2023-24 Events

Wednesday, Oct. 18, 5:00pm 
Guerlac Room, A.D. White House 

The Society for the Humanities & CNY Humanities Corridor (in partnership with Cornell's Media Studies Colloquium) present: The Annual Digital Humanities Lecture

The world is teeming with objects, and today's AI models rely on datasets such as ImageNet to learn, for example, that a "seat belt" and a "waffle iron" are both types of "commodities". But might an earlier moment of scientific classification hold lessons for how we understand the dataset today? By examining collections of botanical specimens in the 17th century, this talk will track two competing modes of computational logic that tried to contain the disorder of the natural world.

Poet and scholar of digital media Tung-Hui Hu will present new work in the annual Digital Humanities Lecture at the Society for the Humanities, entitled "The Grid vs. the Set: Early Attempts at Classifying Data." The lecture is sponsored by the CNY Humanities Corridor, Cornell's Media Studies Colloquium and the Society for the Humanities. The event is free and open to the public and will be followed by a reception in the A.D. White House. 

Hu, Associate Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan, is the author of "A Prehistory of the Cloud" and "Digital Lethargy". The winner of a Rome Prize and a NEA fellowship for literature, Hu has also received an American Academy in Berlin Prize for his research.  https://www.tunghui.hu/

Hu will also lead a space-limited workshop for graduate students on Thursday, October 19, entitled "New Aesthetic Forms, from Lethargy to AI." 

Tuesday, September 19 
Olin Library, Room 701 

Dorothy Berry 
Digital Curator at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture

"Archives Aren’t Forever: Digital Collections and Digital Storytelling in Classrooms"

 A discussion-based workshop exploring interactions of archives, digital collections and digital storytelling in the classroom, with a focus on the transformations between archival collecting, digitization, and digital interpretation.

Dorothy Berry is the Digital Curator at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Formerly the Digital Collections Program Manager at Houghton Library, Harvard University, Berry graduated from Indiana University with an M.L.S. and an M.A. in ethnomusicology. Her undergraduate years were spent at Mills College, where she performed 20^th and 21^st century experimental and new music. Berry specializes in the intersections of information science and African American history, focusing on how description and digitization increase access and understanding to racially confrontational materials. She is committed to a career of expanding access to historical materials through creativity and innovation, and to exploring digital and physical methodologies that unite stakeholder communities with their often displaced heritages.

Tuesday, Sept. 19, 5:00pm 
Guerlac Room, A.D. White House 

Dorothy Berry 
Digital Curator at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture

Elaine Westbrooks
University Librarian, Cornell University 

"Fireside Chat" and Q&A 

A conversation between Berry and Westbrooks on digital archives, open to librarians from across Cornell University, as well as Librarians from the Tompkins County Public Library. 

These events were made possible with support from the CNY Humanities Corridor. 

Friday, Oct. 27 
Guerlac Room, A.D. White House 

This year's cohort of Fellows at the Society for the Humanities gave presentations on works-in-progress on the 2023-24 focal theme of Crossing. Each presentation was followed by a Q&A. Open to the public. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner provided.

10-11:30am PANEL 1
Ruslan Yusupov, Society Fellow; Academy Scholar, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard
University, "Pairing Up: The Militarization of Multiculturalism in the People’s War on Terror in China’s Xinjiang"
Dennis Wegner, Mellon Graduate Fellow; German Studies, Cornell University, "Marina Tsvetaeva’s Queer Multilingual Poetics"

1-2:30pm PANEL 2 
Emma Campbell, Society Fellow; Assoc. Prof./Reader, Modern Languages and Cultures, Univ. of Warwick, "Gender and Sexual Embodiment in Medieval Bestiaries"
Kim Haines-Eitzen, Faculty Fellow; Professor, Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University, "On Fire: Kinesis, Apocalypse, Transformation"

2:45-5pm PANEL 3
Stephanie López, Mellon Graduate Fellow; Romance Studies, Cornell University, "Losing My Relation: Absence of Maternal Care in Latin American Fiction"
Perry Zurn, Society Fellow; Provost Assoc. Professor, Philosophy, American University, "The Advent of Cis: Lessons from the Mainstreaming of a Radical Term"
Cristina Florea, Faculty Fellow; Assist. Professor, History, Cornell University, "War and Revolution in the Lands In-Between: Bukovina in World War II"

Wednesday, Feb. 21, 5:00pm  
Guerlac Room, A.D. White House 

Juliana Hu Pegues, Associate Professor in the Department of Literatures in English, Cornell University 

"Beyond Settler Feminism: Tillie Paul's Arrest and Indigenous Feminist Activism"

In 1922, Tillie Paul, a Tlingit woman in the small town of Wrangell, Alaska, was jailed and arrested for aiding her uncle and clan leader in his attempt to vote in a local election. Tillie Paul’s advocacy occurred between two historical franchises, after the 19th amendment to the constitution, ratified in 1920, which guaranteed women the right to vote, and before the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act. How does a consideration of Tillie Paul’s choices complicate a tidy teleology of women’s suffrage, one that deploys a misapprehended and cumulative formation of intersectionality for liberal multicultural ends, to consider instead the horizon of messy and incommensurate interstices, of refusals lodged within recognitions? Court documents underscore the limits to settler colonial inclusivity while a children’s book on Tillie Paul’s life alternatively highlights Native feminist understandings of Indigenous responsibilities and relationalities.

Read more about the lecture's topic on the College of Arts & Sciences website. 

Juliana Hu Pegues is Associate Professor of Literatures in English at Cornell, where she is also affiliated with the Asian American Studies and American Studies Programs. She is the author of Space-Time Colonialism: Alaska's Indigenous and Asian Entanglements (University of North Carolina Press, 2021). 

The Annual Invitational Lecture of the Society for the Humanities is designed to give a Cornell audience a chance to hear one of our distinguished Cornell humanities faculty members who may frequently speak at other universities, but whom we seldom have the privilege of hearing.

Wednesday, March 20, 5:00pm  
Guerlac Room, A.D. White House

Pheng Cheah, Professor of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley

"Beyond the World as Picture: Worlding and Becoming the Whole World [devenir tout le monde]"

In his well-known essay, Die Zeit des Weltbildes, Heidegger describes modernity as the age in which the world has been reduced to a picture.  The conceptualization of the world as picture is the fundamental basis of globalization and the geopolitical relations of power, inequality and exploitation that characterize the world-system created by late capitalism.  The world as picture is also the basis of various conceptual approaches for understanding worldliness informing various disciplines in the humanities and the narrative social sciences: world literature, world history, globality (global exchange and intercourse) and environmental kinship.  But what the world as picture also implies is the excess excluded by the picture frame: the framing presupposes as its ontological condition of possibility something that lies beyond the picture. This talk examines two philosophical accounts of the ontological grounding of the world as picture: Heidegger’s idea of worlding and Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of becoming the whole world as it is connected to their account of minor literature.  It elaborates in passing on the fundamental differences between these philosophies of world and the above approaches to worldliness.

Read "Pheng Cheah Ph.D. ’98 to deliver Culler Theory Lecture" for more on Cheah, his research, and the Annual Culler Theory Lecture. 

In addition to his lecture, Pheng Cheah hosted a graduate workshop on Thursday, March 21, from noon-2pm at the A.D. White House. 

Entitled "The Nonhuman: Worlding and Critiques of the Anthropocene," this workshop explored the converges and differences between the Heideggerian concept of worlding and recent critiques of the anthropocene. The workshop asked questions such as: What are the conceptual distinctions between the non-human as an ontological issue, the more-than-human and the entanglement of human beings and non-human beings?  Why are these distinctions important and what are some of their ethical and political implications?

Friday, April 26
Guerlac Room, A.D. White House 

This year's cohort of Fellows at the Society for the Humanities gave presentations on works-in-progress on the 2023-24 focal theme of Crossing. Each presentation was followed by a Q&A. Open to the public. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner provided.

10 – 11:30 am PANEL 1

Kadji Amin Society Fellow; Associate Professor, Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Emory University, “Street Queen: Class Struggle over the Meanings of Transfemininity” 

Perry Zurn Society Fellow; Provost Associate Professor, Philosophy, American University, “Theorizing Cis in Argentina and Brazil” 

Amiel Bize Faculty Fellow; Assistant Professor, Anthropology, Cornell University, “Plots” 

2:30 – 4:00 pm PANEL 2   

Parisa Vaziri Faculty Fellow; Assistant Professor, Comparative Literature & Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University, “The Wynter of Autopoiesis” 

Dennis Wegner Mellon Graduate Fellow; German Studies, Cornell University, “Cruising for Words: Towards a Queer Theory of Multilingualism” 

Cristina Florea Faculty Fellow; Assistant Professor, History, Cornell University, “From Empire to Nation-State: Three Lives in Transition” 

4:30 – 6:00 pm PANEL 3 

Emma Campbell Society Fellow; Associate Professor/Reader, Modern Language and Cultures, University of Warwick, “Rethinking Sexuality with Medieval Bestiaries” 

Ruslan Yusupov Society Fellow; Academy Scholar, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University, “Contradictory Simultaneity: Policing Islam in a Model Muslim Town” 

Stephanie López Mellon Graduate Fellow; Romance Studies, Cornell University, “In Mother Earth’s Shadow: Afro-Colombian Maternity and Colombia’s Peace Process in Jhonny Hendrix Hinestoza’s Chocó (2012)”