmos and Community” presents the first comparative study of cosmological art between 700…
There are at least two Cornell alumni who were thrilled when the Academy Award nominations came out earlier this week.Dan Cohen ’05 is an executive producer for “Arrival,” the science fiction movie starring Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner and Forest Whittaker, which was nominated for eight awards, including best picture. Cohen, who was also a producer for “The Spectacular Now” in 2013 and “Cut Bank” in…
“We can hear the universe” declared researchers at LIGO (the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) announcing the first detection of a gravitational wave last year.By capturing a sonic translation of two black holes colliding more than a billion years ago, scientists had finally achieved what ancient scholars had long dreamed of: translating the “music of the spheres” into sound…
Maps of the Caribbean coast in the late 18th century were crafted with political purpose but did not always represent the geopolitical reality in which residents lived.In a new book, Ernesto Bassi traces the configuration of a geographic space he calls the “transimperial Greater Caribbean,” made up of sailors, traders, revolutionaries and indigenous peoples living a cross-border existence in…
All photos by Jesse WinterWhen students return to campus next week and begin to ask “How was your break,” many Arts & Sciences students will have pretty interesting stories to share.Maura Thomas ’17 spent some time exploring the world of book publishing. Yana Kost ’17 gained a whole new perspective on what she might do during her gap year before medical school. Charles Cotton ‘19 attended a…
A portable concussion detection machine created by three college students, including a student from the College of Arts & Sciences, was recently shown at the Consumer Electronics Showcase Jan. 5-8 in Las Vegas.The device from Reflexion Interactive Technologies, founded by Patrick Walsh ’19 and high school friends Matthew Campagna and Matthew Roda, can measure an athlete’s peripheral awareness…
The voices shaping the important conversations of our age, from racial unrest to income inequality and sustainability, are getting a little more diverse, thanks to Cornell University's Public Voices Thought Leadership Fellowship Program. The goal of the program is to increase the public impact of top underrepresented thinkers in the US, and to ensure that their ideas help shape important…
… ’04, PhD ’05 recently published book, Queering Post-Black Art: Artists Transforming African-American Identity After … interest in “post-blackness,” a term that emerged in the art world in the early 2000s, and immediately became a … of themselves on social media. That interest came out of a studio class Murray taught for photography majors at the …
If you’ve ever wondered about love (and who hasn’t?), there’s a new university course for you this year. And if you ponder the issue of food justice and how it relates to our tiny town of Ithaca, there’s one for that too.Those topics are two of the new ones covered this year through the University Courses Initiative, which was begun in 2012 and will offer 18 courses this year.“University Courses…
The College of Arts & Sciences Dean Gretchen Ritter implored members of the Class of 2020 to make the world a better place and think about their role in Cornell’s “unfinished symphony” during her convocation speech Aug. 20, which included several references to the popular Broadway musical “Hamilton.”There is no better place than Cornell, Ritter said, for an undergrad to contemplate who they…
In the ancient ruins of Cyprus, archaeology doctoral student Eilis Monahan hopes to uncover some clues about how social inequality might have begun.As a Fulbright- and National Science Foundation-funded scholar, Monahan will be spending nine months on the island this fall working with the Department of Antiquities of the Republic of Cyprus to survey archaeological sites of its fortresses and…
The Cornell Department of English Creative Writing Program launches the Fall 2016 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series on Thursday, September 1, 4:30pm, inRhodes-Rawlings Auditorium, Klarman Hall, with a celebration of the life and work of Goldwin Smith Professor of English Literature Emeritus James McConkey on the occasion of his 95th birthday.James McConkey has been one of the most…
The Olympics inspire tremendous excitement all over the world, but for Andy Arnold ’13, they're personal. He's gotten to know some of the world’s best athletes and watched two of them march in the 2016 Summer Olympics opening ceremony: David Rudisha, Olympic champion, world champion and world record holder in the 800 meters, and Asbel Kiprop, who won gold in the 1500 meter race in the 2008…
As Emma Korolik ’17 looked around at the other students taking her English classes, she wondered: do class backgrounds affect what major a student might choose in college? And if so, why? Korolik decided to focus her senior honors thesis on the questions."I think there will be interesting variables that I uncover, such as the intersection between race and class and gender and class and rural vs…
Alexandra McClellan ’17 still remembers the day she received an email from her peer advisor in 2014 welcoming her to Cornell. “I couldn’t wait to get to Ithaca, but I was also nervous, and my advisor was incredibly helpful in immediately answering my questions,” said McClellan, now a peer advisor herself.Arts & Sciences peer advisors are upperclassmen, who make themselves available to help…
An endowment bequeathed by Kenneth A.R. Kennedy, professor of physical anthropology at Cornell for 41 years, will fund a lecture series and visiting professorship in human evolutionary biology bearing his name.Kennedy, known for his field studies of early humans and their predecessors in South Asia as well as his work with forensic anthropology, died in 2014 at the age of 83.“The endowment will…
Mary Beth Norton, the Mary Donlon Alger Professor of American History, has been elected president of the American Historical Association (AHA), the principal umbrella organization for the profession. Her one-year term as president will begin in January 2018.She will become the fifth Cornell professor to lead the AHA, whose first president was Cornell co-founder Andrew Dickson White, in 1884…
Although Professor Jane-Marie Law had done extensive planning of her class’ study trip to Japan, there were many wondrous surprises: a valley pathway lit by lanterns, a private concert by a Japanese musician.“Every single day, there was something magical,” said Law, associate professor in the Department of Asian Studies who led 14 students on a 12-day trip to Japan in June after a semester-long…
The Klarman Hall time capsule is now sealed and buried, awaiting its discovery by future Cornell students during Cornell’s bicentennial year in 2065.Sheldon Borden, left, and Ray Wilson, right, carpenters with Local 277, completed the project on July 19.The time capsule was created to celebrate the university’s new humanities building and includes items that tell the tale of life as we know it in…
Most students head to college at the end of August, however students participating in the Prefreshmen Summer Program (PSP) at Cornell arrived June 21 and will spend seven weeks on campus. PSP is a unique program that seeks to help students prepare and adjust to the challenges that often accompany the first year of college.PSP participants take two or three classes in a variety of subjects like…
If Gabe Otte ‘11 hadn’t had a Cornell advisor who steered him down a more challenging path and hadn’t had some chance conversations with Nobel Prize-winning chemist Roald Hoffman, he might be squirreled away in a lab somewhere.Instead, he’s the CEO of Freenome, a start-up just awarded $5.5 million in venture capital for its product, a data-driven blood test that can detect various types of…
Undergraduate researchers from Cornell and other universities gathered June 21 to talk about responsible research and consider various issues surrounding ethics at The Third Annual Summer Undergraduate Workshop on Responsible Conduct of Research.The day began with a light breakfast and registration, where 78 student attendees were able to mingle and get to know each other, then Colleen Kearns,…
Cornell’s global reach expanded with the inaugural session of the East China Normal University (ECNU)/Cornell University Summer School in Theory (ECSST), July 18-22 in Shanghai. It was co-sponsored by Cornell’s Society for the Humanities and ECNU and co-hosted in Shanghai by the ECNU/Cornell Center for Comparative Humanities.The program, “Visual Culture, Media Theory, Arts Practice,” explored…
“I’ve always been really interested in astronomy, so I was curious what kinds of careers there might be in the field,” said Sophia Delpapa, a high school senior from Ontario County who attended the recent 4-H Career Explorations event on campus, sponsored by the state 4-H foundation, part of Cornell Cooperative Extension.Several departments in the College of Arts & Sciences were among many…
