Metaphysics includes big, abstract questions about the nature of reality that can’t be fully answered or investigated empirically: questions about whether or not we have free will and the nature of consciousness; about how objects or people persist through time. Are we the same people as we were as babies? Is a table the same if you inscribe your name into its surface? And what about causation, which is so central to our thinking, on what terms does one event cause another?
In the new book “Protean Power: Exploring the Uncertain and Unexpected in World Politics,” co-editors Peter Katzenstein and Lucia A. Seybert, Ph.D. ’12, argue for a new approach to international relations.
Assistant professors Brett Fors, Karthik Sridharan and Jin Suntivich have been named recipients of Alfred P. Sloan Foundation fellowships. These awards support early-career faculty members’ original research and broad-based education related to science, technology and economic performance.
Social activism efforts of professional athletes such as Chris Long, who recently donated his entire $2.25 million salary to support educational equality efforts, will be the focus of a Feb. 27 visit by former NBA player Etan Thomas. Thomas, author of “We Matter: Athletes and Activism,” will also discuss his new book at the free lecture at 4:30 p.m. in Kauffmann Auditorium in Goldwin Smith Hall.
The number of Americans over age 65 is expected to double by 2060, to 24 percent of the population, intensifying concerns about end-of-life care. In a talk on Feb. 23, sociologists Holly Prigerson and Libby Luth will speak on “Psychosocial Influences on End-of-Life Care: Leveraging and Application of Social Constructs,” at 3:30 pm in Rm. 302, Uris Hall.
The Cornell Contemporary Chamber Players (CCCP) will host The Switch Ensemble for a five-day artistic residency Feb. 26 to March 3 that will include workshops, a lecture recital, a recording session and two concerts.The concerts will feature pieces composed by Cornell graduate students and faculty, and performed by the Switch Ensemble.
Twenty-five hundred years after they were written, Plato’s dialogues continue to yield insights that resonate with current philosophical discussions. In her new book, “Plato’s Moral Psychology: Intellectualism, the Divided Soul, and the Desire for Good,” Rachana Kamtekar, professor of philosophy, examines Plato’s approach to human motivation.
Geoffrey W. Coates, the Tisch University Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, has received the 2017 Newcomb Cleveland Prize of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
Margaret Washington, professor of history, is featured in the new PBS documentary film, "'Tell Them We Are Rising': The Story of Black Colleges and Universities," directed by MacArthur Award-winning filmmaker Stanley Nelson.
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.
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.
Along with discussions about politics, religion and history, the trip included many cultural interactions with local people, including children at a dance school.
As the Cornell Institute of Host-Microbe Interactions and Disease(CIHMID) wraps up its first year, the launch of its Undergraduate Research Experience (URE) proved to be a highlight, say institute leaders.
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.”
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).
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
