Searching vast cosmic communities like real estate agents rifling through listings, Cornell astronomers now hunt through time and space for habitable exoplanets – planets beyond our own solar system – looking at planets flourishing in old star, red giant neighborhoods.Astronomers search for these promising worlds by looking for the “habitable zone,” the region around a star in which water on a planet’s surface is liquid and signs of life can be remotely detected by telescopes.
Hirokazu Miyazaki, professor of anthropology and director of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, is the program chair for this year’s Society for Cultural Anthropology biennial meeting at Cornell May 13-14.
The Cornell Council for the Arts (CCA) has awarded grants supporting 40 projects, many involving students and faculty in the College of Arts & Sciences, to be presented or performed during the 2016-17 academic year.
When she was growing up in Harlem, Ginger So ’79 walked 10 blocks each way once a week to borrow books from the public library.In those books, she saw photographs of an America she did not know – an America of houses with white picket fences – and images of other countries. Her reading made her want to travel, so she followed the advice of her mother and studied hard, gained entrance to a good high school and later was admitted to Cornell.
At a May 2 reception and award presentation, the first cohort of Ewing Family Service Award recipients presented updates on their projects to 40 students, faculty, staff and members of the Ewing Family.Established in fall 2015 to support Cornell’s commitment to innovation in community engagement, the Ewing Family Service Award provides up to $2,000 per project to foster student, faculty or staff leadership and social responsibility in the Cornell campus community.
Professor of performing and media arts Bruce Levitt is the inaugural recipient of Cornell’s Engaged Scholar Prize, Vice Provost Judith Appleton announced May 11.
Alex Hayes, assistant professor of astronomy, will receive the 2016 Zeldovich Medal, in Commission B (planets) from COSPAR (Committee on Space Research for the International Council of Science) and the Russian Academy of Sciences. The award is given to young scientists who have demonstrated excellence and achievement in their field of research.Hayes will be presented with the award at the inaugural ceremony of the 41st COSPAR Scientific Assembly on August 1 in Istanbul, Turkey.
Identity goes far beyond belonging to a particular group according to race, religion or sexual orientation, faculty say, and it's more complicated today than ever before.
Jonathan Boyarin, the Hendrix Director of Jewish Studies, the Diann G. and Thomas A. Mann Professor of Modern Jewish Studies and professor of anthropology, has been elected a Fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research (AAJR). The AAJR was founded in 1919 and includes about one hundred of the most eminent scholars of Jewish Studies in North America.
Migration is one of the major forces shaping the world today, with more than 60 million displaced people.“Never in history have we seen this many simultaneous displacements across the globe and these people are not going home any time soon,” says Mostafa Minawi, assistant professor of history and Himan Brown Sesquicentennial Faculty Fellow. “This is a global population redistribution and it will hit us whether we like it or not.”
Artists today engage with a world very different from that of their predecessors: globally connected, technologically advanced and highly diverse. In the last fifty years the Western canon has been displaced as the benchmark for “good” and worthwhile art, opening the door to works intended to challenge viewers, rather than simply to aesthetically please.
