Phi Beta Kappa celebrates 135th induction

At a ceremony including family and friends, Cornell inducted its 2017 class of Phi Beta Kappa students March 1, juniors and seniors whose grades are at the top of their class.

Ichion Hutchinson

Music and poetry intersect in March 18 concert

The award-winning poetry of Ishion Hutchinson, set to music by graduate student composers, will be featured in the Sat., March 18 concert in Barnes Hall, “Songs of the Land: Poems of Ishion Hutchinson.”

Poet Langston Hughes

Art Is Not a Profit Industry. That's Why We Need the NEA

Poet Langston Hughes, courtesy Library of CongressJoanie Mackowski, associate professor of English, writes in this Time opinion piece that our country needs to support the National Endowment for the Arts not because of its financial benefits, though that's the argument some arts organizations are encouraging their constituents to use with members of Congress.

Ezra Cornell statue on the quad

Mellon grant supports open access to humanities texts

For the second year in a row, Cornell University Press has been awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)/Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant worth nearly $100,000 to fund the open access initiative, Cornell Open.“This is exciting news for the press and for the university,” said Laura Spitz, Cornell’s vice provost for international affairs. “Open access to humanities scholarship aligns with the mission of a global and engaged Cornell.”

Female Black student listening to talk

Scholars, artists convene to discuss black girls, women

In politics and activism, popular culture and social media, “black girls and women are hyper-visible,” according to associate professor of Africana studies Oneka LaBennett. They are portrayed “as ‘at risk’ and as cultural trendsetters, yet simultaneously rendered invisible in public policy discourses.”

Lyrae N. Van Clief-Stefanon

Interwoven - coal, colors, and other stories

“I write in books, not in individual poems,” says poet Lyrae N. Van Clief-Stefanon, English. “A group of poems that make up a book will have an over-arching through line, all these threads that I’m holding together.”

Attendees of the conference

Mellon-Mays fellows share research at Cornell conference

Cornell hosted students from five other universities for the annual Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Mid-Atlantic Regional Conference April 21-22 on campus.During the conference, students presented formal papers about their research, offered feedback to fellow students and heard from a keynote speaker. This year’s speaker was Krista Thompson, the Weinberg College Board of Visitors Professor in the Department of Art History at Northwestern University.

Students in gallery looking at installation

Critique, compassion are 'Side by Side' in Biennial artist's work

Race. Class. Determination. The tension and conflict within social systems.A point of contact between them is empathy. This is the context of “Side by Side,” a sculptural installation by multimedia artist and educator Pepón Osorio, on display until May 26 in Rand Hall.

Klarman Hall

Nafissa Thompson-Spires

Nafissa Thompson-Spiresis the author of the story collectionHeads of the Colored People, which won the 2019 PEN Open Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, The Hurston/Wright Award for Fiction, and a Whiting Award. It was also long-listed for the 2018 National Book Award and the Aspen Words Literary Prize, nominated for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, and was a finalist for theKirkusPrize. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming inThe Paris Review Daily,Dissent,The Root,Buzzfeed Books,The White Review,The Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal, and other publications. She earned a PhD in English from Vanderbilt University and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and currently serves as the Richards Family Assistant Professor at Cornell University.

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Klarman Hall

Derrick R. Spires

Derrick R. Spires is Associate Professor of Literatures in English and affiliate faculty in American Studies, Visual Studies, and Media Studies. He specializes in early African American and American print culture, citizenship studies, and African American intellectual history. His first book, The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), traces the parallel development of early black print culture and legal and cultural understandings of U.S. citizenship. Considering a variety of texts by both canonical and lesser-known authors, Practice demonstrates how black writers articulated an expansive, practice-based theory of citizenship. Practice won the Modern Language Association Prize for First Book, the Bibliographical Society/St. Louis Mercantile Library Prize and the M/MLA Book Prize and was a finalist for the Library Company of Philadelphia’s First Book Prize. He has also edited a special issue of American Literary History dedicated to “Genealogies of Black Modernity” (Winter 2020). His work on early African American politics and print culture appears or is forthcoming in African American Review, American Literary History, and edited collections on early African American print culture, time and American literature, and the Colored Conventions movement. He is working on a second book, Serial Blackness: Periodical Literature and Early African American Literary Histories in the Long Nineteenth Century, that takes up seriality as both the core of early African American literary history and a heuristic for understanding blackness in the long nineteenth century.

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