What commonalities can be found among the topics of anarchist movements, medieval sculptures, and queer kinship? Join us to learn how these and other scholarly topics relate to the Society for the Humanities’ 2025-26 focal theme of Scale at the Society’s annual spring conference on Friday, April 24, from 9:30am-4:30pm. Scale provokes us to consider how concepts of proportionality shape our lives, ideas, arguments, objects, and histories. Seven fellows from a broad mix of humanities fields will present their research on “Scale” during the conference, which will be held at the A.D. White House’s Guerlac Room. A keynote lecture will be delivered by Cornell’s Nick Salvato, Frederic J. Whiton Professor of Liberal Studies in the Department of Performing and Media Arts. The event is free and open to the public, and refreshments will be served throughout the day.
The Society for the Humanities, one of the oldest humanities centers of its type in the U.S., brings together annual cohorts of interdisciplinary scholars from external universities and from within Cornell. Fellows meet weekly throughout one academic year to critique work-in-progress on research relating to a shared focal theme. The annual spring conference represents the Fellows’ opportunity to share their work with a broader audience.
Featured presenters from outside Cornell include visiting fellows Luke Fidler, assistant professor of art history at the University of Southern California; Tiffany Hale, assistant professor of religion at Barnard College; and Teagan Bradway, professor of English at the State University of New York at Cortland. Cornell faculty presenters from the College of Arts and Sciences include fellows Ernesto Bassi, associate professor of history; Shaoling Ma, associate professor of Asian studies; and Benjamin Anderson, associate professor of the history of art and classics. Spencer Beswick, Postdoctoral Associate in the Humanities Scholars Program, will also present. Each fellow will have twenty minutes at the podium, followed by Q&A from invited Cornell faculty respondents and audience members.
A concluding keynote lecture, “Scale’s Remainders; or, Television’s Impossible Floor Plans” will be delivered by Cornell’s Nick Salvato, Frederic J. Whiton Professor of Liberal Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences. Salvato states that in this talk, “I turn my attention to what I am provisionally calling “television’s impossible floor plans,” manifested at such sites as Mark Bennett’s book TV Sets: Fantasy Blueprints of Classic TV Homes, Iñaki Aliste Lizarralde’s drawings of floor plans for television houses and apartments—which he describes as “deviations”—and the recent HGTV reality series A Very Brady Renovation.”
The full conference schedule is available on the Cornell Events Calendar.
The seven fellows presenting represent a portion of the Scale cohort; many fellows presented their work at a fall conference in November. The full list of 2025-26 Society Fellows with links to descriptions of individual research projects is online.
