On Dec. 19, nearly 1,500 Cornell students celebrated their winter graduation in a virtual recognition ceremony viewed around the world – the first such event at Cornell, and a fitting end to what President Martha E. Pollack called “a semester like no other at Cornell.”
For their final projects, students in Africana Studies professor Carole Boyce-Davies’ Black Women and Political Leadership course created a podcast featuring interviews with Black women in politics.
Derrick R. Spires, associate professor of English in the College of Arts and Sciences, has won the Modern Language Association (MLA) Prize for a First Book for “The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States.” In the book, Spires examines the parallel development of early Black print culture and legal and cultural understandings of U.S. citizenship between 1787 and 1861.
For six generations, Mohawk ironworkers have “walked the steel.” Indigenous people began ironworking in the 19th century, when they were hired to build railroad bridges in Canada. They helped craft the New York City skyline, working on projects including the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building and the World Trade Center.
A team of Cornell faculty, graduate students and undergraduates is fighting to save Lisa Montgomery from federal execution next month, supporting her bid for clemency from courtrooms to recording studios to a social media campaign urging followers to #SaveLisa and consider #HerWholeTruth.
Sometimes atoms, like pets and adventuresome hikers, slip loose and wander off into the wild. Their final destination isn’t known, and their trajectory can be all over the map. It’s not so easy to track their path.
Professor Emerita of English Alison Lurie, the award-winning and critically acclaimed writer who set some of her fiction on a campus with a striking similarity to Cornell’s, died Dec. 3 in Ithaca. She was 94.
The Jewish People’s Fraternal Order (JPFO) was founded in 1930 and flourished for two decades as the Jewish division of the multi-ethnic International Workers Order (IWO) before being shut down during the Cold War.
In the wake of last summer’s protests against racism and police violence, this year’s Lund Critical Debate, “The Police and the Public: Global Perspectives,” will explore the contested ground between social justice and security, and weigh strategies for conflict resolution – both inside and outside the policing framework.
Richard “Dick” Polenberg, the Marie Underhill Noll Professor of History Emeritus, died Nov. 26 in Ithaca. He was 83. Polenberg, a foremost scholar of American history, taught at Cornell from 1966 through his retirement in 2012. He served as department chair from 1977-80, taught memorable large lecture courses (including his popular class on modern U.S. history, which reliably filled Bailey Hall), and trained and mentored countless graduate students over the decades.
The term “late industrialism” has become synonymous with collapse: breakdown, pollution, waste and disappointment left behind by failing or exploitive systems. But the “late” in “late industrial” also carries radical potential, according to Chloe Ahmann, assistant professor of anthropology in the College of Arts and Sciences.
The final weeks of the semester will be enlivened by a virtual “Writers & Poets” reading series featuring faculty in the Creative Writing Program in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S) reading their own works. Beginning Nov. 30, a video of a professor reading from their own work will be released every other weekday, through Dec. 23.
Civil rights legislation and Supreme Court rulings have undone a history of legal racial segregation in America, but schools and neighborhoods remain largely segregated, four Cornell faculty members said during the Nov. 19 webinar, “Racism in America: Education and Housing.”
The large Cornell-designed telescopic “ear” at Arecibo, Puerto Rico, which listened for the enlightening crackle of the cosmos for nearly six decades, now hears silence.
Craig Wiggers grew up in Alabama. During his 25-year career in the U.S. Marines he served in Iraq and Afghanistan. So when he moved to Ithaca as a Cornell ROTC instructor in 2012, he wasn’t quite sure what to do with snow. “At first my wife and I spent our winters staring at the walls and waiting for spring,” said Wiggers, now director of administration at the Department of Physics in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S).
Older people occupied a significant part of life for Yohko Tsuji Ph.D. '91 when she was growing up in Japan. Her widowed grandmother lived with the family, creating a traditional three-generation household, and elders were a positive part of daily life.
Micky Falkson, a senior lecturer in the Department of Economics and one of its longest-serving faculty members, died at home in Ithaca Nov. 7. He was 83.
Some of the world’s most prominent human-rights leaders honored the late Yuri Orlov, professor emeritus of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences, in a webinar Nov. 18 at 10 a.m.
As the fourth of five children, Joe Ferrara ’19 grew up cooking meals and baking treats for his family. As a teenager, he spent summers slinging pizzas and busing tables, envisioning a day when he would run his own business. “I really loved seeing people smile and providing the best experiences for them,” he says. So it was no surprise when Ferrara transferred to the School of Hotel Administration as a sophomore in 2016.
Earth’s most arid desert may hold a key to finding life on Mars. Diverse microbes discovered in the clay-rich, shallow soil layers in Chile’s dry Atacama Desert suggest that similar deposits below the Martian surface may contain microorganisms, which could be easily found by future rover missions or landing craft.
Now more than ever, leadership is needed at all levels of government to overcome growing partisanship and to keep the United States in a strong position in the world on fronts such as democracy, cybersecurity and climate change, said former U.S. Sen. John Kerry on Oct. 29.
To identify what makes people vulnerable, the researchers matched the extent of the storms with the measures of governance and living conditions in affected areas.
Black feminist scholars will examine the current socio-political and cultural moment in “Triangle Breathing: A Conversation with Hortense Spillers and Alexis Pauline Gumbs,” the final Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series: At Home virtual event of the fall.
Dark Laboratory, a “humanities incubator” for digital storytelling with a special focus on Black and Indigenous voices, launched its first podcast episode, a crossover with the podcast “Get Free” by laboratory co-founder Tao Leigh Goffe, on Oct. 26.
Amid the clatter in the days before the presidential election – the long lines at early polls, racial strife, street protests, political ad skirmishes and the streaming patter of television punditry – three College of Arts and Sciences professors offered a bright light at the end of the 2020 tunnel: hope for democracy.
Caitlín Barrett, associate professor of classics in the College of Arts and Sciences, has been named a National Geographic Explorer after receiving a grant from the National Geographic Society to study daily life in ancient Rome through archaeological research at Pompeii in modern-day Italy.
The authors analyzed the interconnected nature of dilemmas such as carcinogens, energy crises and invasive species at the intersection of technological and environmental history.
As the frenzied 2020 presidential campaign reaches culmination, the nation’s media, political parties and courts brace for a possible contested outcome. But in the United States and around the world, heated national elections are nothing new.
