2026-2027 events

Tuesday, Sept. 8, 5pm
Guerlac Room, A.D. White House

Irving Goh, Professor of Comparative Literature, Emory University

"Living On After Failure"

Goh shared his thoughts on failure as failure, that is, failure without recuperation, or failure as true negativity. Such a thinking of failure as a thorough impasse not only resists narratives of progress, ideologies of success, and their accompanying notions of grit and resilience, but also registers, at the ontological level, the affective structure of existence. This might also mean reckoning with failure as an irreducible or indelible element of existence, and this can no doubt have implications for the question of a life after, if not always with, failure, that is, a question of survival, as this year’s theme for the Society would have it.

Irving Goh is Professor of Comparative Literature at Emory University. He is the author, most recently, of "Living On After Failure" (Duke UP, 2025) and "Touching Literature, or the Experience of the Limit" (Cornell UP, 2026). His other books are "The Reject: Community, Politics, and Religion after the Subject" (Fordham UP, 2014), which won the MLA 23rd Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Studies, "L’existence prépositionnelle" (Galilée, 2019), and with Jean-Luc Nancy, "The Deconstruction of Sex" (Duke UP, 2021). He was a recipient of a National Humanities Center fellowship in 2022/23 and was named a Franke Visiting Faculty Fellow at the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale in 2018.

Thursday, October 29

Guerlac Room, A.D. White House

Opening this year's Fall Fellows Conference on the 2026-2027 Society for the Humanities focal theme of "Survival," Beans Velocci delivered the keynote address. 

5:00PM Keynote

Beans Velocci, assistant professor in History and Sociology of Science and Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

"Beams Aimed Directly at the Reproductive Organs: Radiation, Gonads, and Trans Mutations in the Cold War" 

American Cold War radiation biologists were obsessed with gonads. Testes and ovaries, containing the genetic heritage and future of humanity, were at constant risk of bombardment by the invisible emanations of x-ray machines, fallout, and nuclear reactors, and as such occupied a central place in studies of the biological effects of radiation. As the scientists tasked with figuring out the impact of radiation on the human body drew on their collective backgrounds in eugenic science, gonads came to serve as the locus of threats to heredity in the far future, holding within them the literal seeds of the downfall of civilization as accumulating mutations diminished human vitality. This talk situates 1950s nuclear anxieties about gonads in the context of the coeval public transition of Christine Jorgensen—herself routinely compared to an atomic bomb—and proposes the juxtaposition of atomic and trans history as a new way to understand the reconstitution of sex in the mid-twentieth century.

Beans Velocci is an assistant professor in History and Sociology of Science and Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Their work uses queer, trans, and feminist methods to interrogate classification systems and how they become regarded as biological truths. They recently published their first book, Sex Isn't Real: The Invention of an Incoherent Binary (Duke University Press, 2026), and they are working on two new projects—one, tentatively titled The Survival of Man: Nuclear Planning and the Future of Sex, that looks at anxieties about post-nuclear war reproduction and repopulation, and the other, as yet untitled, on the STS scholar Leigh Star and lesbian feminist critiques of science. Beans' other work can be found in Transgender Studies Quarterly, Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, the American Naturalist, and Cell, among others.

This year's cohort of Fellows at the Society for the Humanities gave presentations on works-in-progress on the 2026-2027 focal theme of "Survival", following the opening Keynote Lecture from Beans Velocci. Fellows gave presentations on Friday, Oct. 30. Each presentation was followed by a Q&A. This conference was open to the public with lunch and a reception provided. 

10:30-11:30am Panel 1

• Pamela Karimi, Faculty Fellow, Architecture, Cornell University, "Survival by Design: Desert Architecture at the End of the World"
• Ivanna Yi, Faculty Fellow, Asian Studies, Cornell University, "Dreaming of a Sentient Land: More-than-Human Kinship in Han Kang's The Vegetarian"

11:45am 12:30pm Panel 2

• Jennifer Rabedeau, Humanities Scholars Postdoctoral Associate, Cornell University, "Thomas Hardy’s Palimpsests"
• Amanda Gaggioli, Society Fellow, History, University of Memphis, "Historicizing Political Geology and Deep Time"

2:00 - 3:30pm Panel 3

• Jamie Budnick, Faculty Fellow, Sociology, Cornell University, "Carrying Capacity: On (Not) Parenting in the Era of Climate Change"
• Jorden Sanders, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Literatures in English, Cornell University, "Vibratory Matter: Ecoacoustic Sympathy & Frances E. W. Harper's Ear for the End of the World"
• Andrew Dufton, Society Fellow, Archaeology, Dickinson University, "Archaeological contributions to the long-term study of neighborhood life"

Tuesday, November 3

Guerlac Room, A.D. White House

Patricia M. Keller, Associate Professor, Romance Studies, College of Arts & Sciences, Cornell University

"Orpheus’s Light Table: notes on photography and grief"

How are photographs never static, dead objects but always dynamic, ongoing relations?

This lecture is a meditation on the relationship between photography and grief. Organized across three distinct yet interlinking sections, the meditation begins with the history of photography, tracing the medium’s indebtedness to, and entanglements with, the logic and language of shadows. From this genealogy, the meditation turns to the figure of Orpheus, whose descent into the underworld, or realm of shadows, in order to rescue his lost love, and his failure to do so by looking back, uniquely position him as photographer-in-grief. Here, Orpheus’s “failure” is reimagined as an act of love, a photographic survival tactic to illuminate, rather than reverse, the experience of loss. The physical object of the light table is also a phenomenological one and is understood here as the necessary apparatus for illumination. In the third part of this talk, the light table becomes the mediating device through which Orpheus transforms from seeker-of-shadows into guardian-of-light—a metamorphosis that I connect to personal ruminations on the act of looking back, through and with the inherited photographs in my own family archive.

Photography’s well-rehearsed connections to death and afterlife serve as starting points, but the terrain this talk explores is comprised of critical questions around photography’s relationship to mourning, survival and love.

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.