Say you’re the coach of a basketball team that’s trailing by two points in the dying seconds of a game. Your team has the ball and you call a timeout to set up a play.
Or imagine your football team has just scored a touchdown with three seconds to play to pull to within one point. Instead of immediately sending out the placekicker for the point-after, you call your final timeout to discuss your next move.
Mila, a chamber opera with music by Eli Marshall, postdoctoral associate and visiting faculty member in the Department of Music, recently received its world premiere in Hong Kong.
Along with discussions about politics, religion and history, the trip included many cultural interactions with local people, including children at a dance school.
Society for the Humanities Fellow Amy Sara Carroll MFA ’95 is a poet, scholar, and visual artist whose work engages cultural production at the US/Mexico border. Her first critical monograph, REMEX: Towards an Art History of the NAFTA Era, was released on December 15 from the University of Texas Press. Carroll is spending the 2017-2018 academic year as a Society for the Humanities Fellow, working on her next book, an exploration of three contemporary Mexican filmmakers in the context of Mexico’s global co-production.
Mariana Wolfner ‘74, Goldwin Smith Professor of Molecular Biology and Genetics and Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow, has been awarded the 2018 Genetics Society of America Medal for her work on reproduction.
Nine current or former Arts & Sciences faculty members have designed and will lead on-campus seminars or workshops this summer through Cornell’s Adult University (CAU).
The role of “counterfactual hope” in Alexander Kluge’s work, and his “incomparable dedication to the conjoined causes of survival and happiness,” writes Leslie Adelson, formed much of the inspiration for her new book, “Cosmic Miniatures and the Future Sense: Alexander Kluge's 21st-century Literary Experiments in German Culture and Narrative Form.”
Graduate teaching assistants Stepfanie Aguillon and Aravind Natarajan have received the 2017-18 Cornelia Ye Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award.
The awards were presented by Julia Thom-Levy, vice provost for academic innovation, Jan. 22 at the Eighth Annual Celebration of Teaching Excellence hosted by the Center for Teaching Innovation (CTI).
Myron Rush, a Kremlinologist whose careful lexical analysis of public leadership statements determined that Nikita Khrushchev had won the power struggle to succeed Joseph Stalin, died Jan. 8 of kidney failure at his home in Herndon, Virginia. The professor emeritus of government died a week after his 96th birthday.
William Kennedy, the Avalon Foundation Professor Emeritus in the Humanities in the Department of Comparative Literature was recognized for the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Italian Studies, awarded by the Modern Language Association.
Andrew Bass connects his childhood love of the ocean and underweater sounds to his fascination with his research at Cornell University. Hear more about Bass' research in this Cornell Research video.
After Experimental Music, a symposium to explore current perspectives on experimental music studies, will bring scholars, performers, and artist-practitioners from across North America to Cornell University Feb. 8-11. In addition to academic presentations in Lincoln Hall, the symposium will feature two concerts of experimental music. All events are free and open to the public.
A semester-long, in-depth series of lectures on “The Difficulty of Democracy: Challenges and Prospects,” hosted by the College of Art and Sciences’ Program on Ethics and Public Life (EPL), features six eminent social scientists and will take place in Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium, Goldwin Smith Hall, followed by a question-and-answer period.
A new performative sound kinetic installation by Assistant Professor Marianthi Papalexandri-Alexandri will premiere at the ECLAT Festival in Stuttgart, Germany on February 3. Titled Distanz, the work invites the audience to a refined and focused exploration of objects and sounds, carefully shaped and placed at different distances.
“Monish,” by I.L. Peretz, is the story of an irascible Satan, his irresistible wife Lilith, and a young Jew who just wants to be left alone with his books. On Wednesday, February 21 at 7:30 pm the Cornell Jewish Studies Program and Cornell Department of Music present an evening of music and dance, inspired by Peretz’s classic poem.
Annelise Riles, professor of anthropology in the College of Arts and Sciences and the Jack G. Clarke ’52 Professor of Far East Legal Studies at Cornell Law School, has received the Anneliese Maier Award for lifetime achievement across the social sciences and humanities from the German government and the Humboldt Foundation.
Two new studies led by Hening Lin, professor of chemistry and chemical biology, offer new insights into oncogene RAS, the most frequently mutated gene of its type in human cancer.
Sabrina Karim, assistant professor of government, breaks down some of the issues surrounding Liberia's new president, former football star George Weah, in this Washington Post story.
Sarah Kreps, associate professor of government, wrote a recent article in The Washington Post examines the idea of nuclear retaliation on a country that launches major cyberattacks on crtical U.S. infrastructure.
In her new book, “Gentlemanly Terrorists: Political Violence and the Colonial State in India, 1919–1947,” historian Durba Ghosh examines the interplay between India’s militant movement and the nonviolent civil disobedience led by Gandhi, and how Indians reconcile these responses to colonial rule in their narrative of modern India’s birth.
Sabrina Karim, assistant professor of government, recently visited Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh. In this editorial in The Conversation, she explains what the Bangladeshi government has done right so far, and the challenges they are still facing.
The 2018 GRAMMY Award for Best Choral Performance was awarded to Donald Nally and The Crossing, for their recording of Gavin Bryar's "The Fifth Century." Stephen Spinelli, director of the Cornell Chorale and Chamber Singers, was one of The Crossing's 24 singers on the album.
Three Cornellians were among those celebrating Jan. 23 when nominations were announced for this year’s Academy Awards.
Reed Van Dyk and Trevor White, both ’07, received nominations, Van Dyk for his writing/directing on the documentary “DeKalb Elementary,” and White for production of “The Post.” David Greenbaum ’98 is co-head of production for Fox Searchlight Pictures, which had two nominated films, “Shape of Water” and “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri.”
Why do the patterns of misogyny persist, even in supposedly post-patriarchal parts of the world, like the U.S.? asks Kate Manne in her timely book, “Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny.”
In 2016, Yimon Aye, Howard Milstein Faculty Fellow and assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, introduced the world to “T-REX” – a chemical method for targeting and modulating single proteins to analyze and screen for specific oxidation-reduction (redox) events, which are vital to many basic functions of life.
Languages have an intriguing paradox. Languages with lots of speakers, such as English and Mandarin, have large vocabularies with relatively simple grammar. Yet the opposite is also true: Languages with fewer speakers have fewer words but complex grammars.
Why does the size of a population of speakers have opposite effects on vocabulary and grammar?
Economic inequality in advanced industrial societies has been growing in recent years, and so has the demand for recognition by stigmatized minority groups. Sociologist Michèle Lamont offers evidence of these intertwined facets of inequality and recommendations for public policy in her Feb. 2 talk, "Addressing the Recognition Gap: Destigmatization and the Reduction of Inequality."
Genes in an area of the brain that is relatively similar in fish, humans and all vertebrates appear to regulate how organisms coordinate and shift their behaviors, according to a new Cornell study.
Toppling a widespread assumption that a “lactation” hormone only cues animals to produce food for their babies, Cornell researchers have shown the hormone also prompts zebra finches to be good parents.
Kelly Zamudio, the Goldwin Smith Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, will analyze the effects of activity modules on classroom learning goals as the 2017-18 Menschel Distinguished Teaching Fellow at Cornell.
The visits are part of the Becker Grant lectures, established in 1976, which help departments bring alumni to campus to share their experiences with students.
While a master’s student at SUNY Buffalo, Kristen Angierski '12 discovered her passion for eco-criticism—literary criticism that takes the natural world into account. This, paired with her love of animals and environmental politics, inspired her to pursue doctoral study in the environmental humanities.
The 2017 winners of the Mabati Cornell Kiswahili Prize for African Literature have been announced by Abdilatif Abdalla, chair of the prize’s board of trustees.
The Creative Writing Program of Cornell’s English Department launches its Spring 2018 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series with poet Julie Sheehan on Thursday, February 1, 4:30pm, at the Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium in Goldwin Smith Hall. Sheehan is the author of three poetry collections: Bar Book: Poems & Otherwise; Orient Point; and Thaw.
Graduate students explored texts and artworks with themes of movement, escape and water and curated a related gallery installation as part of a fall course at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art.
Among other important milestones, students in the popular class learn how Slope Day and Dragon Day originated; what Collegetown once looked like and why Day Hall creek is called Wee Stinky Glen.
Babies are adept at getting what they need – including an education. New research shows that babies organize mothers’ verbal responses, which promotes more effective language instruction, and infant babbling is the key.
Are supporters of President Donald Trump increasing in prejudice? What’s the best way to end violence in Liberia during elections? Is Colombia ready for a sustainable boom in cocoa production?
Therapy sessions can be dramatic, but normally take place behind closed doors with only the therapist and client as witnesses. “Therapy as Performance,” a new interdisciplinary series premiering Jan. 19 at The Cherry Artspace in Ithaca, turns that convention on its head.
With the hiring of a former Vatican translator, Cornell has become a hub of an unlikely field in the modern age: spoken Latin. This Cornell Alumni Magazine article highlights the work of Daniel Gallagher, a former Catholic monsignor who spent a decade working at the Vatican.
An international group of astronomers has found that the Cornell-discovered fast radio burst FRB 121102 – a brief, gigantic pulse of radio waves from 3 billion light years away – passes through a veil of magnetized plasma. This causes the cosmic blasts to “shout and twist,” which will help the scientists determine the source.
The research is featured on the cover of Nature, Jan. 11.
Jonathan Lunine, the David C. Duncan Professor in the Physical Sciences and director of the Cornell Center for Astrophysics and Planetary Science, was selected as the American Geophysical Union’s (AGU) 2017 Carl Sagan Lecturer.
Faculty growth is essential in multidisciplinary areas such as nanoscale science, behavioral economics, sustainability and media studies, as well as other emerging research areas in the social sciences, sciences, arts and humanities.
