With pulses of sound through tiny speakers, Cornell physics researchers have clarified the basic nature of a new superconductor. Since it was found to be a superconductor about five years ago, uranium ditelluride has created a lot of buzz in the quantum materials community – and a lot of confusion, with more than a dozen theories about the true nature of its superconducting properties…
A papyrus village survey from the second century B.C.E., included in the new book “Households in Context: Dwelling in Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt,” gives a snapshot of an ancient Egyptian household: A woman named Tharetis who managed a shrine to the goddess Isis lived with her 70-year-old husband and their adult son, a priest. “We know nothing else about this family, but the description is…
Patrick Shanahan for Cornell University
Valzhyna Mort, center, discusses the risks writers take to speak out in many countries, with Suzanne Nossel, left, and David Folkenflik ’91.
Narges Mohammedi, a journalist and women’s rights activist, smuggled her Nobel Peace Prize speech out of an Iranian jail so her 15-year-old twins, whom she has not seen for 10 years, could give it for her.
Suzanne Nossel, CEO of PEN America, a nonprofit whose goal is to raise awareness for the protection of free expression, was at the December 2023 award ceremony in Oslo to witness…
Pietro (Piero) Pucci, an influential classical scholar who spent more than 50 years in the Department of Classics in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S) while maintaining a place among leading intellectuals in Europe, died in Paris on April 7. He was 96.
Remembered as “one of the last of a generation” of classical philologists, Pucci brought fresh insight to ancient texts,…
Chris Kitchen
Wenbo Tang studies memory to help develop therapies for memory-related diseases, and also to improve AI systems
Memories are more than mental records of events, according to neuroscientist Wenbo Tang; for humans, a sense of self is wrapped up in the memories our brains hold–or let go of.
“When a human being loses their memories, it’s not just as simple as losing a record of their life. More importantly, I think, we lose a sense of who we are,” said Tang, a Klarman Postdoctoral Fellow in neurobiology and…
It can be demoralizing for a person to work in a climate of repetitive skepticism and doubt about what they know, a new study shows.
“I’m not talking about healthy, well-founded skepticism. I’m talking about failures-of-exchange when a person is persistently overlooked, unheard, brushed off and explained to,” said Laura Niemi, assistant professor of psychology in the College of Arts…
Patrick Shanahan for Cornell University
Student dancers rehearse an ensemble piece that will be part of the "This table has been a house in the rain" performance April 25-27 at the Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts: (from left) Isabel Padilla, doctoral candidate in performing and media arts; Irene Kim ’24; Taylor Pryor, doctoral candidate in literatures in English; Molly Hudson ’25; and Eliza Salamon ’24.
“The world begins at a kitchen table,” poet laureate Joy Harjo wrote.
Inspired by this line, a kitchen table appears at the center of a live dance performance – which is paired with an exhibition of dance-related visual art – April 25-27 at the Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts. Student-artists will reimagine the Kiplinger Theater in the evening-length work, titled “This table has…
Simon Wheeler/Cornell University
Crew members prepare to film on the set of "Remembering Colin Stall," which took over the Kiplinger Theatre stage for much of the spring 2024 semester: (l-r) Jamen Meistrich, assistant director; Indeana Underhill, director of photography; and script supervisor/on set prop master Victoria Serafini, Ph.D. candidate in Performing & Media Arts
The room on the Kiplinger Theatre stage is paneled in wood and faded yellow-green floral wallpaper. The lamps, beige and dim, barely disturb the shadows dominating every corner. Old family photos march up the wall. A taxidermy deer head gazes down upon a mustard yellow couch draped with a crocheted color-block throw. The stairs, carpeted in gray shag, look as though they might creak under the…
Theda Skocpol, Harvard scholar and A.D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell, will present the public lecture “Rising Threats to U.S. Democracy – Roots and Responses” on April 9 at 4 p.m. in Lewis Auditorium, Goldwin Smith Hall.
The event is part of Skocpol’s A.D. White Professors-at-Large (ADW-PAL) visit April 8-12 and is co-sponsored by the Department of Government. She was elected in…
Chris Kitchen
Shiqi Lin next to a poster in her office depicting 25 years of covers from the Chinese culture magazine Neweekly, which reflect China's social changes during the past quarter century.
Every time Shiqi Lin traveled back home to China on breaks from college in the U.S., she was sure to pack two things: her phone and a sound recorder.
Armed with these digital tools, she would walk through teeming neighborhoods bustling with new construction to archive disappearing landscapes and interview people whose lives had been upended by China’s massive drive toward urbanization.
“I…
The Department of Economics in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S) has received a $500,000 gift in support of conferences and other activities centered around economic theory.
Named in honor of the late Tapan Mitra, longtime professor of economics at Cornell and two-time chair of the department, the Dr. Tapan Mitra Economics Fund continues his passion for top-level collaboration…
Margarita Amalia Suñer, professor of linguistics emerita in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S), died in Ojai, California on Feb. 29 after a long bout with Alzheimer’s disease. She was 82.
An expert in the field of Hispanic theoretical linguistics, Suñer is remembered for her insights, her dedication to students and the personable way she shared her love of language.
“Magui was a…
… and Sciences faculty as an assistant professor in fall 2024. “As we’ve shifted to a service economy marked by gig … spoke with Shechtman about the book. Question: Why is 2024 a relevant time to spell out and claim the history of … together and fracturing them with equal force. The year 2024 seems as good a time as ever to get some clarity about …
Between 2010 and 2013, the southern U.S. and Mexico experienced a historic drought. Said to be the worst in 70 years, the drought hit Mexico particularly hard, causing food and water shortages. Many migrated.
This drought and its effects prompted scholar Carolyn Fornoff, who is from Texas, to think about how artists and filmmakers in Mexico document environmental issues.
In her book …
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Purchase, Isaacson-Draper Foundation Gift, 2005
Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, Mont Blanc Seen from the Massif, Les Aiguilles Rouges, 1874. Watercolor heightened with gouache over traces of graphite on two sheets of blue-gray wove paper (glued together in a vertical seam at left), 11 7/16 × 26 1/8 in. (29 × 66.4 cm).
A prestigious Millard Meiss Publication Fund award will allow a new book by Kelly Presutti, assistant professor of history of art and visual studies in the College of Arts and Sciences, to be published at the highest quality possible.
Her book, “Land into Landscape: Art, Environment, and the Making of Modern France,” is forthcoming from Yale University Press in fall 2024; the grant,…
Daniel A. Baugh, professor emeritus of history, died Feb. 9 at his home in Williamsburg, Virginia. He was 92.
Baugh was an historian of British history who specialized in 18th century maritime, naval and geopolitical issues. He was considered the definitive historian of British naval administration.
Colleagues and former students remember him for the breadth and depth of his expertise, his…
Artificial intelligence applications perform amazing feats – winning at chess, writing college admission essays, passing bar exams – but the complexity of these systems is so large they rival that of nature, with all the challenges that come with understanding nature.
An approach to a better understanding of this computer science puzzle is emerging from an unexpected direction: physics. Lenka…
Hero of Alexandria, ancient Greek mathematician and engineer, is a figure known almost entirely through his writings. We have little of his biography, including his timeframe, but his books on things like pneumatics, pure geometry and catapults have influenced many others through the ages and his principles touch early modern inventions including the player piano and the fire engine.
“The…
Ryan Young/Cornell University
Jake Turner, NASA Hubble/Sagan Postdoctoral Fellow in astronomy in the College of Arts and Sciences and part of the Carl Sagan Institute, is a science adviser on a radio telescope made of four antennas that each extend to eight feet long and are packed into an eight-inch canister for launch.
When Jake Turner was a kid in rural Colorado, he had pictures of all the Apollo lunar missions thumbtacked to his bedroom walls, along with Neil Armstrong’s words, “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”
“I would look at those every day before I went to bed, but I don’t think I ever imagined I would be working on a NASA mission going to the moon,” said Turner, NASA Hubble/Sagan…
In the new book-length work, “School of Instructions: A Poem,” Ishion Hutchinson narrates the psychic and physical terrors of West Indian soldiers volunteering in British regiments in the Middle East during World War I. The book also follows the story of Godspeed, a schoolboy living in 1990s rural Jamaica.
The poem maps Godspeed’s daily experiences – at school, at home, outdoors – onto the…
What language did you study in college?
Chances are, we can guess within three tries: French, Spanish or German. This small handful of popular languages attract most of the enrollments and take most of the educational resources, making instruction in Less Commonly Taught Languages (LCTLs) difficult to sustain, says Angelika Kraemer, director of the Language Resource Center in the College of…
Cornell quantum researchers have detected an elusive phase of matter, called the Bragg glass phase, using large volumes of x-ray data and a new machine learning data analysis tool. The discovery settles a long-standing question of whether this almost–but not quite–ordered state of Bragg glass can exist in real materials.
The paper, “Bragg glass signatures in PdxErTe3 with X-ray diffraction…
Renting an apartment in a major city can be more competitive sport than home tour. Historian Jacob Anbinder has been through the process himself, first in New York City right out of college and later in the Boston area during graduate school.
“You show up every day to look at three or four apartments and you’re there with 20 other people and everyone is holding their application packets with…
Lindsay France/Cornell University
Klarman Postdoctoral Fellows pursue research on a wide variety of topics in the social sciences, sciences and humanities.
Twelve exceptional early career scholars will come to Cornell to pursue research on a wide variety of topics in the social sciences, sciences and humanities as the 2024 cohort of Klarman Postdoctoral Fellows.
This fifth cohort of Klarman Fellows is the largest since the program was launched in 2019 with a major gift from Seth Klarman ’79 and Beth Schultz Klarman. The Klarmans renewed and…
Cornell researchers have taken an important step toward harnessing CRISPR gene editing in “targeted, safe and potent” cancer treatment, according to Ailong Ke, professor of chemistry and chemical biology in the College of Arts and Sciences.
The enzyme CRISPR-Cas3, one of many different CRISPR systems found naturally in the immune systems of bacteria, could ultimately be used to find…
Frank Vassen/Creative Commons license 2.0
Białowieża forest in Poland
Sophie Pinkham, professor of the practice in comparative literature in the College of Arts and Sciences, received the 2023 British Journalism Award for Travel Journalism for her feature “Inside the European forest that geopolitics has turned into a graveyard.” The piece investigates a refugee crisis in Poland’s primeval forest.
“I was excited to see that the award’s judges included a story…
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/Creative Commons license 2.0
Image from a satellite showing a portion of the Middle East
Maps are not objective representations of physical space but are always imbued with social and political meanings, said Cornell sociologist Christine Leuenberger, whose new paper examines the politics at play in maps published in 2020 as part of a peace plan proposed by the Trump Administration.
“Both Palestinian and Israeli experts from across the political spectrum said those maps were …
Informed by expert testimony from Jon Parmenter on the history of treaties between Indigenous nations and the British Crown, the Quebec Superior Court recently stayed federal charges against two Mohawk men – touching off what some Canadian legal experts called “an earthquake in Indigenous rights jurisprudence.”
In 2016, Derek White and Hunter Montour were charged with importing large amounts…
One day in seminar, literature scholar Laura Brown imposed a limit on the discussion: for an entire class on Samuel Richardson’s “Pamela,” no one could mention a human character.
“We found that the book was full of other-than-human beings: objects, structures, spaces, natural phenomena,” said Brown, the John Wendell Anderson Professor of English in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S). …
As a graduate student, Parisa Vaziri was compelled to learn more about the history of enslavement in the Indian Ocean.
“It managed to be simultaneously mysterious, taboo, uninteresting and nonexistent for most people,” said Vaziri, assistant professor of comparative literature and Near Eastern studies in the College of Arts and Sciences.
At the time, Vaziri was studying Iranian films made…
Natasha Raheja/Provided
In Jodhpur, India, computer typists offer services to migrants from stalls at the kutchery, an administrative maze housing hundreds of private vendors and dozens of government offices, pictured here in October 2019.
Pakistani Hindus arrive in the western Indian city of Jodhpur with hopes and plans to migrate, but before they even approach the Foreigners’ Registration Office (FRO), most have to visit a typist.
It’s not a legal requirement, anthropologist Natasha Raheja writes in a new ethnographic study she conducted at this border, but many migrants lack the computer equipment, literacy in English or Hindi …
Chris Kitchen
With new tools he develops, Li detects interacting electrons in specialized two-dimensional (2D) materials
Electron interactions are mysterious, delicate, basic to our understanding of matter – and exponentially complex, says physicist Hongyuan Li.
“Each electron has a charge. They also carry a quantum property called ‘spin.’ These charges and spins can interact with each other, making electron behavior very complicated,” said Li, a Klarman Postdoctoral Fellow in physics in the College of Arts…
Martin Shefter ’64, professor of government emeritus in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S) who was noted for his research on American political parties, New York City politics and the ways changes in international systems shape U.S. institutions, died Nov. 3 in Ithaca. He was 79.
Colleagues remember his curiosity and his impressive fund of knowledge – which he rebuilt almost entirely…
Ryan Young/Cornell University
David Folkenflik ’91 (left) moderates the panel “Free Press in a Free Society: U.S. Newsrooms on the Front Lines” with Suzanne Mettler, the John L. Senior Professor of American Institutions in government, and Sewell Chan, editor-in-chief of The Texas Tribune.
Sewell Chan, editor-in-chief of The Texas Tribune, says he will never forget what happened at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde on May 24, 2022 – or the days that ensued.
During “Free Press in a Free Society: U.S. Newsrooms on the Front Lines” Nov. 14, Chan called the deadly mass shooting “an unspeakable tragedy” but also noted a troubling trend: government officials casting journalists as…
Chris Kitchen
Neil Cholli often goes to the white board in his Uris Hall office to "think things through" while analyzing data on social mobility
As a 19-year-old college student, economist Neil Cholli spent a summer teaching with The Algebra Project in an underprivileged neighborhood of Miami. He’d witnessed “visceral” poverty on trips to India to visit family, “but seeing that kind of poverty and inequality in the U.S., in my own country, was eye opening for me,” he said. “I thought, ‘I have to do something about this.’”
The…
Synthetic polymers are everywhere in our society – from nylon and polyester clothing to Teflon cookware and epoxy glue. At the molecular level, these polymers’ molecules are made of long chains of monomer building blocks, the complexity of which increases functionality in many such materials.
In particular, copolymers, which consist of different types of monomers in the same chain, allow…
David O. Brown/Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University
Works in 'Between Performance and Documentation'
A performance art movement emerged in 1990s China, centered in the Beijing neighborhood known as the East Village. In reaction to massive changes in the urban landscape and to everyday living, artists put on one-time performances – but they also filmed and photographed each other, creating a new layer of art, says art historian Nancy P. Lin.
“Performance is an ephemeral artform that’s…
Lockdowns, cancellations, transitions to online learning: the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted higher education when it spread worldwide in 2020. Three years later, teaching and research continue to be immensely different from pre-pandemic times, according to scholar Debra Castillo.
“We knew COVID-19 was causing major stress for faculty and students, major fractures in our students’ learning, major…
James J. John, professor emeritus of history, died on Oct. 23. He was 95.
A specialist in the study of Latin manuscripts and the history of universities, John was a part of the Cornell community for more than 50 years, teaching medieval intellectual history, historiography and paleography – the study of historical writing systems and manuscripts.
Colleagues and students remember John…
For years, art historian Ana Howie had been intrigued by Anthony van Dyck’s striking 1632 portrait of Italian noblewoman Elena Grimaldi Cattaneo – and was not satisfied with scholarly understandings of the work.
“It is an incredibly powerful painting to see in real life as it is over life-size, and I felt there was so much more to say about its composition, messaging and links to the histories…
Provided
The collaborators who created the concert "Riding the Currents of the Wilding Wind": (seated l-r) playwright Virginia Grise, novelist Helena María Viramontes, and composer Martha Gonzalez. Standing is Kendra Ware, the production's director.
The legacy of Professor Helena María Viramontes, novelist and foundational voice in Chicana feminism, will be honored in “Lest Silence Be Destructive,” a two-day celebration of Chicana feminism and Viramonte’s creative work and influence, Oct. 20-21. Scholars, former students, and Viramontes herself will present and give readings Oct. 21 in the A.D. White House starting at 9:30 a.m.
“Helena…
On the dream list of many condensed matter physicists is observing fractionalization, the phenomena of a collective state of electrons carrying a charge that is a fraction of the electron charge, without a magnetic field.
“This is not to say the electron itself can be split into pieces,” said Eun-Ah Kim, professor of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S). “Rather, a group…
Stella Ocker, Ph.D. ’23 won a Brinson Prize fellowship, which she began Sept. 1 at the California Institute of Technology and Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, California
Cornell is now able to welcome Brinson Prize postdoctoral fellows, joining a select group of institutions that host the prestigious astronomy fellowship program.
A collaboration between The Brinson Foundation and the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), the Brinson Prize supports postdoctoral scholars in carrying out novel research in observational cosmology. The program emphasizes…
Provided
The Cornell University Wind Symphony performs "A Place That Is Yours" by Catherine Likhuta
On Nov. 13, 2022, Bailey Hall filled with the resonant debut of “A Place That Is Yours,” a piece of music written by Catherine Likhuta in memory of composer and professor Steven Stucky. Likhuta was able to rehearse beforehand with the student musicians in the Cornell University Wind Symphony and to speak to the audience during the concert thanks to Banding Together, a collaboration amongst…
Tudorita Tumbar, professor of molecular biology and genetics in the College of Arts and Sciences, has received three related grants for the next five years, totaling $7.7 million, from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases (NIAMS).
The work aims to understand how stem cells function to fuel normal tissue maintenance and to…
Chris Kitchen
Alexa Easley is working to develop materials for low-energy carbon capture that are organic and easy to make on large scales and in realistic conditions.
Vehicle by vehicle and building by building, carbon emissions are pouring into the atmosphere, a major contributor to heating up the Earth.
“Global warming is a big issue we’re facing, and the increasing atmospheric level of carbon dioxide is one major contributor,” said Alexa Easley, Klarman Postdoctoral Fellow in chemistry and chemical biology in the College of Arts and Sciences.
Chemists…
Picture a nanoscale dance floor full of independently moving particles. When things really start to heat up – or, in this case, cool down – particles partner off, but on opposite sides of the space, ‘dancing’ in synch as if telepathically.
In the ultra-pure isotope helium-three (3He), this dance starts at a very specific, very low temperature, when it converts into the superfluid phase …
