Overview

Melissa Warden is an Assistant Professor and Miriam M. Salpeter Fellow in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at Cornell University, and is a member of the Cornell Neurotech Advisory Group and the Biomedical Engineering and Psychology graduate fields. She received an A.B. in Molecular Biology from Princeton University and a Ph.D. in Systems Neuroscience from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she investigated prefrontal neuronal encoding of multi-item short-term memory with Earl K. Miller. As a postdoctoral fellow with Karl Deisseroth at Stanford University she studied cortical control of neuromodulatory systems in motivated behavior. Her research at Cornell integrates imaging, neurophysiological, and cellular and molecular approaches to study the neural circuits mediating reward and motivated behavior and their dysfunction. She has received a number of awards including the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, Robertson Neuroscience Investigator Award from the New York Stem Cell Foundation, NARSAD Young Investigator Award from the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation, Sloan Research Fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Research Foundation, and a Research Grant from the Whitehall Foundation.

Research

Our lab seeks to understand the neural circuitry underlying complex cognition and behavior, with a focus on systems mediating reward and motivation.  We are interested in both the normal function of these circuits and how they become dysfunctional in depression.  We study these systems with an observational and causal approach, combining monitoring and decoding of neural activity with control of defined circuit elements.  Our primary current research goals are to determine how neural signals reflecting reward and motivation are constructed and used to control affective state and behavior.

Many of our research projects are focused on the serotonergic dorsal raphe nucleus (DRN) and the dopaminergic ventral tegmental area (VTA). These small, ancient brainstem systems send projections widely throughout the brain and are in a prime position to globally influence behavioral state.  Neurons in these regions encode quantities including reward prediction error, expected reward, the presence of acute stressors, and arousal.  What kind of information is transmitted to these regions, and how is this information used to construct these quantities?  How do these regions influence downstream neural signaling?  What behavioral and cognitive consequences result from changes in afferent and efferent information flow?

We investigate these fundamental questions by perturbing selected circuits and observing the effects on both neural activity and behavior.  Using this approach we hope to shed light on both the normal function of these systems and how dysfunction in information flow contributes to disease states such as depression.  In pursuit of these goals, the lab employs a multidisciplinary approach combining optogenetics, imaging, high-density freely moving neurophysiology, patch clamp electrophysiology, behavior, and computation.

Keywords

motivated behavior, reward, decisions, neural circuits, neuromodulators, prefrontal cortex, optogenetics, imaging, neurophysiology

Courses

• BIONB 4370 - Neural Circuits of Motivated Behavior (alternate years)
• BIONB 2220 - Neurobiology and Behavior II: Introduction to Neuroscience (6 lectures)

In the news

• Imaging captures social dynamics of 'pee-shy' mice
• Study finds tiny brain area controls work for rewards

Overview

Tapan is an associate professor in the department of Information Science at Cornell Tech. His research includes HCI and the design and evaluation of information technologies for education, governance and international development. Tapan’s students have started several tech companies based on his research and teaching. He holds a Sc.B. degree in Molecular Modeling with Honors from Brown University and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Washington, where his dissertation won the William Chan Memorial award. Tapan has received the NSF CAREER award, a Sloan Fellowship and was named TR35 Humanitarian of the Year.

Overview

Maureen R. Hanson is Liberty Hyde Bailey Professor in the Department of Molecular Biology & Genetics. She received a B.S. degree at Duke University and a Ph.D. in Cell and Developmental Biology from Harvard University. After completing an NIH postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard, she joined the faculty of the Biology Department at University of Virginia. She moved to Cornell as Associate Professor and was promoted to Professor in 1991. She is presently a member of the graduate Fields of Genetics and Development, Plant Biology, and Biochemistry, Molecular, and Cell Biology. She has previously served as Associate Director of the Cornell Biotechnology Program and Director of the Cornell Plant Science Center.

Research Focus

Dr. Hanson has two different research programs, related through their dependence on modern methods for examining genome sequences and gene expression. Her research in plant biology has always focused on the genome-containing organelles of plants, chloroplasts and mitochondria. Reflecting their prokaryotic origins, gene expression in these organelles differs from that of nuclear genes. In particular, organelle genes are often organized in operons that undergo considerable post-transcriptional processing, including RNA editing. The nuclear genome exerts significant control of organelle gene expression through the action of nuclear-encoded proteins targeted to the organelle. Research goals include identification of the components of the organelle RNA editing apparatus and an RNA/protein complex that suppresses the expression of an abnormal mitochondrial protein. Another study aims to identify proteins that control the morphology and movement of organelles. A third project concerns expression of bacterial microcompartments in chloroplasts in order to enhance the efficiency of photosynthesis. A second research area is the pathophysiology of the human illness Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, also known as Myalgic Encephalomyelitis. Individuals with this illness often have gastrointestinal issues and evidence of immune system activation and dysfunction. One current project involves characterization of the gut and blood microbiome in healthy vs. ill subjects. Another project aims to identify differences in gene expression at baseline and following exercise in healthy and in subjects diagnosed with CFS/ME.

Overview

Mary Ann Radzinowicz taught at Cornell from 1980, after an uninterrupted 20-year academic career in Great Britain. She was the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of English Literature. Known as a scholar committed to criticism within historical context, her most notable work, Toward Samsom Agonistes: The Growth of Milton's Mind, was published in 1978, followed by American Colonial Prose: John Smith to Thomas Jefferson in 1984 and Milton's Epics and the Book of Psalms in 1989. In 1982 she received a Guggenheim fellowship for her research on Milton's Epics and the Book of Psalms, and in 1987 the Milton Society of American named her an Honored Scholar.

Research Focus

• Milton
• Modern poetry
• American literature

In the news

• Mary Ann Radzinowicz, Milton scholar, dies at 97

Overview

Benjamin Barson is a composer, historian, and musicologist. His research thinks through jazz as an Afro-Atlantic art form deeply tied to the counter-plantation legacies of the Haitian Revolution and their echoes in Radical Reconstruction. He received his PhD in Music from the University of Pittsburgh and recently completed a Fulbright Garcia-Robles postdoctoral fellowship at the Universidad Autónoma de Baja California in Mexicali, Mexico. Barson’s research rethinks migration, agency, and cultural resistance, and has published on topics ranging from the musical cultures of Chinese indenture in the late nineteenth century United States South (The Cargo Rebellion, PM Press, 2023) to the legacy of Haitian migrants in early Louisianan blues (in The Routledge Handbook to Jazz and Gender, 2022). In addition to his academic and scholarly output, Barson is the recipient of the 2018 Johnny Mandel Prize from the ASCAP Foundation for this distinguished work as a jazz saxophonist and composer. Barson, disturbed by the incredible oppression wrought by white supremacy and the destruction of global ecology, employs a musical practice that draws from the deep well of revolutionary musicians within the jazz tradition, often composing through a collaborative process with activists and social movement leaders in the Global South. His work Mirror Butterfly: The Migrant Liberation Movement Suite (2018) was hailed as “Fully orchestrated and magnificently realized” (The Vermont Standard) as well as “a call to action” (I Care if You Listen). His teaching encourages students to consider musical aesthetics and their associated production practices through a holistic, interdisciplinary approach rooted in methodologies developed by scholars in Africana studies, musicology, cultural studies, and Atlantic History from below.

Research Focus

The nineteenth-century Black Atlantic and early jazz

As a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow with the Society for the Humanities and the Africana Studies and Research Center, Dr. Barson will be working on publishing his research in a book monograph titled Brassroots Democracy: Maroon Ecologies and the Jazz Commons. This work explores the evolution of jazz aesthetics and their interaction with social movements in the Caribbean basin, employing theoretical frameworks from cultural studies such as those developed by Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams, and Paul Gilroy, as well as theorists from the global south and Latin America including Enrique Dussel, Jean Casimir, and Édouard Glissant. Barson thinks through jazz as a product of colonial social relations as well as a culture of afrodiasporic resistance. Consulting documents from the Freedman’s Bureau (a federal agency that “supervised” the abolition process) as well as nineteenth-century Black and white newspapers, Dr. Barson explores how Black activists in post-Civil War Louisiana developed a grassroots democratic culture through mass assembly and collective brass band music making—a configuration that he coins as “Brassroots Democracy.” Barson argues that practitioners of Brassroots Democracy expressed and developed “counter-plantation” and liberation theologies, powerfully altering the nature of both Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Movement. His work takes on pressing debates raised by musicologists of the African diaspora, historians of slavery, scholars in cultural studies, and religious studies scholars of the Black Atlantic. This manuscript is currently being prepared for publication with Wesleyan University Press’s Music/Culture series.

Overview

Joanie Mackowski is the author of View From a Temporary Window (University of Pittsburgh Press 2010) and The Zoo (University of Pittsburgh Press 2002), which was awarded the Associated Writing Programs' Award Series in Poetry and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Other awards include a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Grant, and the Emily Dickinson Prize from the Poetry Society of America. Her poems appear in Best American Poetry 2007 and Best American Poetry 2009, The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets, and in such journals as The Yale Review, Raritan, New England Review, Poetry, and others. Her third collection of poems, currently underway, explores lyric poetry from an ecocritical vantage point.

Research Focus

• poetry and corporeal experience
• poetry and ethics
• creative practice as research
• creative writing pedagogy

In the news

• ‘Our story’: Native American writers cultivate their craft
• ‘Writers & Poets’ faculty reading series begins Nov. 30
• Cornell Reading Series features multimedia and interdisciplinary authors for spring 2020
• Spring ‘In a Word’ explored writing ‘beyond the human’
• In a Word to explore writing ‘beyond the human’
• Colleagues celebrate A.R. Ammons in Temple of Zeus
• Art Is Not a Profit Industry. That's Why We Need the NEA
• Nine Arts and Sciences faculty chosen as 2017 Public Voices Fellows

Overview

Jessica Chen Weiss is the Michael J. Zak Professor for China and Asia-Pacific Studies in the Department of Government at Cornell University. From August 2021 to July 2022, she served as senior advisor to the Secretary's Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. State Department on a Council on Foreign Relations Fellowship for Tenured International Relations Scholars (IAF-TIRS). Weiss is the author of Powerful Patriots: Nationalist Protest in China’s Foreign Relations (Oxford University Press, 2014). Her research appears in International Organization, China Quarterly, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Security Studies, Journal of Contemporary China, and Review of International Political Economy, as well as in the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Quarterly. Weiss was previously an assistant professor at Yale University and founded FACES, the Forum for American/Chinese Exchange at Stanford University. Born and raised in Seattle, Washington, she received her Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego in 2008, where her dissertation won the 2009 American Political Science Association Award for best dissertation in international relations, law and politics. 

Research Focus

Learn more about her research and writing at www.jessicachenweiss.com

In the news

• Former national security adviser to speak on US-China relations
• Exploring the complexities of the US-China relationship
• China expert, present at Xi visit to US, aims to cool tensions
• $2.5M in A&S New Frontier Grants supports bold projects
• Even China isn’t convinced it can replace the U.S.
• Xi trying to ‘thread the needle’ by meeting Putin without damaging China’s relations in Europe
• The U.S. should deter — not provoke — Beijing over Taiwan. Here’s how.
• A Professor Who Challenges the Washington Consensus on China
• Biden, Xi meeting a chance to ‘step back from the brink’ of conflict
• America and China Don’t Need to Knock Each Other Out to Win
• Panelists: War in Ukraine reshapes world political order
• Journalists join A&S professors to discuss global impacts of war in Ukraine
• Ten A&S faculty honored with endowed professorships
• Natalie Wolchover named A&S Zubrow Visiting Journalist for Spring 2022
• Russekoff lecture focuses on U.S.-China relations
• China’s leaders say that Biden offers a ‘new window of hope.’ Their experts are more skeptical.
• America, don’t try to out-China China
• Four things to know about the U.S. decision to close the Chinese consulate in Houston
• US paints China as bogeyman, closes Houston consulate
• How coronavirus changes the political outlook in China and the U.S.
• COVID-19 impact: Noliwe Rooks on representing oneself online
• Op-Ed: China’s coronavirus statistics aren’t the real problem
• In South Carolina, Democrats debated when a dictator is really a dictator. So what’s the answer?
• ‘Ours Will No Longer Be a Nation Subject to Insult and Humiliation’
• Weiss to Congress: Face China by strengthening democracy
• What’s the response in China to the trade war?
• Klarman postdoctoral fellowship program announced
• Social scientists analyze the dynamics shaping China’s cities
• Eight grants focus on innovation in China
• A&S expands advising seminars to all first-year students
• How hawkish is the Chinese public?
• The Trump administration wrongly assumed China would capitulate in a trade war. What happens now?
• ISS project to study economics, politics of China urbanization
• Faculty comment on South China Sea verdict
• China & Asia-Pacific Studies Program celebrates 10 years

Overview

George Hutchinson’s teaching and research concern nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature, American racial culture, and more recently literary ecology.  He also directs the John S. Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines.  His most recent book is Facing the Abyss:  American Literature and Culture in the 1940s, a 2019 finalist for Phi Beta Kappa’s Christian Gauss Award and the MLA’s Matei Calinescu Prize for 20^th and 21^st century literature and thought.  His book In Search of Nella Larsen:  A Biography of the Color Line, won the Christian Gauss Award, was named one of the Best Books of 2007 by the Washington Post, and was an Editor’s Choice of the New York Times Book Review and Booklist. It also won a bronze medal for Biography in the Independent Publishers Book Awards, and was named an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice.  His book The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White, was a finalist for the Rea Nonfiction Prize and nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in History. He has also won the Darwin Turner Prize of the African American Literature Division of the MLA.  He has edited four books and a journal special issue concerning African American literature, most recently the Penguin Classics edition of Jean Toomer’s Cane, an Editors Choice of the New York Times Book Review.  He has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future.  He is currently working on a memoir of well-digging in the village of Zéguedéguin, Burkina Faso, in the 1970s; and a biography, Jean Toomer: An American Life, for Yale University Press. 

Research Focus

• American Modernism
• African American Literature
• Race in American Culture
• Walt Whitman

In the news

• Twelve new Klarman Fellows to pursue innovative, timely research in A&S
• George Hutchinson’s ‘Facing the Abyss’ cited by MLA
• Learning Where You Live course empowers students
• English professor’s book shortlisted for renowned Christian Gauss Award
• English professor publishes new edition of Jean Toomer’s “Cane”
• American literature scholar kicks off Botanic Gardens’ lecture series Aug. 29
• ‘Facing the Abyss’ explores literary response to 1940s events
• Environmental Humanities Lecture Series begins Oct. 4

Overview

Professor of Comparative Literature Emeritus and Associate Member of Law School, taught biblical and cognate (Near Eastern and Talmudic) literature as well as courses on law and literature in antiquity. Research to date has been primarily on law and narrative in early biblical material. Of his 25 books many reflect this focus, for example, The Sacrificial Laws of Leviticus and the Joseph Story (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2017). Two of his most recent publications (2019) are: Editor, Cambridge Companion to the Bible and Literature, and Editor, Studies in Comparative Legal History, Roman Law and Language (Berkeley). Published Public Lectures include: The Ten Commandments, Ninth Sacks Lecture (Oxford Centre for Postgraduate Hebrew Studies, 1982); King David’s Adultery, Fourth Annual Jewish Law Lecture (Institute for Advanced Legal Studies, London, 1993), and Interpreting Law: Jesus, the Lawyer, and the Good Samaritan, Bricker Memorial Lecture, Tulane University (2012), also on You Tube. He is currently completing a major study on the Origin of Biblical Rituals. He has contributed some 70 articles mainly in the fields of biblical literature and legal thought; received Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships; and the Cornell Teaching Award, 1997; directed five programs for the National Endowment for the Humanities for College Teachers to aid their research and teaching; is a Corresponding Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Postgraduate Hebrew Studies, a frequent Research Fellow at the Robbins Civil Law and Religious Collection, School of Law, University of California, Berkeley; and has been a Visiting Professor at the Universities of Cambridge, Edinburgh, Grinnell College, Iowa, the Humboldt University, Berlin, and the University of Melbourne, Australia.

Research Focus

• Relationship between law and narrative in early biblical material

Publications

• book
  • Illuminating Leviticus : A Study of its Laws and Institutions in the Light....  Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2006
  • Ideas and the Man : Remembering David Daube.  Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann. 2004
  • Law, Legend, and Incest in the Bible : Leviticus 18-20.  Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press (CUP).1997
  • The Spirit of Biblical Law.  Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press. 1996
  • The Origins of Biblical Law : the Decalogues and the Book of the Covenant .  Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press (CUP). 1992

Overview

William J. Kennedy, Avalon Foundation Professor Emeritus in the Humanities, taught the history of European literature and literary criticism from antiquity to the early modern period. His publications focus on Italian, French, English, and German texts from Dante to Milton. Rhetorical Norms in Renaissance Literature (Yale University Press, 1978) studies interactions of genre, style, and mode in lyric, epic, and prose narrative. Jacopo Sannazaro and the Uses of Pastoral (University Press of New England, 1983), recipient of the MLA's Marraro Prize, traces the rise of modern pastoral from ancient models. Authorizing Petrarch (Cornell University Press, 1994) explores the canonizing imitations of that poet's work throughout Europe. The Site of Petrarchism: Early Modern National Sentiment in Italy, France, and England (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003) tracks the rise of national styles and political identities in Renaissance poetry. Petrarchism at Work: Contextual Economies in the Age of Shakespeare (Cornell University Press, 2016) examines issues of professionalism and its economic consequences in sixteenth-century European poetry. Kennedy has co-edited a rhetoric textbook, Writing in the Disciplines (Prentice-Hall, seventh ed. 2012), and has contributed over fifty articles on literature, rhetoric, and literary theory to various journals and critical collections. He has received fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Liguria Foundations and has served as President of the Renaissance Society of America in 2008-10. He is currently working on a study of Shakespeare in global contexts.

Research Focus

The history of European literature and literary criticism from antiquity to the early modern period, with a special focus on Italian, French, English, and German texts from Dante to Milton. 

Publications

Books:

• Rhetorical Norms in Renaissance Literature, Yale University Press, 1978.
• Jacopo Sannazaro and the Uses of Pastoral, University Press of New England,1983; Howard R. Marraro MLA Prize 1982-84
• Authorizing Petrarch, Cornell University Press, 1994.
• The Site of Petrarchism: National Sentiment in Early Modern Italy, France, and England, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003
• Petrarchism at Work: Contextual Economies in the Age of Shakespeare, Cornell University Press, 2016

In Progress:

Revisionary Shakespeare: A book-length study of eight Shakespearean plays and their global impact on eighteenth- to twenty-first-century fiction and drama in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas.

Edited Volumes:

• Co-editor, Writing in the Disciplines, Prentice-Hall, 1986; revised editions: 1990, 1996, 2000, 2003, 2007, 2012.
• Cosmopolitan Crossings, guest-edited for Annals of Scholarship: Art Practices and the Human Sciences in a Global Culture, vol. 14, no. 2 (March, 2002)
• Transactions and Exchanges in the European Renaissance, guest-edited for Annals of Scholarship: Art Practices and the Human Sciences in a Global Culture, vol. 16 (March, 2005).

Representative Articles and Book Chapters Published in the Current Century:

• "Petrarchism" and "Humanist Poetics" in The Cambridge History of Literary  Criticism, ed. Glyn Norton (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. P, 2000),  pp. 91-97, 119-26.
• "Les autorités pétrarquistes et l'autorisation de Pétrarque" in Dynamique d'une expansion culturelle, ed. Pierre Blanc (Paris: Champion, 2001), pp. 53-62.
• "Is That a Man in Her Dress? Cuckoldry and Transvestism in Renaissance Texts," in Opening the Borders, ed. Peter Herman (Newark: Univ. of Delaware P, 2000), pp. 27-53.
• "Les totems pour la défense et quelques illustrations du tabou" in Sans Aultre guide: Etudes sur la Renaissance, ed. Raymond La Charité (Paris: Klinksieck, 2000), pp. 27-38.
• "Framing the Authentic Petrarch," in Approaches to Teaching Shorter Elizabethan Poetry, ed. Anne Lake Prescott (New York: MLA, 2000), pp. 85-88.
• "Spenser's Squire's Literary History," in Worldmaking Spenser, ed. Patrick Cheney (Lexington: Univ. of Kentucky P, 2000), pp. 45-62.
• "Versions of a Career: Petrarch and His Commentators," in European Literary Careers, ed. Frederick de Armas (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto P, 2002), pp. 146-64.
• “Citing Petrarch in Naples: The Politics of Commentary in Cariteo’s Endimione, “ Renaissance Quarterly 55 (2002): 1-26.
• “Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella,” in Early Modern English Poetry: A Critical Companion, ed. Andrew Hadfield (New York: Oxford Univ. P, 2006), pp. 70-79
• “Les langues des hommes sont pleine de tromperies: Shakespeare, French Poetry, and Alien Tongues,” in Textual Conversations in the Renaissance, ed. Zachary Lesser (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 77-97.
• “Petrarca come ‘Homo Economicus’: Prospettivi del Petrarchismo nel Ronsard e Shakespeare” (in Italian), in Un modello rinascimentale di poesia per l’Europa, a cura di Gian Mario Anselmi (Rome: Bulzoni, 2006), pp. 297-309.
• “Shakespeare and the Development of English Poetry,” in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s Poetry, ed. Patrick Cheney (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007), pp. 14-33.
• “The Economy of Invective: De sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia” in Petrarch: A Guide to the Complete Works, ed. Victoria Kirkham (U Chicago P, 2009), pp. 263-76.
• “European Beginnings and Transmissions” in The Cambridge History of the Sonnet, ed. A.D. Cousins (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011), pp. 14-31.
• “Petrarchism” and “Neo-Latin Poetry,” The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Stephen Cushman and Roland Greene (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2012), pp. 791-93 and 1030-32.
• “Ronsard: Passions and Privations of a Poet,” in Poésie italienne de la Renaissance, ed. Stefano Jossa, Italique (Université de Genève), 14 (2011): 59-74.
• “European Petrarchism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Petrarch, ed. Albert Ascoli (Cambridge UP, 2015), pp. 210-20.
• “Writing as a Pro: Gaspara Stampa and the Men in Her Rime,” Gaspara Stampa in the Canon of European Poetry, ed. Aileen Feng (Ashgate, 2015), pp. 137-54.
• “Shakespeare and the Bible, Literature and Testaments,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Bible and Literature, ed. Calum Carmichael (Cambridge UP), in progress.
• “New Economic Criticism,” in Blackwell Companion to Renaissance Literature, ed. Catherine Bates (Oxford: Blackwell P), in progress.
• "Petrarchism in Early Modern England," in Early Modern English Poetics, ed Rémi Vuillemin (Manchester University Press), in progress.

In the news

• Kennedy recognized by Renaissance Society of America
• Podcast examines the waterways of Venice
• Waterways of Venice
• MLA awards honorable mention to book by William Kennedy
• Comparative literature department celebrates 50 years