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The story of three Kiowa children who escaped a government boarding school in the winter of 1891 and died from the cold is one that faculty member Jeff Palmer heard many times growing up.
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It’s exhilarating for media scholar Anna Shechtman to see who shows up on the first day of an introductory media studies class: students from literature and theater, but also from computing, information science, East Asian studies, religious studies and other diverse majors.
“I’ve come in at the start of the course when that question of what media is and what media studies studies is on the table,” said Shechtman, a Klarman Fellow in literatures in English. “And I see everyone’s minds being blown a little bit by realizing the scope and scale of media studies and what it could be.
Christine Bacareza Balance explores the rich milieu of the arts and of sensational politics in Filipino culture and history.
Growing up as the child of Filipino immigrants in California, Christine Bacareza Balance, Performing and Media Arts, had no idea that the world of performing arts held a place for someone like her. “And then in my sophomore year in high school, the musical Miss Saigon premiered on Broadway,” she remembers. “The original production starred [Filipino actress and singer] Lea Salonga. For the first time, I saw someone who was both a Filipino and a performer. That had a big impact on me.”
Reconsidering John C. Lilly is a one-day symposium convened by Hannah Zeavin (UC Berkeley) and Jeffrey Mathias (Cornell University).
/news/phd-student-organizes-symposium-maverick-john-lilly
The African Studies Association (ASA) has awarded its Best Book Prize to Naminata Diabate, associate professor of comparative literature, for “Naked Agency: Genital Cursing and Biopolitics in Africa” (Duke University Press, 2020).
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Kim Gallon, associate professor of history at Purdue University, will demonstrate how computational humanities offers an opportunity to redefine “crisis” through the Black American experience and turn it into a defining moment for the recovery and reimagination of Black humanity.
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Ziad Fahmy, professor of modern Middle East history in Near Eastern Studies, College of Arts and Sciences, won a 2021 book prize from the Urban History Association (UHA) for “Street Sounds: Listening to Everyday Life in Modern Egypt” (Stanford University Press). Fahmy’s book was recognized in the UHA 2021 virtual award ceremony for Best Book in Non-North American Urban History.
/news/fahmy-wins-urban-history-association-book-prize-0
Remembering a distinguished Cornell Professor.
Trevor Pinch, Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences in Science and Technology Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences, who helped found multiple areas of study related to science, technology, and sound, died Dec. 16 after living with cancer for more than four years. He was 69.
Starting in spring 2022, a graduate minor in media studies will be available to students in fields across the Graduate School at Cornell University. Drawing on the Graduate School's long tradition of fostering interdisciplinary study, the new minor is the most recent project of the Media Studies initiative, which sponsors an undergraduate minor...
/news/media-studies-initiative-launches-new-graduate-minor
Co-sponsored by Cornell Media Studies and the program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Dark Laboratory presents the photography exhibition I’m New Here: Black and Indigenous Media Ecologies. The exhibition explores the intersecting ideas of race and ecology through the visual and literary interpretation of the work of seven...
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Two new media studies articles from Owen Marshall, a postdoctoral researcher in the departments of Information Science and Science & Technology Studies, uncover the technological practices that brought human speech and insect feeding behavior under electro-acoustic control in the mid 20th Century.Early users of magnetic tape recorders were...
/news/artificial-echoes-and-insect-synthesizers
Branden Hookway, a long-term visiting assistant professor in the Department of Architecture, among other departments at Cornell [Design and Environmental Analysis (DE+A), Information Science, and Art], passed away the evening of Saturday, August 14, 2021 in Palo Alto, California after a long battle with a rare form of sarcoma.Born in 1971 and...
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When Elizaveta Zabelina ’24 works on the replica of a ca. 1800 Johann Schantz piano that’s part of the instrument collection at the Cornell Center for Historical Keyboards, she can’t help feeling a bit philosophical.“Because of the distinction of materials and work, which was one of a kind in historical instruments, each instrument has its own...
/news/history-music-physics-harmonize-keyboard-project
Samantha N. Sheppard, associate professor of performing and media arts, has been named a 2021 Academy Film Scholar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The annual grant is given to established scholars whose projects are focused on some aspect of filmmaking and the film industry. She will receive $25,000 to complete her book...
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You are a scholar doing research in an archive. Another person in the archive smiles at you. Do you a) smile back, or b) look away because you’re tired of people expecting you to smile?“There are micro-moments in the archive where your privilege and positionality take you along a different research route,” said Julia Chang, assistant professor...
/news/online-game-replicates-frustrations-research-and-disability-0
Deborah Starr, Togo Mizrahi and the Making of Egyptian Cinema (University of California Press, 2020)Originally Published On: https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/42699/Deborah-Starr,-Togo-Mizrahi-and-the-Making-of-Egyptian-Cinema-New-Texts-Out-Now Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?Deborah Starr (DS): I find Togo Mizrahi’s story to be...
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By: Kina Viola, Society for the HumanitiesFri, 04/23/2021This year’s annual Digital Humanities Lecture for the Society for the Humanities, “Interactivities I: difference and digital textuality,” will be delivered by Marisa Parham, visiting professor of English at University of Maryland, director for the African American Digital Humanities...
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by Jackie SwiftFor roughly 500 years, European colonialism dominated the globe. From it grew a philosophy and a worldview that still live on today. We can find them in the way we categorize people by race, in our emphasis on monocrop agriculture, even in the way we define the geographic borders of America, says Tao Leigh Goffe, Africana Studies....
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By | Kate Blackwood , Cornell Chronicle2/15/2021The College of Arts and Sciences has selected eight exceptional early-career scholars in the sciences, social sciences and humanities to pursue independent research at Cornell as recipients of Klarman Postdoctoral Fellowships, a pilot program established in 2019.The three-year fellowships empower...
/news/arts-and-sciences-welcomes-eight-new-klarman-fellows-0
By | Aidan Kelly , Milstein Program in Technology & HumanityAndrew Moisey, assistant professor of history of art and visual studies; Malte Ziewitz, assistant professor of science & technology studies and Tao Leigh Goffe, assistant professor of Africana studies and feminist, gender, & sexuality studies, have been chosen as new Milstein...
/news/three-professors-named-milstein-faculty-fellows-0
Bryan VanCampenArticle originally published from the Ithaca Times at: https://www.ithaca.com/entertainment/film/cornell-cinema-preview-q-a-with-mary-fessenden/article_9c3609e6-7152-11eb-bf74-87245f9bdf1d.htmlLike everything else, Cornell Cinema has gone through some heavy changes in the wake of COVID. I spoke with Cornell Cinema’s Mary Fessenden...
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by Jackie Swift“I have faith in the power of writing, of poetry, of literature, to do work in the world,” says Derrick R. Spires, Literatures in English. “The fact that the movie Black Panther exists, for example, and my little nephew calls himself Black Panther and is proud of his blackness: that’s what literature, that’s what the arts, do for...
/news/black-activism-and-early-american-media-0
By: Kate Blackwood, Cornell ChronicleThu, 12/17/2020Derrick R. Spires, associate professor of English in the College of Arts and Sciences, has won the Modern Language Association (MLA) Prize for a First Book for “The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States.”In the book, Spires examines the parallel...
/news/spires-wins-mla-award-practice-citizenship-book-0
By: Tao Leigh Goffe and Jeffrey Palmer, Press ReleaseSeptember 28, 2020Ithaca, NY – September 28, 2020 – Two Cornell University professors, Tao Leigh Goffe and Jeffrey Palmer, will host a virtual block party to launch the website for their much-anticipated new initiative DARK LABORATORY, a humanities incubator on Black and Indigenous immersive...
/news/cornell-professors-tao-leigh-goffe-and-jeffrey-palmer-launch-dark-laboratory-indigenous
A recent article by Matthew Kilbane, a lecturer in the English Department, brings together media studies and literary history. Published in PMLA, “Speech-Musical Modernism: Harry Partch’s Lyric Media” reveals the way lyric poetry was understood as specific kind of medium for sound—an "intermedial artifact," Kilbane argues—through a case study of...
/news/new-article-examines-sonic-media-lyric-poetry
By: Kate BlackwoodCornell ChronicleAugust 31, 2020Undergraduates in the Milstein Program in Technology and Humanity imagined themselves into the future during the program’s 2020 summer session.“I tasked the students with curating a museum in the year 2350,” said Tao Leigh Goffe, assistant professor of Africana Studies in the College of Arts...
/news/milstein-program-bridges-tech-and-humanities-virtually
Lauren Kilgour, PhD candidate in Information Science, has published an article based on her dissertation research in The Information Society. The article, entitled “The Ethics of Aesthetics: Stigma, Information, and the Politics of Electronic Ankle Monitor Design,” examines the visual politics of electronic ankle monitor design. The article makes...
/news/new-article-explores-visual-politics-electronic-ankle-monitor-design
By: Daniel AloiCornell ChronicleJuly 10, 2020A new edited volume, “Classics and Media Theory,” features participants from a Cornell media studies conference exploring the interactions between media and antiquity.The book, in the Oxford University Press “Classical Presences” series, gathers expert analysis from scholars engaging with myriad...
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“Clocking Out: The Machinery of Life in 1960s Italian Cinema,” professor of Romance studies and comparative literature Karen Pinkus explores themes of labor and automation and society reflected in Italian cinema, and what they can tell us about alternatives for living and working in...
/news/book-60s-film-has-insight-work-modern-times-0
By: Aarushi MachavarapuA&S CommunicationsJune 2, 2020Junting Huang, a doctoral candidate in the field of comparative literature, has received a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship for his dissertation, “The Noise Decade: Intermedial Impulse in Chinese Sound Recording.”The fellowships are one of the most competitive in the...
/news/doctoral-student-awarded-mellonacls-fellowship-0
Austin Bunn, associate professor and Koenig Jacobson Sesquicentennial Fellow in the Department of Performing and Media Arts, will take over leadership of the Milstein Program in Technology and Humanity July 1.
/news/pma-prof-named-new-director-milstein-program-0
By: Samantha SheppardThe AtlanticJune 9, 2020Black filmmakers have used their works to show that the state’s inhumane treatment of black people, not the uprisings that result, is the real chaos.
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Students in an innovative class this spring made their homes not only classrooms, but also studio and laboratory spaces as they imagined and created unique musical instruments out of materials close at hand.
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Derrick R. Spires, associate professor of English, was awarded the St. Louis Mercantile Library Prize for his book “The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States.
/news/bibliographical-society-america-honors-english-professor-0
The inaugural media studies conference, “Siren Echoes” a multi-disciplinary group of scholars from Cornell and other U.S., German, UK and South Korean universities explored sound, image, and the media of antiquity.
/news/inaugural-media-studies-conference-examines-sound-image-and-media-antiquity
A dozen previously unreleased songs by Rock & Roll Hall of Fame artist Lou Reed have been discovered on one side of a cassette tape from 1975, currently stored in the archives of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.
/news/musicologist-discovers-tape-unreleased-lou-reed-music-0
Algorithmic systems are a pervasive aspect of modern life in areas such as web searches, hiring decisions, credit scoring, and determining the cost of health insurance policies. Important social issues arise when the data and information produced by algorithmic systems turns out to be inaccurate, biased, or discriminatory.
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Media Studies Midday Colloquium welcomed Thomas Elsaesser, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Media and Culture at the University of Amsterdam and Visiting Professor in the School of the Arts at Columbia University. Professor Elsaesser: “Media Archaeology as Symptom,”
/news/media-studies-colloquium-welcomes-professor-thomas-elsaesser
Cornell Cinema receives five year funding and plans new all-access passes.
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Students in a new media studies foundation course spent the spring semester delving into how media formats have shaped human lives throughout history.“Thinking Media,” taught by Roger Moseley, associate professor of Music and CIVIC fellow.
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