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The four faculty teams that received funding support through the President’s Visioning Committee on Cornell in New York City have conducted cross-campus workshops, hosted interdisciplinary talks and expanded their outreach as they move towards presenting final results in the fall.
A Media Studies Conference, “Media Objects,” will take place at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art next fall, postponed from this spring. With a focus on the distinctive approaches to the study of media, the conference will host speakers from a wide variety of disciplines.
"There is something cathartic about smashing rocks on a hillside, miles away from civilization, in pursuit of fossils. Each swing of the hand-pick uncovers part of a mystery. A crack forms, then deepens, and suddenly the rock splits open—to reveal a fossil or reveal nothing. A fossil is set aside. An empty rock is tossed down the hillside. The process repeats—onto the next rock."
A new system of requirements is simplifying the process for incoming students this fall in the College of Arts & Sciences. Many students find that the requirements expand their worldview and introduce them to topics and concepts they would not have encountered otherwise.
An Ithaca theatre company is creating a live-streamed performance of a new work from six international playwrights, including a Cornell professor. The piece will premiere May 1.
In his poetry, fiction and essays, and Mukoma Wa Ngugi, associate professor of English, asks why tensions endure between Africans and African Americans despite a history of common political struggle. In this Cornell Research article, he talks about his first encounters with what it meant to be Black in the United States——in his father’s library in Kenya, reading James Baldwin and Richard Wright and issues of Ebony and Jet.
Christine “Xine” Yao, M.A. '13, Ph.D. '16, was named one of the 2020 BBC Radio 3/AHRC New Generation Thinkers. The program, now in its 10th year, affords early career academics a platform to share their ideas via BBC Radio 3 and other outlets. “It is an amazing opportunity to work with the BBC to share my expertise and hopefully provoke different ways of understanding the world,” Yao said.
Molly O’Toole ’09 was part of the “This American Life” reporting team that produced the November 2019 episode “The Out Crowd.”
Destiny Malloy ’21 had a sweet internship lined up this summer near New York City, working in data analytics at L’Oreal. After COVID-19, it was converted to unpaid and remote. Adam Spaulding-Astudillo ’20 was in interviews for a job using his degree in ecology and evolutionary biology, but companies stopped hiring.
“I think I failed as an English teacher, but it turned out I was a pretty good beer teacher.”
Making art addresses “the emotions of the times,” said Helena Maria Viramontes, director of the Creative Writing Program. “We should ‘speak, so that we can heal.’”
Students will focus on questions of the rural as well as theories, methods and practices of public humanities and community-engaged scholarship.
"It’s a perfect time to start this because college grads have been left with canceled jobs and high school students are trying to figure out what to do when school is out.”
“Our instructors have shown extraordinary dedication and leadership this year, teaching, advising and inspiring our students despite unprecedented challenges.”
Jon McKenzie is working with schools on media resources that will serve teachers statewide.
Austin Bunn, associate professor and Koenig Jacobson Sesquicentennial Fellow in the Department of Performing & Media Arts, will take over leadership of the Milstein Program in Technology and Humanity July 1. The program, launched in 2017, offers a unique multidisciplinary curriculum to a cohort of 100 students, 25 in each class.
Juneteenth—June 19, 1865— marks the day when the last collective of enslaved people heard the Emancipation Proclamation in Galveston, TX, a full two years after Abraham Lincoln delivered it.
The Graduate School Office of Inclusion and Student Engagement (OISE) and the Graduate and Professional Student Diversity Council presented the 2020 Distinguished Awards on June 12 at the Graduate Diversity and Inclusion Awards and Recognition Celebration, held over Zoom.
While they say more needs to be done to secure permanent protected status for “Dreamers,” some Cornell faculty say they’re hopeful about the recent Supreme Court ruling, which ruled that the Trump administration’s move to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program in 2017 was unlawful.
Associate Professor
Director of Graduate Teaching
American Studies Program, Asian American Studies Program, Literatures in English
Professor
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Studies Program, Literatures in English
Associate Professor
Placement Director
American Studies Program, Literatures in English
At this year’s Invitational Lecture for the Society for the Humanities, “Defining Democracy: How Black Print Culture Shaped America, Then and Now,” associate professor of literatures in English Derrick Spires will counter the racist notion that little to no Black print culture existed before the Civil War.