2022-23 Events

Friday, September 23, 3:30pm 

Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium, Klarman Hall 

The Society for the Humanities & the Rural Humanities initiative hosted a panel discussion with Kurt Jordan, author of The Gayogohó:no˛Ɂ People in the Cayuga Lake Region: A Brief History, Sachem Sam George (Gayogohó:no˛Ɂ Nation), Steven Henhawk (Gayogohó:no˛Ɂ language teacher), and Jolene Rickard (Ska:rù:rę’/Tuscarora, associate professor of art and history of art at Cornell). The panel was followed by a public conversation / Q&A.

October 20-21, 2022

Guerlac Room, A.D. White House 

REPAIR 

Thursday, Oct. 21

3:00-4:30pm PANEL 1 

Kevin Duong, Society Fellow; Political Theory, University of Virginia, “Repairing the Psyche at Harlem's Lafargue Clinic, 1946-1958”
Shirley Le Penne, Mellon Graduate Fellow; Government, Cornell University, “Colonial Paranoia: French Carcerality Amidst the Algerian Struggle”
Juno Parreñas, Faculty Fellow; Feminist, Gender & Sexuality Studies and Science & Technology Studies,
Cornell University, “Short Stories, Long Lives: Animal Retirement at the Cross-Sections of an Overworked Planet"

4:45 KEYNOTE 1

Steven Jackson, Associate Professor of Science and Technology Studies in the College of Arts and
Sciences and of Information Science in Cornell Bowers College of Computing, “From Repair to Hope (and Back Again)"

Friday, Oct. 22 

10-11:30am PANEL 2
Kelly Presutti, Faculty Fellow; History of Art, Cornell University, “Obelisks and Agglomerations : Material Histories of a Shipwreck in France and New Caledonia”
Pascal Schwaighofer, Mellon Graduate Fellow; Comparative Literature, Cornell University, "(Re)Thinking Pollination at the End of All Things”
Susan Stabile, Society Fellow; English, Texas A&M, “Nest”

1:15-2:15pm PANEL 3
Jung Joon Lee, Society Fellow; Theory and History of Art and Design, Rhode Island School of Design, “QueerArch: Archiving, Exhibiting, and Transoceanic Kinship Making”
Carla Hung, Society Fellow; Anthropology, University of North Carolina – Asheville, 
“The Criminalization of Communal Care Between Eritrean Refugees Migrating Through Italy”

2:30-3:30pm PANEL 4 
Tamta Khalvashi, Society Fellow; Anthropology, Ilia State University, “Affordances of Brokenness: Scrap Metal Gleaning in the Ruins of Post-Soviet Georgia”
Jon Parmenter, Faculty Fellow; History, Cornell University, “The Untold Story of Cornell University's Mineral Rights in Wisconsin”

4:00pm KEYNOTE 2
Jonathan Flatley, Professor of English, Wayne State University, “Like Trees: On Arboreal Collectivity in Richard Powers and Zoe Leonard" 

Wednesday, February 1, 4:45 p.m. 

A.D. White House 

Sophie Pinkham
Professor of the Practice in Comparative Literature, Cornell University 

"TURNING TO THE PUBLIC: Reimagining Your Academic Research for a Popular Audience" 

A public writing workshop for graduate students. 

In this workshop, participants considered how scholars can conceive essays, articles, or reviews that present their areas of research to non-academic publications. Participants should arrive with at least one idea for a potential piece (either a free-standing article or essay or an essay-length book review) that they might like to pitch to an editor. We will workshop these ideas, discussing how to choose a topic, how to pitch to an editor, and how to navigate the transition from an academic to a more public-facing style. 

Sophie Pinkham has written for The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The
Economist 1843, The Nation, The New Republic, and many other publications, most often about Russian and Ukrainian culture, history, and politics. Her writing career began while she was a PhD student in Slavic Studies at Columbia University. She is the author of Black Square: Adventures in Post-Soviet Ukraine (2016, W.W. Norton), and is currently at work on a cultural history of the Russian forest, with the support of an NEH Public Scholars grant. 

Wednesday, February 15, 5:00 p.m. 

Guerlac Room, A.D. White House 

Verity Platt
Professor in the Departments of Classics and History of Art & Visual Studies, Cornell University

"The Sentient Sponge: Between Natural History, Art History, and Philosophy”

Exploring how physical artifacts played an active role in the ancient production of knowledge, this lecture focuses on a rather unexpected object that was ascribed epistemic value in antiquity: the humble sponge. As naturally-formed products of the deep, sea sponges helped thinkers across a wide variety of literary genres and philosophical positions to formulate relations between matter and mind, perception and knowledge, and reality and representation. In the history of art (and especially in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History), the sponge was even hailed as a co-creator of images that transcended Platonic ontologies of representation to attain a form of visual “truth”, offering an ecology of ancient art that speaks to contemporary sensitivities to object-oriented and nonhuman modes of becoming.

Verity Platt is Professor of Classics and History of Art and Visual Studies at Cornell, where she is also affiliated with CIAMS, Environment and Sustainability, Media Studies, and Religious Studies. She is the author of Facing the Gods: Epiphany and Representation in Graeco-Roman Art, Literature, and Religion (2011) and co-editor of several volumes on the history and historiography of classical art, including The Frame in Classical Culture (2017) and The Embodied Object in Classical Antiquity (2018). She is currently completing a monograph entitled Epistemic Objects: Making and Mediating Classical Art and Text for the Oxford University Press series, "Classics in Theory”. She is also co-curator (with Annetta Alexandridis) of the Cornell Cast Collection, and (together with Andrew Weislogel) curated the current Johnson Museum exhibition “Wonder and Wakefulness: The Nature of Pliny the Elder".

Wednesday, March 1, 5:00 p.m. 

Guerlac Room, A.D. White House 

Sophie Lewis
Faculty, Brooklyn Institute for Social Research 

"Abolish Which Family? Black Familiality, Patriarchal Motherhood, and the Communization of Care"

Abstract: For over two centuries, utopians of various stripes have raised the banner of the "abolition of the family": the positive supersession of the capitalist privatization of care, including transcendence of patriarchy's prevalent mode of possessive maternalism. From the "phalansteries" of the first self-described "feminists" to the "red love" vision of the early Zhenotdel in Russia to the Black lesbian-feminist anti-imperialist efflorescence of the 60s and 70s, radical movements sought to imagine (and, experimentally, to prefigure) the deprivatization of care. But how does the intensely racializing history of the family's constitution in the United States impact a demand to abolish "the" family? Whose families, whose motherhoods, are at stake in the communization of care? Read more ->

Sophie Lewis is the author of Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family (Verso, 2019), hailed by Donna Haraway as “the seriously radical cry for full gestational justice that I long for.” Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation (Verso, 2022) is her second book. As a member of the faculty of Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, Sophie teaches courses on feminist, trans and queer politics and philosophy, including family abolitionism, Shulamith Firestone, and Kathi Weeks. With the Out of the Woods writing collective, Lewis contributed to the collection Hope Against Hope: Writings on Ecological Crisis (Common Notions, 2020). With Blind Field Journal, she has helped foster communities of Marxist-feminist cultural criticism. Previously, Dr. Lewis studied English Literature (BA) and Nature, Society and Environmental Policy (MSc) at Oxford University; Politics (MA) at the New School for Social Research; and Geography (PhD) at Manchester University. Her doctoral dissertation, “Cyborg Labor: Exploring Surrogacy as Gestational Work,” sought to reframe the political economy of contract pregnancy for the purposes of an antiwork polymaternalist utopianism. Sophie’s essays and commentaries appear in venues such as n+1, Boston Review, The Nation, The Baffler, Mal, e-flux, the New York Times and London Review of Books; her papers appear in, e.g., Signs, Paragraph, and Feminist Theory. A Visiting Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Research on Feminist, Queer and Transgender Studies, Sophie is nevertheless a freelance writer dependent on public speaking and Patreon (patreon.com/reproutopia). Her lectures are archived at lasophielle.org.

Read more about Sophie Lewis in an article on the Society's website.

Tuesday, March 7, 5:00 p.m. 

Guerlac Room, A.D. White House 

Anna Kornbluh
Professor of English, University of Illinois Chicago 

"Immediacy: Some Theses on Contemporary Style" 

Proposing a category for and periodization of contemporary cultural aesthetics, this talk connects widespread negation of mediation and despecification of medium with the priorities of flow, speed, and disintermediation in stagnating capitalism.  

Kornbluh also offered a lunchtime workshop (12:30pm) on Tuesday, March 7 for graduate students: “Reading Like a Marxist.”

Anna Kornbluh's research and teaching interests center on Victorian literature and Critical Theory, with a special emphasis in formalism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, and theory of the novel.  She is the author of The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space (University of Chicago 2019),  Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club (Bloomsbury "Film Theory in Practice” series, 2019), and Realizing Capital: Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian Form (Fordham UP 2014).  Her current research concerns impersonality, objectivity, mediation, and abstraction as residual faculties of the literary in privatized urgent times.  She is the founding facilitator of two scholarly cooperatives: V21 Collective and InterCcECT.

Friday, March 24, 3:30 p.m. 

Guerlac Room, A.D. White House 

“Come join us at Cornell for an open forum on ChatGPT and the Humanities. We'll be exploring how ChatGPT, a novel natural language processing technology, can be used to enhance research in the Humanities. We'll be discussing the potential for ChatGPT to improve research productivity, deepen understanding, and open up new avenues for exploration. Everyone is welcome!” – ChatGPT

This panel discussion will focus on ways to make a non-reductionist use of Artificial Intelligence in theoretical humanistic research and some consequences of automated text generation on present and future scholarship.

Participants include:

Morten Christiansen (Kennan Professor of Psychology, Cognitive Science and Information Science)
Laurent Dubreuil (Professor of Comparative Literature, Romance Studies, & Cognitive Science)
(recipients of a New Frontier grant for "Poetry, AI and the Mind: A Humanities-Cognitive Science Transdisciplinary Exploration)

&
Pablo Contreras Kallens (PhD candidate in Psychology)
Jacob Matthews (PhD candidate in Romance Studies)

Monday, April 10, 5:00 p.m. 

Guerlac Room, A.D. White House 

"Small Press Poetry, Archives, and Performance: A Conversation with Sophie Seita and Nick Sturm"

Come hear Sophie Seita and Nick Sturm as they speak on small press poetry, archives, and performance! Sturm and Seita will discuss small press publishing as both a historical practice and an embodied event, considering how writing, performance, and textual circulation might foster poetic community and world-making. The Q&A following their talks will be moderated by Dr. Marty Cain, Postdoctoral Associate in the A&S Humanities Scholars Program. This event is held in conjunction with SHUM 2750 Introduction to Humanities: Subcultures and Archives, and is sponsored by the Humanities Scholars Program.

More on the event, including the speakers biographies, can be found here. 

Wednesday, April 26, 5:30 p.m. 

Cinemapolis, 120 E. Green St., Ithaca, NY

This event, sponsored by Cornell's Rural Humanities Initiative, will feature three award-winning short films by writer/director Austin Bunn, Associate Professor in the Department of Performing and Media Arts. A post-show panel Q&A will include those featured in each film: David Hirsch ("Lavender Hill"), Claudia Brenner ("In the Hollow"), and Wayne Mitteer ("Campfire"), and will be facilitated by Gerard Aching, Cornell's W. E. B. DuBois Professor in the Humanities. The films have screened variously at Outfest (L.A.), Inside Out (Toronto), Cleveland Film Festival, Provincetown International Film Festival, Sidewalk, Shortoftheweek.com, and elsewhere. The screening and Q&A will be followed by a reception at Moosewood Restaurant. 

Out Here: 3 Short Films about Rural LGBT Life
Written & Directed by PMA Associate Professor Austin Bunn
With guests David Hirsch ("Lavender Hill"), Claudia Brenner ("In the Hollow"), and Wayne Mitteer ("Campfire")
5:30pm-7pm Cinemapolis
Wednesday, April 4/26
Post-show reception at Moosewood

Film can be found here. 

This event is sponsored by the Rural Humanities Initiative from an award by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

April 27-28, 2023

Guerlac Room, A.D. White House 

REPAIR 

Thursday, April 27

3:00-4:30pm PANEL 1 

Kevin Duong, Society Fellow; Political Theory, University of Virginia, “Freud in the Tropics"

Shirley Le Penne, Mellon Graduate Fellow; Government, Cornell University,"Guillotining the Political: FLN Prisoners Amidst the Algerian Struggle”

Jon Parmenter, Faculty Fellow; History, Cornell University, “How Did Cornell Dispossess? The Impact of Timber and Land Sales on the Lives and Livelihoods of Indigenous Peoples Bordering the University’s Morrill Act Lands, 1868-1900” 

Friday, April 28

10:00-11:30am PANEL 2

Tamta Khalvashi, Society Fellow; Anthropology, Ilia State University, “A City of Vineyards: Reparative Ecologies in Times of Ruination”

Imane Terhmina, Faculty Fellow, Romance Studies, Cornell, “Critical Repair: Afterlives of Decolonization and the African Imagination”

Carla Hung, Society Fellow; Anthropology, University of North Carolina – Asheville, “Migration as Reparation? Eritrean Refugees and a Postcolonial Indebted Politics”

11:30am-1:00pm KEYNOTE 1

Audra Simpson, Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University, "Savage States: Settler Governance in an Age of Sorrow" 

Abstract: How is the past imagined to be settled? What are the conditions that make for this imagining, this fantasy or rather, demand of a new start point? In this piece I consider the slice of this new-ness in recent history – 1990 to the near present in Canada.  This is a time of apology, and a time in which Native people and their claims to territory are whittled to the status of claimant or subject in time with the fantasy of their disappearance from a modern and critical present. In this piece I examine how the Canadian practice of settler governance has adjusted itself in line with global trends and rights paradigms away from overt violence to what are seen as softer and kinder, caring modes of governing but governing, violently still and yet, with a language of care, upon on still stolen land. This piece asks not only in what world we imagine time to stop, but takes up the ways in which those that survived the time stoppage stand in critical relationship to dispossession and settler governance apprehend, analyze and act upon this project of affective governance. Here an oral and textual history of the notion of “reconciliation” is constructed and analyzed with recourse to Indigenous criticism of this affective and political project of repair.

2:30-4:00pm PANEL 3

Juno Parreñas, Faculty Fellow; Feminist, Gender & Sexuality Studies and Science & Technology Studies,
Cornell University, "The Life and Death of a Tropical Polar Bear"

Pascal Schwaighofer, Mellon Graduate Fellow; Comparative Literature, Cornell University, "Human Pollination” 

Susan Stabile, Society Fellow; English, Texas A&M, "Upcycle" 

4:15-5:45pm KEYNOTE 2

Mimi Thi Nguyen, Assoc. Professor & Chair of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, “The Right To Be Beautiful“

Abstract:  What is the promise of beauty for habituation in disastrous situations where a life that can be lived is hard to hold? Part humanitarian intervention and part performance, the 2009 Miss Landmine Cambodia pageant follows from a not uncommon faith that beauty is both a humanitarian problem and also its solution. From the sprawling international complex that funds and conducts prosthetic manufacturing, rehabilitation and vocational training, infrastructural development and cultural programming, through to the aesthetic and moral discourses of rights, capacities, humanitarianism and humanity, all must be in place for this pageant to promise beauty. I focus narrowly on the pageant’s maxim, everyone has the right to be beautiful, in the time and space of rights claims that unfold tactically under a quasi-authoritarian regime, through a humanitarian campaign for the social recognition of the war damaged. The right to be beautiful attests to the degree to which rights almost exclusively model claims to the subject of freedom. Such claims follow from the constellation of modern powers that presume to adjudicate humanity, in which the human is the effect of rights, animated by the law, and through which those who have been abandoned or outcast through the law’s absence or suspension can be redeemed. That beauty also operates as a measure of humanity and its others dares us to consider beauty alongside other rights on whose behalf we intervene against what terrors might follow in their absence.

May 5, 9:30-4:00pm, 2023

A.D. White House 

This annual conference features outstanding Cornell senior student research in various humanities fields, student panel discussions, and oral presentations of student papers with postdoctoral and faculty respondents. The day will consist of brief presentations (approximately 10 minutes each) followed by Q&A, organized into panels based on common themes. Q&A and panels will be moderated by Professor Durba Ghosh, (Director, Humanities Scholars Program), and Drs. Marty Cain and Krithika Vachali, (Postdoctoral Associates, Humanities Scholars Program). Join in and pose your own questions to the student presenters! 

The event is sponsored by the College of Arts & Sciences Humanities Scholars Program (HSP) housed at the Society for the Humanities and will include senior presenters from HSP and across humanities departments.

The full list of presentations can be found here.