2024-25 Events

Thursday, Sept. 12, 5:00 p.m. 
Guerlac Room, A.D. White House 

The Society for the Humanities welcomed Jonathan Lethem, Roy Edward Disney '51 Professor of Creative Writing and Professor of English at Pomona College, to present his talk "The Novel as Lyric Essay and Stage Play."

Out of his twenty-five years’ experience as creative writing instructor, Lethem presented his eccentric personal account of the elements and development of the basic forms of literary fiction – an account which, while possibly a kind of fiction itself, might prove a useful model for writers and readers to consider.

Celebrated for his novels, short stories and essays, Jonathan Lethem is recognized today as one of America’s foremost contemporary writers. His works include nine novels, five short-story collections, six non-fiction books and an array of essays published in such publications as Rolling Stone, Harper’s and The New Yorker.

His novel Motherless Brooklyn was named Novel of the Year by Esquire magazine and won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Salon Book Award, as well as the Macallan Crime Writers Association Gold Dagger. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2005. At Pomona, he teaches classes in creative writing and contemporary fiction.

In addition to his visit to the Society for the Humanities, Lethem participated in the Ithaca is Books festival on Friday , September 13 and Saturday, September 14 in downtown Ithaca. More information on the festival's events can be found here: https://www.ithacaisbooks.org/schedule. 

This event was free and open to the public. 

Tuesday, Oct. 22, 5:00 p.m. 
Guerlac Room, A.D. White House 

The Society for the Humanities & CNY Humanities Corridor, in partnership with Cornell's Media Studies Colloquium, presented The Annual Digital Humanities Lecture on October 22nd. 

Scholar of digital media Hannah Zeavin presented this year's Digital Humanities Lecture at the Society for the Humanities. Her talk “Matrix, Environment, Atmosphere: How Mother Became a Medium”, was sponsored by the CNY Humanities Corridor, Cornell's Media Studies Colloquium and the Society for the Humanities. The event was free and open to the public and followed by a reception in the A.D. White House. 

From the mid-1940s until the 1960s and beyond, class, race, and maternal function were linked in metaphors of temperature in pediatric psychological studies of Bad Mothers. Newly codified diagnoses of aloof “refrigerator mothers” and overstimulating “hot mothers” were inseparable from midcentury conceptions of stimulation, mediation, domesticity, and race, including Marshall McLuhan’s theory of hot and cool media, as well as maternal absence and (over)presence, echoes of which continue in the present in terms like “helicopter parent.” Whereas autism and autistic states have been extensively elaborated in their relationship to digital media, this talk attends to attributed maternal causes of “emotionally disturbed,” queer, and neurodivergent children. The talk thus elaborates a media theory of mothering and parental “fitness.”  

Hannah Zeavin is a scholar, writer, and editor, and works as an Assistant Professor at UC Berkeley in the Department of History. Zeavin is the author of The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy  (MIT Press, 2021) and Mother Media: Hot and Cool Parenting in the 20th Century (MIT Press 2025). She is at work on her third book, All Freud's Children: A Story of Inheritance for Penguin Press. Articles have appeared in American Imago, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, Technology and Culture, Media, Culture, and Society, and elsewhere. Essays and criticism have appeared or are forthcoming from Dissent, The Guardian, Harper’s Magazine, n+1, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. In 2021, Zeavin co-founded The Psychosocial Foundation and is the Founding Editor of Parapraxis, a new popular magazine for psychoanalysis on the left. 

The video recording of this lecture is available on the Society for the Humanities Vimeo channel. 

Zeavin also presented the talk "The Distance Cure / The Far Voice" at the October 23rd Media Studies Colloquium. 

Friday, Oct. 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 2024-25 focal theme of Silence. Each presentation was followed by a Q&A. This conference was open to the public with breakfast, lunch, and dinner provided.

10 – 11:30 am PANEL 1 
Angelica Allen, Society Fellow; Africana Studies, Chapman University, “Narrating the Lives of Afro-Amerasians in the Philippines”

Brian Sengdala, Mellon Graduate Fellow; Performing & Media Arts, Cornell University, “Silent Transduction”

Dawn LaValle Norman, Society Fellow; Classics, Australian Catholic University, “Blushing, Speech and Silence in Late Ancient Philosophical Dialogues”

12 – 1:30 pm KEYNOTE 
Benjamin Piekut, Keynote Presenter; Music, Cornell University, “The Afterlives of Indeterminacy” 

3 – 4:30 pm PANEL 2 
Sara Warner, Faculty Fellow; Performing & Media Arts, Cornell University, “The Silent Majority:  Lorraine Hansberry’s Queer Closet Dramas”

Andrew Campana, Faculty Fellow; Asian Studies, Cornell University, “Silent Protagonists: Feminist Video Game Poetry in Japan"

Bianca Waked, Mellon Graduate Fellow; Philosophy, Cornell University, “The Limits of Curative Violence: Oralism and the Black Deaf American Experience”

Tuesday, Feb. 11, 5:00pm  
Guerlac Room, A.D. White House 

Samantha N. Sheppard, Associate Professor in the Department of Performing and Media Arts, College of Arts & Sciences, Cornell University

"Sanctuary from the Storm: Making (My) Room with The Torkelsons" 

This talk responded to Nick Salvato's call to reconsider how houses are foundational to television studies. As a domestic medium, television can link home and identity in numerous ways. Reflecting on her teenage scrapbook, "Sam & Friends," Sheppard approached this televisual link between home and self via an autotheoretical reading of the fictional home centered in the white family sitcom The Torkelsons (NBC, 1991-1993). She argued that her teenage scrapbook, which references the series,  functions as a self-portrait of domestic spacemaking with and through television spectatorship. Through an analysis of the The Torkelesons' domestic world as well as her own, Sheppard tuned into broader living practices, looking relations, and meaning-making processes for Black viewers and audiences of dominant white television. 

For more on Samantha and the background for this lecture, check out this article from A&S Communications. 

Samantha N. Sheppard is an associate professor of cinema and media studies in, and chair of, the Department of Performing and Media Arts, where she is also affliated with the Africana Studies and Reserch Center, the American Studies Program and the Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program. She is the author of Sporting Blackness: Race, Embodiment, and Critical Muscle Memory on Screen (University of California Press, 2020). She is co-editor of the anthologies From Madea to Media Mogul: Theorizing Tyler Perry (University Press of Mississippi, 2016) with TreaAndrea Russworm and Karen Bowdre and Sporting Realities: Critical Readings on the Sports Documentary (University of Nebraska Press, 2020) with Travis Vogan. More on Samantha Sheppard's research interests and work can be found via her department profile. 

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

Jane Bennett, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities, Departments of Comparative Literature and Political Science, Johns Hopkins University

"On Behalf of the Anexact: along the lines of Franz Kafka, Paul Klee, Len Lye"

This lecture was prompted by a recent announcement by the president of Bennett’s university that “data science” was to become a signature research focus, for faculty in the sciences and engineering but also the humanities. It is in the context of this boosterism that Bennett explored the extent to which the social, ethical, and lyrical value of the humanities is linked to its engagement with sources that are non-metrical, not isolable and essentially anexact, and thus are not well-described as “data.” The larger project seeks, ultimately, to conceptualize the subtle efficacy of the vague or cloudy and to articulate defend modes of research practice appropriate to it.

Is not one of the special talents of the humanities – and an important contribution to a democracy worth having, which requires a demos able to affirm or at least tolerate complexity – a careful attentiveness to what is subtle and anexact about cultural forms and their experiential effects, asks Bennett? What happens once sites of underdetermined meanings are re-framed as “data,” as, that is, aggregates of clearly demarcated entities rather than as processes whose fuzzy nodes resist an additive logic? Bennett’s lecture makes a start at a response by exploring some (literary, philosophical, visual-artistic) efforts to express and conceptualize the “anexact.” 

Read “Jane Bennett to Deliver Culler Lecture in Critical Theory,” for more on Bennett, her research, and the Annual Culler Theory Lecture.  

Jane Bennett is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University, with appointments in the Departments of Political Science & Comparative Thought and Literature. Bennett holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from University of Massachusetts, Amherst Her books include Influx & Efflux: Writing Up with Walt Whitman (Duke University Press, 2020); Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Duke University Press, 2010); The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics (Princeton University Press, 2001), Thoreau’s Nature: Ethics, Politics, and The Wild (Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), and Unthinking Faith and Enlightenment: Nature and the State in a Post-Hegelian Era (NYU Press, 1987). She is co-editor of several book collections.

In addition to this lecture, Jane Bennett also offered a workshop for graduate students on Thursday, March 20. Entitled "Comparative Thinking," the workshop, said Bennett, focused “specifically on the practice of trans-cultural ‘comparative conceptualization’ within humanities scholarship.”

Thursday, April 24

A.D. White House 

 “The Elephants of Dzanga Bai”: a pre-conference photo and sound installation by Ivonne Kienast (K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics) and Annie Lewandowski (Department of Music). In collaboration with the Society for the Humanities, this one-night installation engaged with the 2025-26 focal theme of "Silence" and kicked off the Society's program for the Annual Spring Fellows' Conference. 

“The Elephants of Dzanga Bai”

Situated in the Dzanga-Sangha Protected Area (DSPA) in the Central African Republic, the Dzanga Bai forest clearing is an exceptional window into the lives of the critically endangered forest elephant, the elusive gardener and architect of the Central African rainforest. The clearing hosts a 35-year long-term study on individually recognized elephants, providing unique opportunities to gather much needed conservation-relevant information to inform local and regional conservation strategies.

Elephants enter the clearing seeking minerals needed for their diet, and spend their days searching for those minerals in water pits. They also feed on grass and clay, bathe in mud, and use the space as a social arena, interacting with conspecifics of all ages.

At Dzanga Bai elephants become a canvas, and nature the greatest artist. Marvelous colors mix, and low frequency roars and infrasonic rumbles create a scene nowhere else to be seen, heard or felt. An ecstatic experience that awakens all of the senses.

Read "In 'Silence' spring conference, Fellows 'attend to what is note there'" to learn more about the installation and the 2024-25 Spring Fellows' Conference on Silence. 

Photographer Ivonne Kienast is a behavioral biologist who has spent the last 10 years in the central African rainforest working for wildlife conservation and engaging with local communities. Since 2021 she manages the research station at Dzanga Bai, training central African researchers, working with children from the local communities and applying passive acoustic monitoring on a landscape scale to inform the park authorities about illegal firearm activity, as well as about biodiversity in the area. She is part of the Elephant Listening Project of the K.Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics and collaborates in the field with the WWF and the central African government.

Sound installation artist Annie Lewandowski is a composer/performer, and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Music. Annie writes: “When Ivonne first shared her incredible photographs with me, I thought it would be fantastic to exhibit them in the acoustic space of the Dzanga Bai elephants. Today, we bring that space to you within the AD White House, in a setting where you can both hear and feel the elephants’ calls.” The recordings you experience today are from the Elephant Listening Project archive.

Thanks to Michael Ashkin, Alex Livingston, Kevin Ernste, John Eagle, Leslie Brack, the Elephant Listening Project, the Department of Music, and the Society for the Humanities.

Friday, April 25
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 2024-25 focal theme of Silence. Each presentation was followed by a Q&A. Open to the public..

10 – 11:30 am PANEL 1

 “Migration to the Moon, and Other Theories of Avian Absence” 
Julia Mueller, Society Fellow, Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago

 “Silent, Silenced, and Silencing: Black, Deaf and Bling Education in the Jim Crow South” Jenifer Barclay, Society Fellow, History, University at Buffalo

“Transnational Historical Novels and Human Rights History” Cassandra Falke, Society Fellow, English Literature, UiT-The Arctic University of Norway 

11:45 – 12:45 pm PANEL 2   

 “The Cold War, Capitalism, and the Color Line: Reading Silence in The Human Condition” Patchen Markell, Faculty Fellow, Government, Cornell University

“Sounding Khmerican Life in Straight Thru Cambotown” Brian Sengdala, Mellon Graduate Fellow, Performing & Media Arts, Cornell University

2:00 – 3:00 pm PANEL 3 

 “C’Est Si Bon: The Queer Pas de Trois of Lorraine Hansberry’s ‘Chanson du Konallis’” Sara Warner, Faculty Fellow, Performing & Media Arts, Cornell University

 “Is Yeshaya Silent?” Jonathan Boyarin, Faculty Fellow, Anthropology, Cornell University

3:15 – 4:45 pm KEYNOTE 

 “Re-storying Silence: Mad, Deaf and Disability Histories” Susan Burch, American Studies, Middlebury College

Susan Burch, Professor of American Studies, Middlebury College, delivered the keynote address at the Society for the Humanities' Spring Fellows' Conference. 

This talk centered on life stories of Black deaf people detained at a state mental hospital in North Carolina, and of Native Americans incarcerated at a federal asylum in South Dakota. Burch traced some of the multivalent relationships silence has to institutionalization, institutionalized people, and to their kin on the outside.  Centering on life stories and drawing on critical disability, Mad, and deaf history, Burch revealed wide-ranging meanings and functions of silences that cross generations and reach into the present day.

Susan Burch's research and teaching interests focus on histories of deaf, disability, Mad, race, ethnicity, Indigeneity, and gender and sexuality. Material culture, oral history, and inclusive design play an important role in her courses. Her latest book, which has recently received the National Women’s Studies Association Alison Piepmeier Book Prize, and the Disability History Association’s Outstanding Book of 2022, Committed: Native Families, Institutionalization, and Remembering (University of North Carolina Press, 2021) centers on peoples’ lived experiences inside and outside the Canton Asylum, a federal psychiatric institution created specifically to detain American Indians. To learn more about Burch and her research, click here. 

Read "In 'Silence' spring conference, Fellows 'attend to what is note there'" to learn more about the 2024-25 Spring Fellows' Conference on Silence.