“Courtly Love” a new episode of the “What Makes Us Human” podcast series, explains how the invention of courtly love helped prevent warfare in medieval Europe. The podcast’s third season -- "What Do We Know about Love?" -- showcases the newest thinking across academic disciplines about the relationship between humans and love.“One of the things that has always fascinated me is the claim I’d often…
The black, faux-leather book cover declares “The American Fraternity,” and nothing else. The title page reads only “Ritual of Initiation.”“The American Fraternity” is an almost verbatim reprint of a University of California, Berkeley, fraternity’s secret ritual manual, interspersed with photos Andrew Moisey took at the fraternity over seven years. The book is intended to represent the living…
“Buffalo,” said Jonathan Tenney eight times in a row to the crowded room in White Hall. The participants in the Near Eastern Studies (NES) monthly undergraduate lunch laughed as he told them the ancient Sumerians would have had no trouble understanding the sentence.The eight-buffalo sentence, though grammatically correct in English, is difficult to interpret, said Tenney, assistant professor of…
“Love Science” a new episode of the “What Makes Us Human” podcast series, explores the behavioral, psychological, and neural components of love -- and its loss.The podcast’s third season -- "What Do We Know about Love?" -- showcases the newest thinking across academic disciplines about the relationship between humans and love. The series is produced by the College of Arts and Sciences in…
Nov. 9 would have been Carl Sagan’s 84th birthday. Cornell’s Carl Sagan Institute is honoring the day by releasing the “lost” lecture Sagan gave in 1994 at the symposium in honor of his 60th birthday, “The Age of Exploration.” Anne Druyan referred to the lecture as her late husband’s “finest talk” during Cornell’s 2017 celebration of the Voyager mission’s 40th anniversary.
Linda…
Nilay Yapici, assistant professor of neurobiology and behavior, has received a 2018 Glenn Foundation for Medical Research and AFAR Research Grants for Junior Faculty from the American Federation for Aging Research (AFAR). The grant provides an early career investigator with up to $100,000 for one to two years to support research focused on aging processes and age-related diseases.The grant will…
Humans share 98.8 percent of their DNA – as well as tool use and systems of communication – with bonobos and chimpanzees. Yet human activity threatens these “next of kin” great apes with extinction. In “Apes and Sustainability,” a forum on Nov. 15, activists, scholars, scientists and humanists will explore new perspectives on preserving nonhuman great apes in sustainable ways. The event will be…
Drawing a picture of wonder with words, images and animations, Ray Jayawardhana shared his enthusiasm for astronomy’s “extraordinary age of discovery” with Cornell’s Trustee Council in a keynote address at the Annual Meeting Nov. 2.Jayawardhana, the Harold Tanner Dean of Arts and Sciences and professor of astronomy, reminded the packed Alice Statler Auditorium that just about 25 years ago only…
“Topophilia,” a new episode of the “What Makes Us Human” podcast series, examines what motivates people to care for Earth’s creatures and its places.
The podcast’s third season -- "What Do We Know about Love?" -- showcases the newest thinking across academic disciplines about the relationship between humans and love. The series is produced by the College of Arts and Sciences in…
When students first walk into Julia Chang’s classes, they often do a double take. “I don’t think students are accustomed to having a Korean-American Spanish professor,” says Chang, assistant professor of Hispanic studies in the College of Arts & Sciences’ Department of Romance Studies.Her diverse research interests include gender and sexuality studies, medicine, and history and literature.The…
When the tantalizing scent of chocolate chip cookies wafts by, how does your mind know what it means? Nobel laureate Richard Axel will explain in his talk, “Scents and Sensibility: Representations of the Olfactory World in the Brain,” in Cornell’s annual Ef Racker Lecture in Biology and Medicine Thursday, Nov. 15, at 8 p.m. in Call Alumni Auditorium, Kennedy Hall. A reception will follow in…
“Product Love,” a new episode of the “What Makes Us Human” podcast series, explores why consumers feel love for certain products or brands.The podcast’s third season -- "What Do We Know about Love?" -- showcases the newest thinking across academic disciplines about the relationship between humans and love. The series is produced by the College of Arts and Sciences in collaboration with the…
Chemist Geoffrey Coates will be part of the $120 million, five-year second phase of the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research (JCESR), an interdisciplinary project aimed at realizing next-generation batteries.Coates and his team will investigate the polymerics that go into batteries.“By designing and building new polymers with molecular precision, we will enablenew batteries that charge faster…
Ray Jayawardhana, the Harold Tanner Dean of Arts & Sciences and professor of astronomy, has been awarded the 2018 Dwight Nicholson Medal for Outreach by the American Physical Society (APS). The award recognizes the humanitarian aspect of physics and physicists created through public lectures and public media, teaching, research, or science related activities. Jayawardhana will deliver an…
“Colonial Love,” a new episode of the “What Makes Us Human” podcast series, examines what love meant for colonial India’s mixed-race families.The podcast’s third season -- "What Do We Know about Love?" -- showcases the newest thinking across academic disciplines about the relationship between humans and love. The series is produced by the College of Arts and Sciences in collaboration with the…
A wave of democratization swept over the African continent in the 1990s. Has it made a difference in the welfare of individuals in sub-Saharan African nations? And why hasn’t the shift to multiparty elections led to profound change in African governance, given the region’s rapidly changing economics and urbanization?In the first comprehensive comparative analysis of African elections in the last…
Alison Van Dyke, retired senior lecturer of performing and media arts and an integral part of the Cornell Prison Education Program, died in London on Oct. 5, while on a trip to Spain, France and England. She was 79.In an email to faculty, performing and media arts professors Sara Warner and Amy Villarejo wrote that Van Dyke’s “grace, beauty, and elegance inspired us all, as did her care for the…
“Love Transformed,” a new episode of the “What Makes Us Human” podcast series, explores the complex relationship between love, early Christianity, and contemporary wedding practice.The podcast’s third season -- "What Do We Know about Love?" -- showcases the newest thinking across academic disciplines about the relationship between humans and love. The series is produced by the College of Arts and…
The circle of chairs at the inaugural meeting of The Future is Feminist: A Feminist Theory Book Club on Sept. 23 kept getting bigger and bigger as more people arrived, until the Buffalo Street Books Annex was full. Many brought copies of “How We Get Free” by Keeanga Yamatta-Taylor, distributed free to the first 25 people who signed up, but with approximately 40 people attending, copies ran out…
We like to think of love as a quintessentially human emotion. There’s love for family and passionate romantic love; a deeply spiritual love for God and for country. Many believe that our dogs love us, and too many of us, it seems, love our possessions. How does recent research shed light on what we know about humans and love?The new season of the “What Makes Us Human” podcast and essay series…
Yellow fever, malaria, tetanus – in the West Indies and Africa, disease often felled more soldiers of the 18th century British Empire than battle. Without the benefit of germ theory, British doctors explained place-specific illness by the theory of “seasoning” (what later became known as acclimatization). As historian Suman Seth explains in his new book, “Difference and Disease: Medicine, Race,…
Image: Artist's concept of the completed Giant Magellan Telescope.Astronomer Nikole Lewis has been selected as co-convener of the Extrasolar Planetary Systems Key Science Program development for the US Extremely Large Telescope effort. She will co-lead a team of 75 astronomers in developing programs that highlight the scientific potential of these large telescopes for the study of exoplanetary…
The off-Broadway world premiere of “The Winning Side,” a new play by James Wallert, will feature Godfrey L. Simmons, Jr., senior lecturer in the Department of Performing & Media Arts, as Major Taggert. The show opens Oct. 8, with a limited run through Oct. 28.Based on the true story of Wernher von Braun, chief rocket engineer for Hitler’s Third Reich and one of the fathers of the United…
Image: Royal Solomon Islands Police Force female officers march down the main street of Honiara on International Women’s Day, 8 March 2010. Credit: Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade Sabrina Karim, assistant professor of government, and her co-author Kyle Beardsley, Duke University, have been awarded the 2018 Conflict Processes Section Best Book Award from the American Political Sciences…
The mysteries of quantum computing will be explained by physicist Shoucheng Zhang, a lead researcher in the field, in the fall Hans Bethe Lecture on Wed., Sept. 26 at 7:30 p.m. in Schwartz Auditorium, Rockefeller Hall. His talk will focus on a special type of fundamental particles -- Majorana Fermions -- and their application to quantum computing. “Majorana Fermions are like the Cheshire Cat…
Women who breastfeed their first child for five months or longer are more likely to have three or more children, and less likely to have only one child, than women who breastfeed for shorter durations or not at all.In “Intensive Parenting: Fertility and Breastfeeding Duration in the United States,” published in the journal Demography Sept. 19, co-authors Vida Maralani and Samuel Stabler (Hunter…
So many students attended the semester’s first Wednesday Lunch Series on Aug. 29, sponsored by the Asian American Studies Program (AASP) and the Asian and Asian American Center, that some of them ended up standing. But no one seemed to mind as they feasted on samosas, two kinds of curry, and fluffy basmati rice. The free lunch series on the fourth floor of Rockefeller Hall features informal…
Numerous artists have been launched into chart-topping, award-winning careers by Mathew Knowles, including both his daughters, Beyoncé and Solange. On Thursday, Sept. 27, Knowles will discuss his first two books, “The DNA of Achievers” and “Racism From the Eyes of a Child,” in a panel at 4:30 p.m. in the Africana Studies and Research Center. A reception will follow. The event is free, and the…
Linguist and A.D. White Professor-at-Large John Rickford will address race, class and speech in a series of campus events Sept. 17-21 that include public talks and a screening of his 2017 film, “Talking Black in America.”
On Tuesday, Sept. 18, at 4:30 p.m., Rickford will speak on “Class and Race in the Analysis of Language Variation and the Struggle for Social Justice,” in Rhodes-Rawling…
Niankai Fu, a postdoctoral researcher in organic chemistry, has been recognized for his “transformative” work by the New York Academy of Sciences and the Blavatnik Family Foundation as a finalist for the 2018 Blavatnik Regional Awards. Fu will receive a $10,000 prize and be honored with the other winners and finalists at the New York Academy of Sciences’ 15th Annual Gala in New York City on…
Timothy Campbell, professor of Romance studies, has been awarded the 2017 American Association for Italian Studies (AAIS) prize in film and other media studies for his recent book, “Technē of Giving: Cinema and the Generous Form of Life.”The book explores how we hold the objects of daily life—and ourselves—in relation to neoliberal forms of gift-giving. In such a milieu of charitable gift-giving…
Some research just has to be done on-site, said historian Mostafa Minawi, and he should know.Thanks to an ANAMED fellowship, he spent seven months in Sudan, Turkey, the United Kingdom, Somalia and Djibouti, tracking down details for his new book on Ottoman/European/Ethiopian competition over the coast of Somalia. The most surprising thing he found, he said, was how alive that history still is in…
Marbled plastic, strange fluorescent colors, irregular forms: Large-format photographs on display in the John Hartell Gallery scale images of tiny plastic toys up 30 times in an exploration of what artists Iftikhar Dadi and Elizabeth Dadi call “tilism.” The word, they explain, means “an inanimate object transformed into its own world.”The “Tilism” exhibition runs through Sept. 26 in the gallery…
Electrons whizzing around each other and humans crammed together at a political rally don’t seem to have much in common, but researchers at Cornell are connecting the dots.They’ve developed a highly accurate mathematical approach to predict the behavior of crowds of living creatures, using Nobel Prize-winning methods originally developed to study large collections of quantum mechanically…
The South has shaped America in subtle, surprising ways. In a new book, “Southern Nation: Congress and White Supremacy After Reconstruction,” three political scientists reveal the influence of Southern white supremacists on national public policy and Congressional procedures, from Reconstruction to the New Deal, and the impact that continues today.David Bateman, assistant professor of government,…
Image: Quilt by Sanford Biggers from the Cartographer’s Conundrum, MASS MoCA, 2012, 77 x 70 inchesIn the fight to end slavery, the 1788 image of a slave ship had an outsized impact on legislators and the public. In her new book, “Committed to Memory: the Art of the Slave Ship Icon,” art historian Cheryl Finley provides the first in-depth look at the influence of the 18th-century slave ship…
“What one cannot compute, one must poetize,” concludes a new interdisciplinary study of poetry, “Poetry and Mind: Tractatus Poetico-Philosophicus,” by Laurent Dubreuil, professor of comparative literature and Romance studies, and a member of the cognitive science program.While not a direct sequel to Dubreuil’s previous book, “The Intellective Space,” his new work shows how we are able to bypass…
Abi Bernard ’19 says her experience is pretty typical at Cornell: she came in with one plan – to major in linguistics – but that changed in her first semester when she took a history course with Professor Russell Rickford that she enjoyed more.“The historical perspective is so powerful,” she says. “What’s happening in the world is not new: Looking at what has happened in the past gives us courage…
The process of attending a show by the Phoenix Players Theatre Group (PPTG) in Auburn (New York) Correctional Facility gives attendees a hint of what it’s like to be a prisoner in the maximum security facility. Processed, stamped, stripped of belongings, herded down long, locked corridors by prison guards, the audience is ushered into a room from which no one can leave until the corrections…
A new technique that combines electricity and chemistry offers a way for pharmaceuticals – including many of the top prescribed medications – to be manufactured in a scalable and sustainable way. The procedure for this technique is outlined in a new paper published Aug. 2 in Nature Protocols.In electrochemical manufacturing, the usual process is to use chemical reagents to provide energy for…
The impact of technology on modernity has been a worldwide phenomenon, but Western art historians tend to ignore the “global south” – less developed countries – as María Fernández explores in her new edited work, “Latin American Modernisms and Technology.”She writes in her introduction: “Traditionally, scholars invoked primitivism, surrealism, and revolution to characterize Latin American art,…
Image: Conceptual installation by Colombian-born sculptor Doris Salcedo at the 2007 exhibition at the Tate Modern in London. Photo credit: Gilberto Dobón, Wikimedia CommonsTweets have inspired social movements, brought down government officials and triggered arrests. Love it or hate it, Twitter wields tremendous power to influence the world and, in the case of Cornell art historian Ananda Cohen…
Image: Jupiter with the albedo plotted over it. Credit: J. Madden/NASAEarthbound detectives rely on fingerprints to solve their cases; now astronomers can do the same, using “light-fingerprints” instead of skin grooves to uncover the mysteries of exoplanets.Cornell researchers have created a reference catalog using calibrated spectra and geometric albedos (the light reflected by a surface) of 19…
For decades, Americans' anger at government has been growing, despite the increase in benefits people receive from that same government. Suzanne Mettler explores this growing gulf between people’s perceptions of government and the actual role it plays in their lives in her latest book, “The Government-Citizen Disconnect.”“It’s like Americans are at war with their own government. How can this be,…
Students in a light-filled classroom in Klarman Hall don’t seem to notice the verdant courtyard just outside the window, so focused are they on exploring the ties between literary criticism and media studies. They’re participants in the six-week DAAD Faculty Summer Seminar for North-American faculty and postdoctoral fellows in the humanities and social sciences. The “Literature-Media-Form”…
Planetary scientist Steve Squyres has been roving Mars – virtually – for 14 years, as principle investigator for the Mars Exploration Rovers. Now a smaller, icier body has caught his eye: Comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko (comet 67P), from which Squyres wants to bring a sample back to Earth. On July 26, Squyres will explain the exciting science behind the proposed Comet Astrobiology Exploration Sample…
Carol Edelman Warrior, assistant professor of English in the College of Arts and Sciences, died July 4 in Montana, surrounded by her family. She was 56.Warrior’s scholarship centered on Native American, First Nations, and Alaska Native literatures, Indigenous philosophies, worldviews and critical theory. She researched the “fearsome” in Indigenous literatures and representation, as well as the…
When talking about famous people, do you say “Darwin” but “Marie Curie?” Dickens but Emily Dickinson? Shakespeare but Jane Austen? What’s in a name – or part of a name – matters.In new research, psychologists found that study participants, on average, were more than twice as likely to call male professionals – even fictional ones – by their last name only, compared to equivalent female…
Why would five Cornell professors decide to teach a class when there was no budget to pay them to do it? If you’re the directors of Cornell’s Behavioral Economics and Decision Research Center (BEDR), you rely on research showing the importance of the class topic: Better Decisions for Life, Love and Money.For the professors, teaching the course was about giving students better tools for decision…
NASA awarded the Distinguished Public Service Medal, its highest honor, to astronomer Yervant Terzian, the Tisch Distinguished Professor Emeritus. The medal was presented by NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine at the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston Aug. 2. “Dr. Yervant Terzian has dedicated his life to education, public service, and scientific research,” reads the NASA statement. “He has used…
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