old photos of a woman and young boy

Library immersions deepen student research

A doctoral student researching Black life in the U.S. after the abolition of slavery, Victoria Baugh was fascinated by the hundreds of studio portraits in the Loewentheil Collection of African-American Photography at Cornell University Library.

The cover of Trans Historical showing a person with long red hair and a mustache.

New edited volume explores plurality of gender experiences

“The book is a collection of essays about trans, nonbinary and gender-complicated people across a broad geographic range, from Poland to France to early Colonial America, going all the way back to Byzantine and Ancient Roman writings.”

rally

FGSS/LGBT programs plan yearlong anniversary celebration

Faculty, staff, students and alumni are planning a series of events to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Cornell’s women’s studies program, now Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies (FGSS), as well as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) activism and advocacy on campus.

Nikole Hannah-Jones

Creator of 1619 Project to give Kops Lecture

Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Pulitzer Prize-winning creator of the 1619 Project and a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine, will give the Daniel W. Kops Freedom of the Press Lecture on Sept. 9 at 5 p.m.

man dancing

Festival takes listeners on musical pilgrimage around Arts Quad

The Resounds Festival kicks off a yearlong project focused on innovation in acoustic instruments and includes installations at the Johnson Museum and concerts each day beginning at 4 p.m. that take listeners on a pilgrimage to various locations around the Arts Quad.

Klarman Hall

Samantha Zacher

Samantha Zacher received her PhD from the University of Toronto, and taught at Vassar College before joining the English Department and Medieval Studies Program at Cornell. Her research and teaching interests include Old and Middle English literature, with a special interest in poetry, sermons, and biblical literature. She is the author of Preaching the Converted: the Style and Rhetoric of the Vercelli Book Homilies (University of Toronto Press, 2009), and Rewriting the Old Testament in Anglo-Saxon Verse: Becoming the Chosen People (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). She has also published two collections of essays: New Readings in the Vercelli Book, co-edited with Andy Orchard (University of Toronto Press, 2009), and A Companion to British Literature, 4 volumes, co-edited with Robert DeMaria, Jr. and Hesok Chang (Wiley-Blackwell, 2014). Samantha is currently preparing a new volume of essays for publication, entitled Imagining the Jew in Anglo-Saxon Literature and Culture (University of Toronto Press). Her recent research investigates the treatment of Jews in medieval literature and culture, and the role of the animal in medieval literature and jurisdiction.

/samantha-zacher
Klarman Hall

Helena María Viramontes

Helena María Viramontes is the author of The Moths and Other Stories and two novels: Under the Feet of Jesus and Their Dogs Came With Them. She has also co-edited with Maria Herrera Sobek, two collections: Chicana (W)Rites: On Word and Film and Chicana Creativity and Criticism. A recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the John Dos Passos Award for Literature and a United States Artist Fellowship, her short stories and essays have been widely anthologized and her writings have been adopted for classroom use and university study. Her work is the subject of a critical reader titled Rebozos De Palabras, edited by Gabrielle Gutierrez y Muhs and published by the University of Arizona Press. A community organizer and former coordinator of the Los Angeles Latino Writers Association, she is a frequent reader and lecturer in the U.S. and internationally. Currently she is completing a draft of her third novel, The Cemetery Boys.

/helena-maria-viramontes
Klarman Hall

Amy Villarejo

Amy Villarejo has published widely in cinema and media studies, with research on feminist and queer media, documentary film, Brazilian cinema, Indian cinema, American television, critical theory, and cultural studies.  Her first book, Lesbian Rule:  Cultural Criticism and the Value of Desire (Duke University Press) won the Katherine Singer Kovacs award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies for best book in the field in 2003.  She has written on Hollywood (Queen Christina, from BFI Publishing) and on television, in her most recent monograph Ethereal Queer:  Television, Historicity, Desire (Duke University Press).  Her work intersects with cultural studies, and, with co-editor Matthew Tinkcom, she has edited a volume exploring that intersection entitled Keyframes (Routledge).  With Jordana Rosenberg, she is co-editor of a special issue of the journal GLQ on “Queer Studies and the Crises of Capitalism.”  For students and general readers interested in cinema and media, she is the author of Film Studies:  The Basics (Routledge) and Film Studies:  A Global Introduction.  Her articles have appeared in journals such as Film Quarterly, Cinema Journal, New German Critique, Social Text, and numerous anthologies and edited collections.  She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in cinema and media, feminist theory, queer theory, urbanism, television, critical and literary theory, and political art.

/amy-villarejo
Klarman Hall

Stephanie Vaughn

Stephanie Vaughn is the author of Sweet Talk (published as Able Baker Charlie Dog in UK editions, and as Alfa Bravo Charlie Delta in Spanish-language editions). Sweet Talk won the Southern Review award for fiction. She is the author of an introduction to a an edition of Willa Cather's My Ántonia. She graduated from The Ohio State University and the University of Iowa, and did post-graduate work at Stanford University as a Stegner Fellow. She came to Cornell as both a Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow and as an Assistant Professor of English. She now is Professor of English and a Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow at Cornell.

/stephanie-vaughn
Klarman Hall

Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon

Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon is the author of Open Interval, a 2009 finalist for the National Book Award and the LA Times Book Prize, and Black Swan, winner of the 2001 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, as well as the chapbooks Leading with a Naked Body with Leela Chantrelle and Poems in Conversation and a Conversation with Elizabeth Alexander. She has been awarded fellowships from Cave Canem, the Lannan Foundation, and Civitella Ranieri. She has written plays and lyrics for The Cherry, an Ithaca arts collective, and in 2018, her work was featured in Courage Everywhere, celebrating women’s suffrage and the fight for political equality, at National Theatre London.

/lyrae-van-clief-stefanon

Literatures in English

Literatures in English
Klarman Hall

Anna Shechtman

Anna Shechtman is an Assistant Professor of Literatures in English, specializing in media studies and American literature. She is writing a two-volume history of the “media” and “data” concepts in the United States. The first examines the social formations and technologies of production that have allowed media to incorporate—and perhaps even supersede—the categories of art, literature, communication, and culture in the second half of the 20th century. The second challenges the notion that “data” has always been the proprietary domain of social scientists, improperly imported into the study of literature and history by digital humanists.

/anna-shechtman
Klarman Hall

Elizabeth F. Evans

I work on British and Anglophone literature with special attention to modernism, visuality, and mobility. I am the author of Threshold Modernism: New Public Women and the Literary Spaces of Imperial London (Cambridge University Press, 2019), which examines gendered identities and transitional spaces in British and colonial narratives of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this book, I argue that writing of the era (from B. M. Malabari to Virginia Woolf) was shaped by widespread debates about women’s increasing public presence as workers and pleasure-seekers in the city. I continue my study of gender, race, and urban space in two ongoing projects. One examines the role of British urban green spaces in the work of early twentieth-century migrants of color. The other, carried out in partnership with the NEH-sponsored Textual Geographies project, uses computational methods to map the past two centuries of British cultural geography across a corpus of over 20,000 digitized literary texts.

/elizabeth-f-evans
Klarman Hall

Neil H. Hertz

Neil Hertz studied at Amherst and Harvard before coming to Cornell in 1961. He taught courses on autobiographical writing, on writing about cities, on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature, focusing on the notion of the sublime, and on psychoanalysis. In 1983 he moved to Johns Hopkins, where he taught similar courses, tilting the emphasis more towards urban literature. He retired in 2005, moved back to Ithaca in 2010, and has taught, since then, for a couple of semesters in the program Bard College has set up in Palestine in collaboration with Al Quds University, just outside Jerusalem in the Occupied Territories.

/neil-h-hertz
Top