2025-26 Events

Thursday, Nov. 6
Guerlac Room, A.D. White House 

Opening this year's Fall Fellows Conference on the 2025-26 Society for the Humanities focal theme of "Scale," Jenny Sabin delivered the keynote address. 

5:00 pm KEYNOTE

Jenny E. Sabin, Arthur L. and Isabel B. Wiesenberger Professor in Architecture, and Chair of the Design Tech Department in the College of Architecture, Art and Planning, Cornell University 

"Biosynthetic Design: Towards Adaptive Architecture" 

o address pressing issues in our built and natural environments, architects and designers must develop new models that respond to social, environmental, and technological imperatives. This shift requires a departure from traditional research toward hybrid, transdisciplinary approaches and collaborative frameworks. Advances in computation, visualization, material intelligence, and fabrication are transforming how we design and build across disciplines and scales, forging new intersections between the digital, physical, and biological realms.

This lecture presents ongoing research spanning biology, materials science, fiber science, fashion, engineering, and architecture. Sabin’s work investigates material and formal intersections among architecture, science, and emerging technologies, revealing nonlinear modes of fabrication and self-assembly that operate from surface to structure. These projects open new possibilities for redefining architecture within broader frameworks of generative design, sustainability, and advanced fabrication. The keynote will highlight methodologies, prototypes, and architectural projects developed by Sabin and collaborators, including adaptive building skins, textile and ceramic assemblies, and responsive architectural systems that dynamically reconfigure their own performance in response to local environmental conditions and human interaction.

Jenny Sabin is a professor of architecture and chair of the design tech department at Cornell University and is an architectural designer whose work is at the forefront of a new direction for 21st-century architectural practice — one that investigates the intersections of architecture and science and applies insights and theories from biology and mathematics to the design of material structures. Sabin specializes in adaptive architecture, bioinspired design, material computation, programmable matter, sustainability, responsive materials, digital ceramics, biomimicry, and Kirigami geometry. More on Sabin, including selected works, can be found via her department profile. 

Friday, Nov. 7 
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 2025-26 focal theme of "Scale", following the opening Keynote Lecture from Jenny E. Sabin. Fellows gave presentations on Friday, Nov, 7. Each presentation was followed by a Q&A. This conference was open to the public with lunch and a reception provided. 

1 – 2:30 pm PANEL 1 
David Leheny, Society Fellow, Asia-Pacific Studies, Waseda University; "Scaling Injustices as National History: Site and Victimhood in Clint Eastwood’s The Outlaw Josey Wales and Okamoto Kihachi’s Akage"

Ernesto Bassi, Faculty Fellow, History, Cornell University; 
"A Fugitive Red: Santa Marta’s Brazilwood in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World"

Yue Zhao, Mellon Graduate Fellow, Science and Technology Studies, Cornell University; "Cultivating Potential: Potential Science and Embodied Laws of Scientific Discovery"

2:45 – 3:45 pm PANEL 2

Elizabeth Barrios, Society Fellow, Modern Languages and Culture, Albion College; "Plastic Environmentalisms"

Isabel Calderón Reyes, Mellon Graduate Fellow, Romance Studies, Cornell University; "Shared Terrains: Children, Landscape and the Frame of Togetherness" 

4 – 5:00 pm PANEL 3

Leif Weatherby, Society Fellow, German, New York University; "Language at Scale"

Michell Chresfield, Faculty Fellow, Africana Studies and Research Center, Cornell University; "Scalar Sovereignties: Afro-Native Histories and the Uneven Terrain of Recognition"

Tuesday, Nov. 11 
Guerlac Room, A.D. White House 

Stacey A. Langwick, Associate Professor of Anthropology,  College of Arts & Sciences, Cornell University

“Healing in a Toxic World: Reimagining the Times and Spaces of the Therapeutic"

What does it mean to heal in a toxic world? How is that which counts as “therapeutic” shifting with the growing acknowledgment that the extractive relations fueling contemporary economies and animating modern life undermine possibilities for future survival? In Tanzania, this double-bind defining our contemporary moment is forging creative responses that reimagine the territorial and the corporeal, posing configurations of care that invite alternative forms of sovereignty in the service of both ecological and bodily healing. Social-therapeutic projects are challenging the ways that “health” conceptualizes and governs the entanglement of bodies and ecologies. 

A charismatic banana, kitarasa, has emerged as a key player in both entrepreneurial and nongovernmental experiments striving to heal bodies and soils in a world where that which enables survival in the near term, undermines it for future generations. Articulating the efficacy of kitarasa, and the social-therapeutic projects in which it is entangled, requires decentering 19th and 20th century articulations of toxicity and its relation with remedy. The story of Dorkia Enterprises, a small business, working to commercialize kitarasa flour as a “therapeutic” food reveals the tensions between the economic and the ecological, as it is caught up in efforts to heal land and bodies. Animated by connections to international food sovereignty initiatives, it reimagines the scalar work of economy and disrupts the forms of property on which it depends. 

This talk moves between (1) Dorkia Enterprises’ elaboration of kitarasa through partial engagements with the state and the market and (2) an effort to think with kitarasa and the liveliness in its insistent excesses of these logics. As this charismatic banana folds the scales of bodies and lands into one another, it incites the theorizing of relations among toxicity, healing, and memory.

Stacey Langwick is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Cornell University. Her most recent book Medicines That Feed Us: Plants, Healing and Sovereignty in a Toxic World is forthcoming from Duke University Press (Feb 2026). She is also author of Bodies, Politics and African Healing: The Matter of Maladies in Tanzania (2011) and co-editor of Medicine, Mobility and Power in Global Africa (2012). Her ethnographic work has led to co-leading a collaborative international design project that invites a rethinking and reworking of healing on and of the planet in the face of climate change. Uzima: Wellness has begun with the cultivation of a teaching, research, and healing garden that reimagines medicine’s land relations in a major teaching-research hospital in Tanzania. The land-based pedagogy emerging from this project offers the garden as a central site of medical training, together with the clinic, classroom, and laboratory. Prof. Langwick teaches classes on medicine and healing, the body and bodiliness, toxicity, postcolonial science, critical plant studies and anthropological methods.

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.