
A&S Klarman Fellows program renewed and expanded
Thanks to additional significant support from Seth Klarman ’79 and Beth Schultz Klarman, the Klarman Postdoctoral Fellowship program has been expanded to support 10 fellows per cohort.
Read MoreThe Cornell Department of Literatures in English has a long history of critical and methodological openness. From the early 20th century, it has embraced new approaches to literary study, while maintaining traditional strengths. Supported by a series of libraries and collections that are world-renowned in many fields, Cornell English is the largest humanities department at Cornell University.
Thanks to additional significant support from Seth Klarman ’79 and Beth Schultz Klarman, the Klarman Postdoctoral Fellowship program has been expanded to support 10 fellows per cohort.
Read MoreNovelist Victor LaValle ’94, BA ’95, has recently expanded his eerie narrative voice into Marvel Comics—and Apple TV
Read MoreAlumna perspective: "As a student, I never spent much time downtown—but in my 20s, vacationing in the Finger Lakes proved unexpectedly meaningful."
Read MoreFrom the clock tower to Risley and beyond, Grace Elmore ’25 finds inspiration in Cornell’s eclectic architectural styles
Read MoreSamantha Kathryn O’Brien turns the intimidation of an MFA into empowerment as she works on the beginnings of her novel. She is discovering her voice as she grapples with writing fiction about sex work in a non-polemical way.
Read MoreAishvarya Arora is an avid researcher, reader, and writer. They're also an enthusiast for graphic novels as they create instructive, visual images in the world of literature and language!
Read MorePretaa, inspired by the Latin meaning ‘to be ready,’ draws upon Madon's Cornell English degree, his Wharton MBA, his military training and his technical expertise.
Read MoreMcClane remembers the photograph that drew him to Cornell, and how the University has changed since his first day in 1969.
Read MoreWhat do you value about your liberal arts education?
I love that at a university like Cornell there is a class about literally anything you could ever want to learn. At first, I was a bit wary about the English major because I worried I would learn about dead white guys for four years. Despite the pre-1800 requirement, that absolutely hasn't been the case, and because of the wide variety of opportunities and classes at Cornell I've been able to tailor my education to my own interests and build a knowledge of Black artists and writers who, like myself, use their work to fight fight FIGHT against the world around them.
If you were to offer advice to an incoming first year student, what would you say?
Get involved in the community. There are amazing activists and artists right downtown that many Cornell students never interact with. Don't get trapped in the bubble; go downtown, organize, build community. There are so many learning opportunities for you here outside of class and you have got to take advantage of them.
What do you value about your liberal arts education?
What I value most about my liberal arts education is its interdisciplinary nature. Being able to recognize and expand on the connections between coursework in a variety of subjects is an incredibly important skill. Not only has the interdisciplinary nature of my studies allowed me to examine issues from a multitude of perspectives, though: it has also helped me to better internalize the information I am learning, and it has made my work that much more interesting and rewarding. It’s become a sort of game to see how I can connect all my classes each semester. During my junior spring, for example, I remember connecting my readings on Kant and Aristotle in my Literature as Moral Inquiry class to similar pieces we were reading in my Topics in Social and Political Philosophy class, which in turn related to readings assigned in the Intergroup Dialogue Project section on race that I co-facilitated. That summer, I took a class on international development from a feminist perspective, and we discussed the concept of third world feminisms; the seminal text on the subject was written by the wife of my Literature as Moral Inquiry professor.
"She thought of a sunrise over the library slope of Cornell University that nobody out on it had seen because the slope faces west."
— Thomas Pynchon