In Cornell circles, Helen Magill is known for marrying, in 1890, Andrew Dickson White, the university’s first president. But years before they met, Magill made history in her own right, becoming the first woman to receive a PhD in America – from Boston University in 1877. Her dissertation in Classics was found in 2018 in the Cornell Library Rare and Manuscript Collections.
“The manuscript…
Nanci McCraine
Great Gully Falls in Union Springs is an important spot in Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫɁ history.
Cornell’s Society for the Humanities will kick off its 2022-23 theme of “Repair” with a community read of “The Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫɁ People in the Cayuga Lake Region. A Brief History” by Kurt Jordan, associate professor of anthropology in the College of Arts and Sciences.
The Sept. 23 event will take place from 3:30 to 5 p.m. in the Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium, Klarman Hall, and will be…
Former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev has died at 91.
Military historian David Silbey is an adjunct associate professor of history in the College of Arts and Sciences, associate director of Cornell in Washington, and faculty member in the Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy.
Silbey says: “Mikhail Gorbachev likely haunts Vladimir Putin's dreams. He was trying to save the USSR in the…
Lindsay France/Cornell University
Students on the Arts Quad
In “Land Grab Universities,” the 2022 Daniel W. Kops Freedom of the Press Lecture, journalist Tristan Ahtone, a member of the Kiowa tribe, and historian Robert Lee will talk about how Indigenous land expropriated by the 1862 Morrill Act is the foundation of the land-grant university system.
The lecture, which will expand on their 2020 investigative reporting in High Country News, will take…
American life, and American politics, are increasingly divided: by party, by geography, by education. Just by knowing your zip code, analysts can probably predict your opinions about abortion, climate change, national health care, and immigration. They can also predict consumer choices, such as whether you prefer Levis or Wrangler jeans. And of course, it’s possible to make a very good guess at…
Provided
From left to right: Chunyi Hu, Gabriel Schuler and Ailong Ke.
New research from Cornell offers insights into a line of CRISPR systems, which could lead to promising antiviral and tissue engineering tools in animal and plants.
The research by Ailong Ke, the Robert J. Appel Professor of molecular biology and genetics in the College of Arts and Sciences, and Stan J.J. Brouns at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, focuses on a newly…
Cornell’s Center for Alkaline-Based Energy Solutions (CABES) has received renewal funding of $12.6 million for a four-year period to continue its work developing advanced fuel cell technologies in alkaline media.
The center, part of the Energy Frontier Research Center (EFRC) program supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, was created in 2018 with an initial $10.75…
The Fall 2022 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series, beginning Sept. 8, will feature acclaimed writers from around the world. The series, hosted by Cornell’s Creative Writing Program in the College of Arts and Sciences, brings innovative, award-winning authors to read from their work on Cornell’s Ithaca campus.
All readings are free and open to the public, and take place on Thursdays at…
Jason Koski/Cornell University
Aerial view of the Arts Quad, heart of the College of Arts and Sciences
The College of Arts and Sciences invites early-career scholars to apply for up to six Klarman Postdoctoral Fellowships. The application deadline is October 14, 2022.
Klarman Fellows pursue research in any discipline in the College, including natural sciences, social sciences, humanities and the creative arts as well as cross-disciplinary fields that transcend traditional boundaries…
Jesse Winter
Elida Met-Hoxha, left, and Zayana Khan, became friends this summer during their time at Cornell Tech.
We spent some time talking in depth with four of the 29 students in the Milstein Program in Technology & Humanity during their eight-week immersion at Cornell Tech in New York City this summer. Here are some of the thoughts from:
Carlton Cassedy ’24, computer science
Zayana Khan ’25, computer science major
James Koga ’25, computer science and science and technology studies major
…
Charles “Chip” Aquadro, the Charles A. Alexander Professor of Biological Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences, has been awarded the 2022 Society of Molecular Biology and Evolution (SMBE) Lifetime Research Achievements Award in recognition of his decades of exceptional contributions to population genetics.
"This award is the highest honor given by SMBE and places Chip in the company of…
Jesse Winter
Milstein students explored the city on various outings.
At the end-of-summer showcase for students in the Milstein Program in Technology & Humanity, James Koga ’25 had a host of things on display: an interactive glove he developed and coded that allows people to create music or poetry by tapping their fingers; a 3D digital museum that he and other students built for artworks created by patients and residents of Coler Hospital on…
Jesse Winter
Iván Andrade on the Weill Cornell Medical Center campus in New York City.
This summer, when Iván Andrade ‘23 wasn’t interviewing patients in the emergency room at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center, he was spending his time interpreting for Spanish-speaking patients at the Einstein Community Health Outreach Free Clinic, or perhaps studying for the MCATs, the Medical College Admissions Test.
Andrade’s summer experience helped him realize that he’s…
Jesse Winter
Louise Wang outside the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse, where she worked this summer, in New York City.
Prameela Kottapalli ’23 and Louise Wang ’23 spent the summer in New York City courtrooms and legal offices, reviewing evidence, reading cases and learning about the complex processes of the legal system, thanks in part to grants from the Humanities Scholars Program (HSP) in the College of Arts & Sciences.
Wang interned with the New York County District Attorney’s office while Kottapalli…
Geoffrey Coates, the Tisch University Professor of chemistry and chemical biology in the College of Arts and Sciences, has won the 2022 Eni Award for Advanced Environmental Solutions for his innovations in sustainable materials, including “benign polymers” and renewable resources.
A global prize in the fields of energy and the environment, the 2022 Eni Awards will be presented by Italian…
Provided
Abigail Kraus husks a coconut during her summer experience in Hawai'i.
From Ithaca to Hawaii to Ecuador, students in the Robert S. Harrison College Scholars Program in the College of Arts & Sciences took advantage of the summer as a time to explore their research interests.
The students — who create their own interdisciplinary course of study around a question or issue of interest — can receive summer funding from the program to pursue their research. Some of…
Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay
Flag of Taiwan
U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has landed in Taiwan, becoming the highest-ranking American official in 25 years to visit the self-ruled island.
Allen Carlson, associate professor of government in the College of Arts & Sciences, is an expert on China. He says:
"Ever since President Richard Nixon moved to normalize relations between the United States and the People’s Republic…
Marc Goebel/provided
Students in an undergraduate entomology lab work together to establish a species-area curve
Biologist Michelle Smith discovered the wonders of the ocean while taking a field course in Friday Harbor, Washington, as a doctoral student.
“When you rowed a boat at night the water all around you would glow because of bioluminescent organisms. Learning about the ocean transformed me,” said Smith, the Ann S. Bowers Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Senior…
Artists who work in new media use screens and data instead of paint, pencil or clay. As electronic and digital technology have evolved, so have the ways new media artists create – and the ways in which they speak out about the digital and physical worlds, scholar Tim Murray writes in a new book.
In “Technics Improvised: Activating Touch in Global Media Art,” Murray, professor of…
Austin Bunn, associate professor of performing and media arts in the College of Arts & Sciences, has been awarded a New York State Council for the Arts/New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in screenwriting. The fellowship includes a $7,000 prize meant to “fund an artist’s vision or voice, at all levels of their artistic development.”
Bunn is a Koenig Jacobson Sesquicentennial Fellow…
Jesse Winter
Stephanie Naing in front of Trinity School in New York City, where she is teaching this summer.
In a New York City classroom this summer, Stephanie Naing ’23 decided against giving her sixth-grade students another formula to memorize: Area = base x height.
Instead, she drew a parallelogram for them, shaded in the triangle at one end and showed how it fits perfectly into the triangle at the other end.
“The students were shocked and amazed that it made so much sense,” Naing said. …
“Be careful of what you wish for when you announce your political ambitions on TV,” wrote Grant Farred, professor of Africana studies, in “The Zelensky Method,” his new analysis of actor-turned-wartime president. Published as a monograph by Westphalia Press, this extended essay focuses on the figure of Volodymir Zelensky, locating Russian’s war-making within a global context and examining the…
Patrick Shanahan
Eden Kebede '25 collects a soil sample in a forest outside Ithaca.
“Tuck your pants into your socks – the ticks can be really bad out here,” graduate student Dave Frey tells the group of four students as they embark from their cars.
That’s one of the directions the students are used to hearing this summer as they head into the forests surrounding Ithaca to collect soil samples that will be used in research assessing soil carbon storage and loss. They also are…
Eros Georgiou ’25 is the kind of student every career counselor dreams of. As he started his freshman year, he wasn’t willing to accept the fact that internships are hard to come by for first-year students. So, during his winter break, he spent hours networking and reaching out to alumni at various finance and investment firms, eventually landing an interview and lining up a job at investment…
Chris Kitchen
Juno Salazar Parreñas, left, and Mari Kramer
As the COVID pandemic has so starkly taught us, human health is intricately connected to the health of animals, plants and the environment.
These connections and related impacts have been studied for decades, but are now receiving urgent attention under an approach called One Health. The transdisciplinary initiative, endorsed by the Centers for Disease Control, works at local, regional,…
As part of Ryan Pinard ’25’s summer research project, he’s hoping to create a chemical sample that’s never existed before —with a cavity that could hold liquid between two reflective surfaces. The sample could make it possible to use various organic materials to shape the future of solar or change the way chemical reactions are performed.
He’s one of seven undergraduate researchers on campus…
Sofija Palurović
Romanian pianist Aurelia Visovan, one of the 12 artists participating in the Forte/Piano Summer Academy.
For seven days this summer, 12 young artists from around the world will be immersed in one of the world’s most significant collections of performance-ready historical pianos, as part of the Forte/Piano Summer Academy at Cornell University’s Center for Historical Keyboards, in partnership with the Westfield Center.
“The new educational initiative will give these students the opportunity of a…
Mathematician Kathryn Mann remembers attending one academic conference where ideas were simply not getting through.
“It seemed like 90% of the audience was totally lost during 90% of the talks,” said Mann, associate professor of mathematics in the College of Arts and Sciences. “I thought to myself: we need to do better at talking to each other.”
That experience inspired Mann to organize …
Chris Kitchen
Christian Gaetz, Klarman Fellow in mathematics
Ranking things – like the 100 best chess players in the world – soon gets complicated, especially when not all the participants have played each other yet. While mathematics can provide a helpful framework, it can’t yet entirely solve an open problem, introduced in the 1960s, having to do with rankings.
“The 1/3-2/3 Conjecture makes a specific prediction about how to choose two players to play…
Provided
Molly Ryan will be the new director of Cornell Cinema
A new director, Molly Ryan, will take the helm of Cornell Cinema this fall, succeeding Mary Fessenden, who has led the organization for 35 years, eight years as manager and 27 as director.
Ryan is finishing up a master’s degree in film studies from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and has experience with museums and festivals.
“I’m excited to find new ways to embed the art of film…
Chris Kitchen
Smith feeds the chickens at Fallen Tree.
Nexus Scholars study connections between wellness & environment
This summer, Audrey Lockett ’24 is learning about the importance of respecting all sorts of labor – from academic research and reading to physical tasks such as turning weedy beds into productive gardens or cleaning toilets. As a human biology health and society major, she’s also learning how connecting to the environment and…
Photo by K8 on Unsplash
The Finnish flag (front) and Swedish flag (fifth) fly with those of other nordic countries
NATO has formally invited Finland and Sweden to join its alliance after Turkey dropped its objections. The decision comes as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine continues.
Barry Strauss, professor of history and classics at Cornell University and the Corliss Page Dean Fellow at the Hoover Institution, is an expert on military strategy. He says history is full of alliances…
Victor Interiano/University of California Press
The cover of Chiara Galli’s forthcoming book will feature this painting by Victor Interiano, a Salvadoran artist based in Los Angeles.
From the Los Angeles Asylum Office in Anaheim, California you can see the Disneyland parking lot and even some of the rides. But Disneyland’s iconic childhood vacations are out of reach for the minors visiting the office, as sociologist Chiara Galli knows well.
For six years while doing an ethnographic study, Galli, a Klarman Fellow in sociology in the College of Arts and Sciences, helped…
Faculty from the College of Arts & Sciences will be leading many courses on campus, as well as teaching during educational vacations far from campus as part of Cornell Adult University this summer and fall. Alumni can also take part in special trips curated especially for them through Cornell Alumni Travel.
From cruising the Nile to discovering the universe, faculty in the College will be…
Wanda Field
Artwork from Christel Robinson and Wanda Field appears throughout the book.
A performing and media arts class composed of Cornell students and formerly incarcerated people has produced a book of their writings, exploring their own stories and their discoveries about each other.
“Moments Before the Silence” contains poems, artwork, devised theater pieces and essays from the class, Performing RE-Entry, which met in the fall semester, with students and Professor Bruce…
