Media, Radical Relationality, and the Cthulucene

Lissette Lorenz, PhD candidate in science and technology studies (STS), published two pieces in a recent special issue of Art + Media: Journal of Art and Media Studies. This issue, called "Cosmographies of Worlding and Unworlding", was guest edited by Cornell's Professor of Practice Jon McKenzie. In her essay, "We Are All Monsters: Radical Relationality During Planetary Crisis.", Lorenz examines three imagined representations of nuclear apocalypse...

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Faculty members' film focuses on boarding school escape

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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What is ‘media?’ Klarman Fellow strives to define a capacious concept

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.

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Filipino Performance Culture

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.”

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Phd Student Organizes Symposium on Maverick John Lilly

Reconsidering John C. Lilly is a one-day symposium convened by Hannah Zeavin (UC Berkeley) and Jeffrey Mathias (Cornell University).

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Naminata Diabate wins ASA book prize for ‘Naked Agency’

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 to deliver lecture on Black pandemic deaths data

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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Fahmy wins Urban History Association book prize

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.

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Pioneering professor Trevor Pinch dies at 69

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.

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Media Studies Initiative Launches New Graduate Minor

 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...

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Dark Laboratory Launches Black and Indigenous Media Exhibit

 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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Artificial Echoes and Insect Synthesizers

 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...

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In Memoriam: Branden Hookway (1971–2021)

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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History, music, physics harmonize in keyboard project

 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...

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PMA professor named Academy Film Scholar

 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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Online game replicates frustrations of research and disability

 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...

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Deborah Starr, Togo Mizrahi and the Making of Egyptian Cinema (New Texts Out Now)

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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Parham to deliver lecture on African American Digital Humanities

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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DJs, Linnaeus, and Plantation History

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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Arts and Sciences welcomes eight new Klarman Fellows

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...

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Three A&S professors named Milstein Faculty Fellows

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...

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Cornell Cinema Preview: Q&A with Mary Fessenden

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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Black Activism and Early American Media

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...

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Spires wins MLA award for ‘Practice of Citizenship’ book

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...

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Cornell Professors Tao Leigh Goffe and Jeffrey Palmer to Launch “Dark Laboratory” on Indigenous Peoples’ Day

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...

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New Article Examines the Sonic Media of Lyric Poetry

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...

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Milstein Program bridges tech and humanities virtually

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...

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New Article Explores the Visual Politics of Electronic Ankle Monitor Design

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...

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New book echoes conference on classics, media theory

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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Book on ’60s film has insight on work in modern times

“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...

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Doctoral student awarded Mellon/ACLS Fellowship

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...

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PMA prof named new director of Milstein Program

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.

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The Films That Understand Why People Riot

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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‘Bending’ to create homemade musical instruments

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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Bibliographical Society of America honors English professor

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.

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Inaugural media studies conference examines sound, image, and the media of antiquity

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.

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Musicologist discovers tape of unreleased Lou Reed music

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.

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How Citizens Are Affected by Algorithmic Systems

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 Colloquium Welcomes Professor Thomas Elsaesser

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,”

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Cornell Cinema plans new all-access passes, receives five-year funding

Cornell Cinema receives five year funding and plans new all-access passes.

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New class contemplates media from cross-campus perspectives

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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