“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 humans can hear.
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.
Derek Conrad Murray’s MA ’04, PhD ’05 recently published book, Queering Post-Black Art: Artists Transforming African-American Identity After Civil Rights (2016), arose from his interest in “post-blackness,” a term that emerged in the art world in the early 2000s, and immediately became a controversial and hotly-debated topic.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
The Cornell Summer School in Theory explored contemporary international debates in media studies, visual studies, literary studies, philosophy and contemporary art.
Researchers in the collaboration between the Colleges of Arts & Sciences and Engineering will work on technologies and new tools to reveal the inner workings of the brain.
Cornell will host the Conference in Laboratory Phonology (LabPhon 15), an international meeting for researchers taking experimental approaches to the study of human speech sounds, July 13-17.The conference theme, “Speech Dynamics and Phonological Representation,” will address sounds in human language as part of a linguistic, cognitive and communicative system.
Sofia Aumann ’19 could have felt completely overwhelmed as a high school freshman when she uncovered the complicated issues behind human sex trafficking as she worked on a research project.
In the class Introduction to Evolutionary Biology and Biodiversity, it’s not uncommon for the professor to don colorful props as students vote electronically on which ones would make her the most attractive bird to potential mates.The point?“That got a lot of laughs, but I’m sure no one in the audience will forget about sexual selection anytime soon,” said Justin Zhu ’17, a biology major concentrating in molecular biology.
On July 4, the veil over Jupiter’s mysteries will be ripped away with the arrival of NASA’s Juno mission, and Jonathan Lunine will be there to watch it happen.Like cosmic archaeologists, astronomers will use Juno’s instruments to understand what went into the icy planetesimals that Jupiter swept up after it formed.
Lisa Kaltenegger, associate professor of astronomy and director of Cornell's Carl Sagan Institute, has been name the inaugural recipient of the Barrie Jones Award by The Open University (OU), United Kingdom, and the Astrobiology Society of Britain (ASB). The award will be presented in a ceremony on July 7 at the OU campus.
Although Jonathan Culler’s “Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction” has been translated into 22 languages including Tamil and Macedonian, a French version had never been available.
For students who have many interests across diverse disciplines, the College Scholar Program in the College of Arts & Sciencs may fit their needs. This year’s graduating class of College Scholars recently presented their final research projects, focused on topics such the anthropology of food and China’s naval development.
We are constantly bombarded with linguistic input, but our brains are unable to remember long strings of linguistic information. How does the brain make sense of this ongoing deluge of sound?
From left, government faculty members Gustavo Flores-Macias and Sarah Kreps with graduate students Colin Chia, Minqi Chai & Caitlin Mastroe.Six doctoral students from the Department of Government presented papers and met fellow PhD students and faculty interested in issues of global security during a workshop May 23-25 in Sweden.
Maggie Wong ‘16 signed up for Chinese classes when she came to Cornell so that she could more effectively communicate with her grandparents.Four years later, she’s using some of the classes she took in Asian studies and her language-learning abilities as she heads to a year-long internship with an international non-profit in Cambodia.
Richard W. "Dick" Pogue's '50 freshman class wasn't like most classes that enter Cornell together. In 1946, 75 percent of the first-year students were veterans returning from service in World War II. Another 10 percent were women, and the other 15 percent were "greenhorn high school boys" like Pogue.
As Asia continues to expand its influence in the world, Cornell’s Department of Asian Studies has grown to reflect the importance of the region globally and now offers more Asian languages for study than any other American university.
Michael Lynch ‘70, professor of science & technology studies, has been awarded the 2016 J. D. Bernal Prize by the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) for his “long-term and highly influential contribution to Science and Technology Studies and to the intellectual life of 4S.”
Members of the Cornell community are invited to explore issues of race in America during six simultaneous small-group discussions of the Ta-Nehisi Coates book “Between the World and Me” Thursday, April 28.The discussions, set for 12:20-1:10 p.m., will take place at locations across campus and are part of the College of Arts and Sciences’ New Century for the Humanities celebration.
There are many words and phrases used to describe the relationship between blacks and Jews in America in the 20th century: golden age, strained, coalition, collaborative, adversarial, contentious, allies.
“Everyone is talking about food. Chefs and food critics have become celebrities. To state that food production and consumption are increasingly in the public eye is to understate the point,” writes Andrew Chignell, associate professor of philosophy, and his two co-editors in the introduction of “Philosophy Comes to Dinner: Arguments about the Ethics of Eating” (2016, Routledge).
Professor Geoffery Coates, Assistant Professor Yimon Aye and student Shivansh Chawla ’17, who works in Aye’s lab in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, were all recently honored by the American Chemical Society (ACS) with 2016 awards.
Science Foundation Ireland presented its prestigious St. Patrick’s Day Science Medal March 16 to Séamus Davis, Cornell’s James Gilbert White Distinguished Professor in the Physical Sciences. The presentation was made by Charles Flanagan, Ireland’s minister for foreign affairs and trade, as part of St. Patricks’ Day celebrations in Washington, D.C.
