by :
Linda B. Glaser
,
Arts & Sciences Communications
Islam has been much in the American news lately, but Chiara Formichi says the stereotypes media reinforce do us a disservice. “It’s important that we as faculty help students to break up assumptions and see that Islam is not just what is portrayed in the media,” she says.
The Cornell Council for the Arts (CCA) 2016 Biennial, “Abject/Object Empathies,” will feature 12 new projects by invited artists, Cornell faculty members and students. Most of the works will be presented on campus between Sept. 15 and Dec. 22, all on the theme of the cultural production of empathy.
If you’ve ever wondered about love (and who hasn’t?), there’s a new university course for you this year. And if you ponder the issue of food justice and how it relates to our tiny town of Ithaca, there’s one for that too.Those topics are two of the new ones covered this year through the University Courses Initiative, which was begun in 2012 and will offer 18 courses this year.
by :
Linda B. Glaser
,
Arts & Sciences Communications
Nearly half a century ago, student protests led to the creation of Cornell’s Africana Studies and Research Center. Since then, the Africana Center has trained generations of leaders in academia, the professions, business and public service.
The Ithaca campus and Weill Cornell Medicine-New York welcomed three special young guests recently: high school students from Qatar, visiting the United States for the first time to get a sneak peek into the world of academic medicine.
Faculty from more than 40 East Asian universities attended the inaugural one-week session of the East China Normal University (ECNU)/Cornell Summer School in Theory (ECSST) in Shanghai.ECSST provides an opportunity for select humanities and arts faculty to interact and explore contemporary international debates in media, literary and visual studies; art and philosophy.
Twelve Cornell assistant professors, including three from the College of Arts & Sciences, have been awarded research grants by the Affinito-Stewart Grants Program.The program, administered by the President’s Council of Cornell Women (PCCW), aims to increase the long-term retention of women on the Cornell faculty by supporting the completion of research important in the tenure process.
Of the approximately 7,000 languages in the world, many are endangered. An endangered language is one that is at risk of losing all of its native speakers.
Forty-seven Cornell faculty and graduate students will be among the 4,600 sociologists to descend on Seattle Aug. 20-23 for the American Sociological Association’s 111th annual meeting. Nearly 600 sessions and 3,000 research paper presentations will address society’s most pressing problems.
The Cornell Department of English Creative Writing Program launches the Fall 2016 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series on Thursday, September 1, 4:30pm, inRhodes-Rawlings Auditorium, Klarman Hall, with a celebration of the life and work of Goldwin Smith Professor of English Literature Emeritus James McConkey on the occasion of his 95th birthday.
Very little is known about the wiring of nerve cells in the brain that allow a fish, or any animal, to make fundamental choices to move to the left or to the right. A study of zebrafish larvae published Aug. 9 in the journal eLife for the first time reveals a circuit that determines the direction of a lightning-quick turn to escape a predator.
The nonprofit Brooklyn Institute for Social Research (BISR), co-founded in 2012 by Ajay Chaudhary ’03, offers deep subject matter outside of traditional institutional walls, giving the local community access to liberal-arts education.
Klarman Hall – the College of Arts and Sciences’ light-filled humanities building that opened last semester – was certified LEED Platinum July 29.The U.S. Green Building Council, which certifies LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) structures, awarded the university 87 out of 110 points, the highest total Cornell has ever received.
Imagine serving in the military, having life-changing experiences, then re-entering civilian life only to realize that to fulfill your dreams you need to go to college.
All materials found in nature – even the most “perfect” diamond – contain defects, since the atoms inside them are never arranged in perfect order.Such structural disorder causes complex force distributions throughout the material. Measuring these forces is critical to understanding the material’s behavior, but these force measurements have been impossible to perform through conventional techniques, which only determine average responses to stress.
The explosion of social and behavioral data available in the 21st century has created huge opportunities to study human behavior and social interaction and has fueled the collaborative, interdisciplinary new field of computational social science.
by :
Linda B. Glaser
,
Arts & Sciences Communications
“Wordplay and Powerplay in Latin Poetry,” a book in honor of Frederick Ahl edited by two of his former students, has just been released. The volume comes out of a conference titled “Speaking to Power in Latin and Greek Literature,” which was organized in honor of Ahl at Cornell University in September 2013.
by :
Linda B. Glaser
,
Arts & Sciences Communications
In an op-ed in The Washington Post, anthropologist Adam Smith offers lessons from history on Donald Trump's proposed wall as a solution to border problems.
by :
Linda B. Glaser
,
Arts & Sciences Communications
“In the last decade, political economy has moved from the margins to the mainstream of the historical conversation in the United States,” writes history postdoc Noam Maggor in his introduction to the special History of Capitalism issue of the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, which he edited. “Galvanized under the banner of the ‘his
As Emma Korolik ’17 looked around at the other students taking her English classes, she wondered: do class backgrounds affect what major a student might choose in college? And if so, why? Korolik decided to focus her senior honors thesis on the questions.
by :
Linda B. Glaser
,
Arts & Sciences Communications
When Tracy McNulty read “I Never Promised You a Rose Garden” at age ten, about a psychotic, the book had a profound impact: after college, McNulty went to France to study psychoanalysis and later trained with experts in psychosis treatment. With academic degrees in French and comparative literature and training in clinical psychoanalysis, McNulty has become known for combining these interests in her scholarship.
Mary Beth Norton, the Mary Donlon Alger Professor of American History, has been elected president of the American Historical Association (AHA), the principal umbrella organization for the profession. Her one-year term as president will begin in January 2018.
When it comes to the birds and the bees, frogs are remarkably diverse: They do it in water, on land and on leaves.Researchers have assumed that natural selection drove frogs to take the evolutionary step to reproduce on land as a way for parents to avoid aquatic predators who feed on the eggs and tadpoles.
The Klarman Hall time capsule is now sealed and buried, awaiting its discovery by future Cornell students during Cornell’s bicentennial year in 2065.Sheldon Borden, left, and Ray Wilson, right, carpenters with Local 277, completed the project on July 19.
by :
Linda B. Glaser
,
Arts & Sciences Communications
Adam Seth Levine, assistant professor of government, has won two awards from the American Political Science Association (APSA), the leading professional organization for the study of political science. The awards will be presented in Philadelphia at the beginning of September.
Most students head to college at the end of August, however students participating in the Prefreshmen Summer Program (PSP) at Cornell arrived June 21 and will spend seven weeks on campus.
by :
Linda B. Glaser
,
Arts & Sciences Communications
On July 12, a United Nations tribunal ruled on an arbitration case involving contested territory in the South China Sea. Government professors Allen Carlson and Jessica Chen Weiss, both on the faculty of the China-Asia Pacific Studies (CAPS) Program, reflected on the verdict.
The Cornell Summer School in Theory explored contemporary international debates in media studies, visual studies, literary studies, philosophy and contemporary art.
“I’ve always been really interested in astronomy, so I was curious what kinds of careers there might be in the field,” said Sophia Delpapa, a high school senior from Ontario County who attended the recent 4-H Career Explorations event on campus, sponsored by the state 4-H foundation, part of Cornell Cooperative Extension.
Researchers in the collaboration between the Colleges of Arts & Sciences and Engineering will work on technologies and new tools to reveal the inner workings of the brain.
Cornell will host the Conference in Laboratory Phonology (LabPhon 15), an international meeting for researchers taking experimental approaches to the study of human speech sounds, July 13-17.The conference theme, “Speech Dynamics and Phonological Representation,” will address sounds in human language as part of a linguistic, cognitive and communicative system.
When cells die, whether through apoptosis or necrosis, the DNA and other molecules found in those cells don’t just disappear. They wind up in the blood stream, where degraded bits and pieces can be extracted.
Sofia Aumann ’19 could have felt completely overwhelmed as a high school freshman when she uncovered the complicated issues behind human sex trafficking as she worked on a research project.
NASA’s Cassini and Huygen’s missions have provided a wealth of data about chemical elements found on Saturn’s moon Titan, and Cornell scientists have uncovered a chemical trail that suggests prebiotic conditions may exist there.
In the class Introduction to Evolutionary Biology and Biodiversity, it’s not uncommon for the professor to don colorful props as students vote electronically on which ones would make her the most attractive bird to potential mates.The point?“That got a lot of laughs, but I’m sure no one in the audience will forget about sexual selection anytime soon,” said Justin Zhu ’17, a biology major concentrating in molecular biology.
Uthara Suvrathan, a visitng Hirsch Postdoctoral Fellow in the Cornell Institute of Archaeology and Materials Studies, recently led her class (ARKEO/ANTHRO 2140, "Fantastic Frauds and Myths in Archaeology") in a Nazca Lines activity on the Arts Quad. The Nazca Lines are ancient, gigantic (several are over 300m long) geoglyphs drawn on a desert in Peru.
