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Cornell University Library’s Grants Program for Digital Collections in Arts and Sciences transforms fragile artifacts into lasting online collections for teaching and research. This year, the program has awarded funding to five projects representing a range of study, from unearthing a vanished hamlet in Enfield Falls, New York, to examining modern art in Indonesia.
Cornell has recognized eight members of the faculty for excellence in teaching undergraduate students and contributions to undergraduate education at the university.The Stephen H. Weiss Awards were announced Oct. 18 by President Martha E. Pollack in a report to the Cornell University Board of Trustees. The eight awardees were unanimously recommended by a selection committee composed of six faculty members and two students, who considered 37 distinguished nominees in all.
This column by Michael Fontaine, professor of classics and Cornell’s associate vice provost for undergraduate education, appears in this month's Ezra Magazine.There’s a great story from the ancient world. As Cicero tells it, it goes like this:
Lehmann and Klinck sounded out two other Cornell scientists – associate professor of entomology Kyle Wickings and assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering Greg McLaskey – to join in a project to listen to the Earth. Wickings is the principal investigator on “Sounds of Soil,” a project to develop inexpensive acoustic sensors to detect, monitor and study populations of soil-dwelling organisms – in particular, disruptive insects that feed on roots, affecting both plant and soil health. The project received a Venture Fund grant from the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability in June 2018.
Scholars from Germany and the UK, as well as numerous U.S. universities, will visit campus Nov. 7-9 for the first media studies conference sponsored by CIVIC (Critical Inquiry into Values, Imagination and Culture), the provost’s Radical Collaboration initiative focused on the humanities and the arts.
The fossilized footprints reveal a wealth of information about how humans and animals moved and interacted with each other 12,000 years ago.
Classics professor Michael Fontaine explores the poem’s possible influence on George Orwell’s “Animal Farm.”
Benjamin Anderson's monograph “Cosmos and Community in Early Medieval Art” has been awarded the 2020 Karen Gould Prize in Art History from the Medieval Academy of America, an award given each year for a distinguished book in the field of medieval art history.
Joshua Johnson’s ’21 senior research project won’t be just on paper – he envisions kids walking through his senior project: a museum that helps them think more broadly about the term “classical civilizations.”
Seed and small grants from the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies are launching some big global initiatives – from uncovering one of Pompeii’s lost gardens to bringing together international researchers studying Indonesia’s 700 languages.
Caitlín Barrett, associate professor of classics in the College of Arts and Sciences, and Kathryn Gleason ’79, professor of landscape architecture in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, have been collaborating since 2016 on the excavation and survey of a large house and garden site, the Casa della Regina Carolina Project, at Pompeii in southern Italy.
The focus was on the period from the late 15th to the early 17th century, he said, or “the long 16th century of change in the northeast.”New research is producing a more accurate historical timeline for the occupation of Native American sites in upstate New York, based on radiocarbon dating of organic materials and statistical modeling.
Radiocarbon dating, invented in the late 1940s and improved ever since to provide more precise measurements, is the standard method for determining the dates of artifacts in archaeology and other disciplines.“If it’s organic and old – up to 50,000 years – you date it by radiocarbon,” said Sturt Manning, the Goldwin Smith Professor of Classical Archaeology in the College of Arts and Sciences.
Although not as well-known as the ruins of Athens or Rome, the remains of the ancient city of Sardis, capital of the Iron Age empire of Lydia in what is now Turkey, offer a wealth of clues to Greek, Roman, Byzantine and other cultural histories.
Eric Rebillard, the Avalon Foundation Professor of the Humanities in the Department of Classics, in the College of Arts and Sciences, has been named a 2020 fellow by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.A historian of early Christianity and late antiquity, Rebillard is one of 175 writers, artists, scholars and scientists awarded the Guggenheim fellowship this year, selected from nearly 3,000 applicants.
When Michael Fontaine began translating the Latin poem “How to Drink: A Classical Guide to the Art of Imbibing” by Vincent Obsopoeus, he could not have known it would be published in the middle of a pandemic. Ironically, much of the advice offered in this 500 year-old text seems eerily appropriate to this time of social distancing -- Obsopoeus tells readers that the best way to drink is at home.
Historian Barry Strauss, who specializes in ancient and military history, notes that plagues and epidemics have often been linked to wars. The current pandemic will accelerate the use of computer models and big data in the field of history; however, he says, COVID-19 has taught us that models are only as good as the assumptions on which they’re based.
As a first-generation college student whose family – refugees from Indonesia – arrived in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, when he was only a year old, Malikul Muhamad ’20 credits his teachers and professors with helping him chart a successful course through uncertainty and new experiences.
Even though we can't be together in person, we are looking forward to "seeing" you at our virtual Reunion 2020, Friday and Saturday, June 5-6!
"Cornell's collaborative culture drives innovation, which leaves a lasting impression on our students.”
“Our instructors have shown extraordinary dedication and leadership this year, teaching, advising and inspiring our students despite unprecedented challenges.”
Storage in the preindustrial world of ancient Rome could make or break small farmers and giant empires alike.
