What social media creators can’t say about their job
While researching her forthcoming book on the promises and perils of visibility in the content creator economy, Brooke Erin Duffy noticed a surprising pattern.
What social media creators can’t say about their job
From Seminar to Screen: A Trip to the Margaret Mead Film Festival
In the first weekend of May, a group of graduate and undergraduate students from Cornell University attended the Margaret Mead Film Festival, one of the longest-running and most prestigious showcases of ethnographic and documentary films in the world. The trip was organized as an experiential learning initiative connected to coursework in visual anthropology and ethnographic…
World According to Sound offers immersive audio experience March 23
A sonic experience where the audience sits blindfolded is returning to Cornell March 23 for a 6 p.m. performance in Sage Chapel.
Nintendo music app ‘rivals major record labels,’ not just for gamers
Some of Nintendo's music has attained classic status, says music professor Roger Moseley.
Crowdfunding launch supports Ways of Knowing podcast at Cornell
A crowdfunding campaign launched Nov. 1 to support a Cornell-based season of "Ways of Knowing,” a new podcast created by The World According to Sound.
Cornell crafts multifaceted game studies program
The field of game studies is growing at Cornell, including an expanded set of classes, workshops and symposia and a growing library collection of games.
CIVIC Interactive Media and Games, Spring Symposium
Iskandar Zulkarnain “Atari, Dingdong, and the New Order Regime: Tracing the Emergence of Indonesian Video Game Cultures”
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.
Filipino Performance Culture
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…
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).
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).
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, monthly colloquium,…
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 photographers from across the Western hemisphere.…
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.
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.
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)
Cornell Cinema Preview: Q&A with Mary Fessenden
Like everything else, Cornell Cinema has gone through some heavy changes in the wake of COVID. I spoke with Cornell Cinema’s Mary Fessenden about their new “virtual” film season and other special events.
Black Activism and Early American Media
“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…
Spires wins MLA award for ‘Practice of Citizenship’ book
Derrick 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.”
Cornell Professors Tao Leigh Goffe and Jeffrey Palmer to Launch “Dark Laboratory” on Indigenous Peoples’ Day
Ithaca, 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 digital storytelling, theory, and design, on October 12, 2020 at 7PM EST.
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 the U.S. composer Harry Partch…
Milstein Program bridges tech and humanities virtually
Undergraduates in the Milstein Program in Technology and Humanity imagined themselves into the future during the program’s 2020 summer session.
New Article Explores the Visual Politics of Electronic Ankle Monitor Design
Kilgour locates this argument in a socio-historical analysis of the design of electronic ankle monitors’ “form factor” - the physical size and shape of computing hardware - over time (from the 1980s to the present). Kilgour’s research strongly suggests that the lack of change in in how ankle monitors look creates the conditions for their…
New book echoes conference on classics, media theory
A new edited volume, “Classics and Media Theory,” features participants from a Cornell media studies conference exploring the interactions between media and antiquity.
Book on ’60s film has insight on work in modern times
In her new book, “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 today’s world.
Doctoral student awarded Mellon/ACLS Fellowship
Junting 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 Films That Understand Why People Riot
Black 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, writes Samantha Sheppard, the Mary Armstrong Meduski '80 Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Studies in the Department of Performing and Media Arts, in an op-ed in The Atlantic.
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."
Inaugural media studies conference examines sound, image, and the media of antiquity
At the inaugural media studies conference, “Siren Echoes” (Nov. 7-9), a multi-disciplinary group of scholars from Cornell and other U.S. universities, as well as Germany, the United Kingdom, and South Korea, explored sound, image, and the media of antiquity.
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. The songs are based on Warhol’s book, “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B…
Media Studies Colloquium Welcomes Professor Thomas Elsaesser
For this year’s inaugural session, the 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.