Atop a cabinet, leaning against a wall of Dagmawi Woubshet’s office, is an enlarged framed cover of the May 17, 1963, issue of TIME magazine. Its portrait of writer James Baldwin stares into the room. Woubshet, associate professor of English, gestures to it several times as he talks about his research.
Two Arts & Sciences alumni were honored with reviews of their debut novels in the Jan. 29 New York Times Book Review.The novels of Sana Krasikov ’01, winner of the 2009 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, and Lydia Peelle ’00, author of the short story collection “Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing,” were both reviewed in the recent issue.
In discussions about climate change, many people seem to think the only real problem is replacing fossil fuels, and once that’s done nothing much really needs to change. “That’s not only false, it’s a really dangerous way of thinking,” said Karen Pinkus, professor of Romance studies and comparative literature in the College of Arts and Sciences.
Like all researchers, Itai Cohen, Physics, has a lot of questions. But unlike many, his questions make big, topical leaps. From fruit flies to mosh pits, from origami to cartilage—Cohen dreams of preventing stampedes in Mecca, understanding the complex neuromechanics of fruit fly flight, and making self-folding robots from a single sheet of atoms. How can all this happen in one lab? Well, the answer is: it doesn’t.
Hundreds of seldom-seen photographs documenting the journey of African-Americans from the slavery era to the 20th century are now digitized and freely accessible to students and scholars around the world.
“My name’s Ishmael, what’s yours?” -- or would “Call me Ishmael” better open a narrative about whaling? Tone, diction, style: these are the kinds of questions Cornell’s Historians Are Writers! (HAW) grapple with in their meetings.
Many of the vintage observatory instruments were collected in the 19th century by Estevan Fuertes, founding dean of Cornell’s civil engineering department.
"We hope the suggested readings, primary sources, and multimedia sources will help educators and citizens in their teaching and public discussions," says historian Maria Cristina Garcia.
Walk by a bakery, and you’ll smell fresh-baked bread. But would you smell it, if you’d never learned what bread was? “Not necessarily,” says Thomas A. Cleland, Psychology.
In academic fields from physics to genetics, researchers rely on computers for everything from data analysis to modeling. One area of scholarship that has gone largely untouched is the humanities, where today’s researchers are far more often hunched over stacks of books than scanning graphs and charts on a screen.
From our earliest history, humans have contemplated the cosmos. Before we had an inkling of the nature of our own solar system, we wondered at the composition of our sister planets. And long before we knew there were planets orbiting other stars, we wondered if we, earth-bound beings, were alone in the universe.
Cornell in Rome will celebrate its 30th anniversary with an event featuring tours, receptions, lunches, and panels on art, architecture and the humanities.
A hallmark of human language is our ability to produce and understand an infinite number of different sentences. This unique open-ended productivity is normally explained in terms of “structural reuse”; sentences are constructed from reusable parts such as phrases. But how languages come to be composed of reusable parts in the first place is a question that has long puzzled researchers in the language sciences
The university has created a new resource page for faculty, staff and students concerning the Jan. 27 presidential executive order on immigration. Interim President Hunter Rawlings also sent the following message to the Cornell community Jan. 29:
Benjamin Anderson’s recently published “Cosmos and Community in Early Medieval Art” (Yale University Press, 2017) has won the 2018 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award of the College Art Association (CAA).
“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.
by :
Linda B. Glaser
,
Arts & Sciences Communications
“The curriculum belongs to the faculty, 100 percent,” declared Interim President Hunter Rawlings at a faculty forum Jan. 23 in the Rhodes Rawlings Auditorium in Klarman Hall.
Kyle Shen, associate professor of physics, creates and investigates artificial and unconventional materials with unusual electronic and magnetic properties. His research into these new materials and their potential applications is explored in this Cornell Resarch story.
Using a novel chemical procedure developed in her lab, Yimon Aye and her group are helping to blaze a trail in the emerging field of precision medicine by targeting and modulating single proteins to achieve desired responses.
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has approved $1.1 million to extend the Mellon Collaborative Studies in Architecture, Urbanism and the Humanities (AUH) interdisciplinary seminar series at Cornell for four years.
Sarah Kreps, associate professor of government, and co-author Debak Das, a graduate student in government, write in this Washington Post piece about their research into Americans' thoughts about the need for retaliation against Russia for alleged cyberattacks.
James Wells Gair, left, and longtime collaborator, linguist W.S. Karunatillake/Photo providedJames Wells Gair, Ph.D. ’63, professor emeritus of linguistics who throughout a long and distinguished career produced groundbreaking work on South Asian languages and their relation to other languages, died Dec. 10 in Ithaca. He was 88.
This Cornell Research story explores the many avenues that graduate students pursue in their research projects and the multitide of Cornell supports available to them.More than 5,000 graduate students work at Cornell, studying in more than 80 fields.
Karen Pinkus, professor of Italian and comparative literature, is deeply concerned about the environment and believes that the humanities can bring a critical research component to solving the problems of climate change.
by :
Linda B. Glaser
,
Arts & Sciences Communications
Carole Boyce Davies, professor of Africana studies and English, will receive The Caribbean Philosophical Association’s 2017 Frantz Fanon Lifetime Achievement Award at the association’s international conference, June 22-24 in New York City.
Despite the distance, Cornell researchers are actively involved in the cutting-edge particle physics experiments taking place at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland.This Cornell Research story explores the many projects and discoveries Cornell faculty are undertaking as they pursue answers to some of the universe's greatest mysteries.
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.
In this NY Daily News opinion piece, Sergio Garcia-Rios, assistant professor of government and Latina/o studies, says exit polls reporting that Donald Trump received a larger share of the Latino vote than Mitt Romney did in the 2012 were wrong.
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.
Thomas Pepinsky, associate professor of government, writes in this Vox opinion piece that Americans have a "fantastical" and "cartoonish" image of authoritarianism, while life for people living in authoritarian countries is similar to the daily life of many Americans.
A&S alum Dr. Lewis Cantley is a leader on the project, which could dramatically shorten the timeline for new drug treatments and possibly save millions of lives.
Everywhere we turn in modern Western society, we run into the influence of economics. Our worldview, and our very language, is colored by it. We worry that politicians can be bought and sold. We give credit to those who can afford a comfortable retirement. We debate the price of a free society as police clash with protestors.
In the short story “How to Win an Unwinnable War,” a seventh-grade boy named Sam enrolls in a summer school class called How to Win a Nuclear War. The story traces Sam’s morbid reflections spurred by the course—“He wonders what the stars will see the day the war begins, the whole planet brightening, then going gray like a dead bulb”—as he simultaneously grapples with the dissolution of his parent’s marriage.
Peter J. Katzenstein, the Walter S. Carpenter Jr. Professor of International Studies, offers a look into his world of teaching and research in international relations in this video on the Cornell Research site.
One in 10 people on Earth live in China’s cities. Over the past decade, nearly 200 million people in China have moved from rural to urban regions, and 8 million more are expected to relocate every year between now and 2050. Just what this means for China and the world has the attention of the Institute for the Social Sciences’ newest collaborative project, China’s Cities: Divisions and Plans.
