The Cultivation of Knowledge - Cornell University

TheCultivationofKnowledgeCORNELL AND THE CHANGING FACE OF THE HUMANITIES1

12ContentsI N T R O D U C T I O NTHE PLACE OF THE HUMANITIES IN THE RESEARCH UNIVERSITYby Cornell President Hunter Rawlings and Provost Biddy MartinCULTIVATING MORAL KNOWLEDGEHow Cornell helps students answer the question “Who am I, andwhat should I do with my life?”1868Andrew Dickson White,Cornell’s first president,appoints Willard Fiske asthe first university librarian,first director of CornellUniversity Press, and professorof north Europeanlanguages. Fiske developeda reference collection similarto Oxford University’sBodleian.48101214161819202426272832F E A T U R E SBRICKS AND MORTARBOARDSThe university advances its investments in facilities, faculty, andprograms for the humanitiesWRITING IN THE SERVICE OF LEARNINGThe John S. Knight Institute emphasizes writing as integral toevery academic disciplineCLASSICS: THE ORIGINAL INTERDISCIPLINARY PROGRAMOne of Cornell’s oldest departments continues to attract studentsSEEING ENGLISH IN A NEW LIGHTYoung people “crave literature,” although it sometimes comes inunexpected formsProfile: Yujin David Chung, engineering student andfiction writerTHE PURSUIT OF WISDOMThe Sage School applies ancient philosophy to today’s problemsProfile: Student Jacque Darrell looks to Kant for guidanceETHICS AND PUBLIC LIFEExploring the moral dimensions of public and private decisionsCRUCIAL, CENTRAL, ENDURINGThe relevance of the humanities in a high-tech worldWHERE DO THEY GO FROM HERE?A thorough grounding in the humanities helps prepare students forlife, whatever their life’s workENLARGING OUR CAPACITY TO IMAGINECritical theory is part of the fabric of many undergraduate coursesProfile: Naoki Sakai Traces theory from East to WestANCIENT ARTS, MODERN METHODSKaren Brazell’s database takes a global view of the performing artsFROM MEDIEVAL TO HIP-HOPJudith Peraino rocks musicology—and students line up to learnBRIDGING THE GAPSalah Hassan hopes to broaden the field of art historyMORE THAN WHAT MEETS THE EYEBorn of art history, a new concentration in visual studies draws onan array of disciplinesProfile: The Andersons pursue parallel paths in visualitySPOTLIGHT ON NEW FACULTY

The Place of thein theResearchUniversityHorrifying events like the September 11, 2001,attack on New York City and Washington oftengive renewed urgency to the study of the humanitiesand to liberal arts education. In times of crisis, peopleturn to poetry, music, photography, writing, religiousritual, and public forms of mourning and remembrancefor comfort and understanding. In the aftermath ofSeptember 11, members of the Cornell communitysought analysis from experts in international politics,scholars of Islamic culture, historians of the Middle East,philosophers, and scholars of U.S. culture. Liberal artseducation and scholarship in the humanities cannot provideany one of us with all the knowledge we need atmoments like those, but they can develop our capacityfor analytic thought, moral imagination, emotional generosity,and creative expression—the tools we need inorder to acquire, integrate, and make good use of knowledge.Humanities fields deserve credit for broadening ouroutlook beyond ourselves and our traditional definitionsof culture. Courses on Western civilization now attend tothe racial, ethnic, sexual, and gender differences thathave shaped our cultures despite accounts of our historythat exclude them. Scholarship and teaching in humanitiesfields emphasize the many different cultural landscapesacross the globe and their impact on one anotheracross long periods of time. Literature, music, and artdepartments have become more interdisciplinary, broadeningthe study of culture to include not only canonicalworks, but also everyday interactions, popular culture,and conscious and unconscious beliefs. Literary and culturaltheorists have refined traditional tools and developednew critical methods for investigating how culturalmeanings are constructed, deployed, and changed, atwhat cost as well as with what benefits. By expanding ourperception of ourselves and of others, humanists havegiven us not only a greater breadth of knowledge for itsown sake; they have been catalysts for change.While humanists at Cornell and other major researchuniversities have been engaged in work with evidentsocial and ethical significance, they also continue toexplore and preserve the less obviously instrumental,even the anti-instrumental, value of language, art, music,literature, and philosophy. Humanities research and writingare not only of their time but often at odds with it,valuing and analyzing aesthetic and intellectual achievementsthat have no one proper time, providing critiquesof the self-evidence or familiarity that cultural objects acquire with use. Humanist scholarship traces the history of differentcultural media, examining their constraints and exploiting their possibilities. Non-instrumental approaches to themaking and interpretation of culture enhance what composer Steven Stuckey has called “aesthetic intelligence,” openingup the potential for apprehending the world more fully, for thinking differently, and for understanding in unfamiliar and,ultimately, more complex ways. Literature is heterodox; it is marked by analytical reasoning and by imaginative leaps.The imaginative has its advantages over scientific ways of knowing, not because it is anti-logical but because it has itsown ways of engaging the emotions and pushing the limits of the logical so we can render intelligible that which has notyet been thought. Ultimately, the instrumental and non-instrumental uses of the arts fold into one another and complicatethe distinctions we try to draw between them.As a major research university, Cornell has long had strong programs in the arts and humanities and these programsremain at the center of university life. Many of these programs pursue time-honored methods of understanding languagesand cultures. Some have made interdisciplinary work on culture a priority. Still others preserve our long-standingstrengths in literary and aesthetic theory. Cornell is also developing new approaches and new modes of scholarship thatwill bring the strengths of humanistic thought to the complex issues we now face. The effort to build the Program inEthics and Public Life is one example of an opportunity to provide educational and research opportunities at the intersectionof a number of disciplines, while bridging the gap between analytical and practical approaches to ethical questions.Scientific developments engage ethicists as well as other humanists interested in the significance of moral reasoningfor developments in the sciences and technology and in the implications of scientific discovery for our definitions ofwhat it means to be human.We invite you to learn more about some of Cornell’s work in the humanities through this special publication.1– PRESIDENT HUNTER RAWLINGS AND PROVOST BIDDY MARTIN

Cultivating“MoralKnowledge ”by Franklin Crawford1873 1875Cornell Sage Chapel awards opens. a doctorof Designed philosophy by degree Cornell to professorfemale Charles graduate, Babcock, Emma theitsfirstEastman.chapelThathas sinceyearhostedthe cornerstoneis laid for Sageavast range of speakers,College for Women.EndowedamongbythemHenry19thSagecenturyandorator housed Henry in a Ward building Beecherdesigned and 20th by century Charles civilBabcock, rights activist Cornell’s and first Georgia professorcongressman of architecture, John Lewis. thecollege opens its doors in1874. (Today Sage Hall ishome to the JohnsonGraduate School ofManagement.)One of the specific functions of the humanities at Cornell is the cultivation of whatPresident Hunter Rawlings calls “moral knowledge.”“The development of moral knowledge demands that each of us answer the ultimate Socraticquestion: ‘Who am I, and what should I do with my life?’” Rawlings said, in his October 2000State of the University address to the Cornell Board of Trustees. “In universities, we should notforget, a major part of our obligation is to help 18-year-olds answer that question.”It’s a mission that Cornell’s teaching and administrative community has pursued with vigorfrom the outset. Cornell endowed the nation’s first university chairs in American literature, musicology,and American history, and was the first American university to teach Asian languages.Today the liberal arts thrive at Cornell, often in forms that defy traditional notions of humanities.A new undergraduate concentration in visual studies draws on art history, critical theory, the socialand natural sciences, and fine arts to create a cross-disciplinary approach to the study of visual art,new media, performance, and perception. A course called Visual Culture and Social Theory,taught by government professor Susan Buck-Morss, brings the tools of critical analysis to bear onthe myriad images that Americans are exposed to every day. The burgeoning American Studiesprogram, under the direction of Professor Larry Moore, is the focus of renewed efforts at interdisciplinarycooperation and coordinated study in the history, literature, and politics of the UnitedStates.The programs may be new, but the tradition of interdisciplinary scholarship dates back toCornell’s inception. In his Plan of Organization for the university, Cornell’s first president, AndrewDickson White, proposed faculty lines that interpenetrated, with “one professor frequentlyextending through two or three departments.”2

At least 14 departments within the College of Arts and Sciences belong to those branches ofstudy that characterize the creative arts and humanities. The departments of English, Philosophy,and Classics maintain a traditionally strong presence. Several departments embrace both the humanitiesand the social sciences, including Government, History, and Near Eastern Studies, as well asthe Department of Art in the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning.Courses with a distinctively humanistic flavor can be found throughout the university, largely dueto the humanistic questions that arise in other fields. Scientists in Wilson Laboratory teach coursesnicknamed “Physics for Poets.” In science and technology studies, there’s a waiting list for a coursecalled Biology and Society. Students in Astronomy 490, a seminar on “critical thinking” originallytaught by the late Carl Sagan and revived by astronomer Yervant Terzian, ponder questions moretypical of a philosophy course: “Can machines think?” “Is immortality around the corner?” “What isthe debate between science and religion?”“The teaching of science or scientific thought is not the most important thing, nor the goal of theclass,” says Terzian, the David Duncan Professor in the Physical Sciences. “[The goal] is the abilityto critically think about various issues.” Likewise, Gail Fine, chair of the Sage School of Philosophyat Cornell, finds that “Studying philosophy enables one to present, assess, and analyze argumentscritically, which is a vital skill in any discipline. Our graduates do extremely well in law school andmedical school, but they also find the training relevant in whatever career they pursue.”Cornell’s administration—composed, itself, of many humanists—is a strong advocatefor the study of ethics and moral reasoning throughout the disciplines. More than 60courses at Cornell include discussion of the social, ethical, or legal aspects of biology.The interdisciplinary program on Ethics and Public Life, led by Professor MichelleMoody-Adams, plays an active role within the “new biology,” and Moody-Adams is animportant presence on the multidisciplinary committee that oversees the Ethical, Legal,and Social Issues project (ELSI) connected to the Cornell Genomics Initiative.Philip Lewis, dean of Cornell’s College of Arts and Sciences, observes that the futureof the humanities in the research university will depend on collaboration with science,social sciences, and technology. In a paper titled “Institutional Humanities: TheMarginal Center,” Lewis writes: “We have long recognized and often demonstrated thepossibility of integrating the humanities and the arts with science and technology inways that rationalize their coexistence and seek common, or at least intersecting, horizonsfor the research and problem-solving they pursue.” Lewis has urged that thisapproach be “asserted as the overarching collaboration that should permeate the wholeof a university’s educational program.”A major step in that direction was taken when Cornell Provost Biddy Martin introduceda mandatory summer reading program for first-year students. The debut assignmentwas Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, an interdisciplinarytour de force embracing the humanities, the social sciences, and the naturalsciences. The vibrant discussions that resulted serve as a model for the kind of crossdisciplinarydialogue and diverse scholarship cultivated by the humanities at Cornell.Expanding the scope of the humanities also means pushing beyond the boundaries defined by“Western Civilization.” For more than 25 years, the humanities at Cornell have advanced academicstudy on formerly marginalized peoples and cultures, leading to the development of gender andethnic studies. From the civil rights movement and the campus agitation of the late 1960s rosethe highly respected Africana Studies and Research Center, now under the direction of Don C.Ohadike, associate professor of Africana studies. The Latino Studies Program, led by MariaCristina Garcia, is building a rigorous academic program. Assistant Professor Amy Villarejo holds ajoint appointment in women’s studies and film, teaching courses in feminist thought, the study ofTV and queer theory, and film studies.The wealth of offerings within the various departments, programs, and facilities at Cornell putsan expansive spin on the word “liberal” in liberal arts. Undergraduates chart their own course ofstudy in a college that offers one of the richest, most abundant, and intellectually diverse curriculumsavailable at any university in the world.Andrew Dickson White’s Plan of Organization served as the template for the first trulyAmerican university based on “the close union of liberal and practical instruction,” as he put it.What made the humanities at Cornell especially American was White’s educational philosophy,which emphasized modern courses of study—modern languages, literature, history, and classics—alongside instruction in science and technology. White himself was not just the university’s firstpresident—he also served as its first professor of history. President Rawlings, a classicist by training,keeps that tradition fresh by teaching a course on the political, social, and intellectual life of5th century B.C. Athens.The humanities are alive and well at Cornell. ❧3

proposal, Martin writes that “Thefuture of the humanities and social sciences inhigher education depends on serious efforts to highlightthe enduring benefits of a liberal arts education, with its potentialto promote and, when necessary, reconceptualize citizenship in quicklychanging national and international contexts . . . The faculty and studentsneed support for the study of such pressing issues as technology, global economicdevelopments, changing demographics, socioeconomic inequality, environmentalsustainability, racial and ethnic division, and meaningful political participation. At thesame time, Cornell will continue to reinforce the significance of aesthetic intelligence andcreativity.”Building on SuccessIn addition to faculty development and the creation of new programs, Cornell’s dedication to thehumanities is demonstrated through large-scale renovations and new building projects. One exampleis Olive Tjaden Hall, which reopened in 1998 as the new home of the Department of Art in theCollege of Architecture, Art, and Planning. The $8 million dollar project reconfigured and modernizedthe 42,500-square-foot interior space for specially equipped multimedia technology classrooms, a studiofor performance and installation art, roomy, well-ventilated photo labs, a 20-student darkroom, andprint-making workshops. The ventilation and fire protection systems were updated and an oversized elevator—toaccommodate large works of art—was installed. All this was accomplished while retainingTjaden Hall’s historic facade.ment at the time of the renovations.Improvements include 20 new practicerooms and an electronic secu-“Our belief inrity system that gives students the importancelate-night access to the prac-of the liberal artsis reflected in ourfaculty, our facilities,and the priority we attachto teaching in these fields.”tice rooms while keepingthe rest of the buildingoff-limits. Thirteennew teaching studios provide space for individual instruction.The Sidney Cox Music Library is a state-of-the-art facilitywith 15 streamed digital sound stations, an Internetaccessiblecomputer lab with MIDI keyboardsand music software, andWhite Hall (foreground) underwent$12 million worth of renovationsthat modernized the interior withoutchanging the building’s historicexterior.DistinguishedA similar transformation has occurred in White Hall; the interior of the 135-year-old building has beencompletely redesigned. Project manager Gary Wilhelm says the $12 million project “is not a restorationbut a sympathetic renovation that retains the 19th century character of the building while improving it.”The first floor holds classrooms and offices, with more seminar rooms and areas for graduate students inthe basement. Offices for the departments of Government, Near Eastern Studies, Art History, and theVisual Studies Program occupy the upper three floors. The Finlay Gallery, formerly located in GoldwinSmith Hall, moved to the fourth floor of White Hall.Meanwhile, designs are being completed for renovating Bailey Hall. The venerable building is theprincipal concert space for Cornell music ensembles and visiting artists. Built in 1913, it also serves as alecture hall and movie theater, and houses the campus offices of the Cornell Fingerlakes Credit Union.The $13 million project includes replacement of the antiquated heating and wiring systems and installationof air conditioning and new auditorium seats. Bathrooms, stairs, and aisles will be made handicapaccessible. Exterior improvements include restored concrete steps, promenades, and cornices.In October 2001, the university celebrated the dedication of the $19 million renovation and expansionof Lincoln Hall on the Arts Quad. The buildingrepresents a significant development in thehistory of Cornell’s Department of Music, whichcelebrates its 100th anniversary in 2003.“A wonderful musical environment hasbeen created, with music-making right nextto music research and study,” says MarkScatterday, who was chair of the depart-CORNELLIANSWilliam Strunk Ph.D. 1896,educator and editor; authorof the classic writing manualElements of Style, whichwent on to become theessential book for writersand editors of English.Frank Gannett 1898, newspaperpublisher, founder ofthe Gannett chain of newspapers.Hu Shih ’14, philosopher,poet, scholar, statesman;championed vernacularChinese as a literary language.– President Hunter RawlingsState of the University address, Oct. 27, 20005

eading spaces with Internet connection ports. A new wing includesthe two-story, 2,850-square-foot Neylan Rehearsal Hall, 600 squarefeet of space for instrument and music storage, and another roomfor chamber rehearsals. A climate-control system pampers temperature-and humidity-sensitive instruments such as music professorMalcolm Bilson’s fortepianos. The Office of the Provost has allocatedsignificant resources toward the purchase of two new organs—one large 18th century-style instrument and a smaller 17th centurystyleinstrument—for teaching and performance.“We now offer first-rate facilities,” says Scatterday. “It helps toenhance the whole philosophy that the arts are important and ofgreat benefit to a liberal arts education.”The College of Architecture, Art, and Planning is looking aheadto its new quarters: the $25 million Milstein Hall, designed bySteven Holl Architects of New York. The initial plan calls for aseven-story cube-shaped building with a northern facade made ofclear glass to enhance lake and gorge views.In the midst of all this construction activity, other Cornell facilitiescontinue to function smoothly to enhance instruction in the artsand humanities. One example is the Schwartz Center for thePerforming Arts, located at the university’s southernmost border.Opened in 1989 and recently renamed for longtime Cornell benefactorsSheila W. and Richard J. Schwartz, the marbled home ofCornell’s Department of Theatre, Film and Dance houses one ofthe region’s premier performance spaces, the 475-seat KiplingerTheatre. The center also boasts two small flexible theaters anddance studios, film editing and showing rooms, lighting and soundlaboratories, costume design and scene shops, classrooms, readingand meeting rooms, and administrative offices.Cornell’s Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art is first of all a teachingmuseum, where instructors from art and art history to Romancestudies, from religious studies and anthropology to math and engineering,work with the museum’s education department to organizevisits. Architecture students draw the building—which wasdesigned by I. M. Pei—and the art objects themselves provide topicsfor freshman writing class assignments. Students work as internsin curatorial research, children’s programs, and marketing. Themuseum brings artists to campus to lecture, to critique art studentportfolios, and to meet for informal discussions with undergraduates.For the past four years, the Johnson has worked with theCornell Institute for Digital Collections at Cornell Library creatinga searchable database of more than 18,000 images, with the goal ofoffering online access to most of the 30,000 objects in the museum’scollection in the near future. The Johnson’s 2000–01 year wasmarked by extraordinary acquisitions in painting, prints, sculpture,and photography, including two works by Picasso.Cornell’s Commitment to the LettersCornell’s commitment to the humanities is not just a matter ofgrants and building projects. The university recently became thefirst in the nation to support the international City of Asylum programfor writers. The program supports oppressed writers whosework, culture, and even language are threatened with annihilation.This year, Cornell joined forces with the International Parliamentof Writers and the Ithaca City of Asylum Project (a nonprofit groupassociated with Cornell’s Center for Religion, Ethics, and SocialPolicy) by providing funds for the arrival of Yi Ping, exiled ChineseA.A. D. WhiteBuilding Investments in the Humanities1925Edwin A. (“Ned”) Burtt,philosophy professor, publishesThe MetaphysicalFoundations of ModernPhysical Science (Harcourt,Brace & Co). The book goeson to become a classic textin philosophy study.(Department of Theatre, Film and Dance)New construction, $25 million. Completed: 1985Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts(Department of Art) Renovation, $8Olive Tjaden Hallmillion. Completed: 1998Lincoln HallWhite Hall(Department of Music) Renovation and expansion,$19 million. Completed: 2000(departments of Government, Near Eastern Studies, History of Art)Renovation, $12 million. Completed: 2002Bailey Hall(lecture and performing arts venue)Renovation, $13 million. Start date: 2003Milstein Hall(College of Architecture, Art, and Planning)New construction, $25 million. Start date: 2003Total= $102 million6

poet, essayist, and playwright. With Cornell’s assistance, Ithaca is now the27th City of Asylum worldwide and the first in New York state. Yi Ping willlive in Ithaca for two years with his family while teaching at Cornell.Other recent developments include creation of a Visiting Writer-in-Residence Program, a cooperative arrangement between the Department ofEnglish and the Office of Student and Academic Services that provides atemporary home for visiting writers who are teaching in the English department.In addition, writers in Cornell’s Creative Writing Program, as well asCornell faculty, present frequent readings as part of their routine activities.“The arts and humanities perform a deep and essential role that goes tothe heart of universities, and to the heart of individual women and men,”President Rawlings declared in a 1999 speech. With bricks and mortar, peopleand programs, Cornell has continued its tradition of supporting andenhancing that role into the 21st century. ❧DistinguishedCORNELLIANSE. B. White ’21, New Yorkeressayist, author of belovedchildren’s books Charlotte’sWeb and The Trumpet of theSwan; revised WilliamStrunk’s classic writingmanual, Elements of Style.Pearl S. Buck M.A. ’25,novelist, author of The GoodEarth, which won thePulitzer Prize in literaturein 1932, and first Americanwoman to win the NobelPrize in literature (1938).Margaret Bourke White’27, renowned photojournalistand war correspondentfor Life magazine and firstphotographer for Fortunemagazine.D. WhiteEudora Welty, author, 1984–90Professors-at-LargeThe Andrew Dickson White Professors-at-Large program, named for Cornell’s first president, wasestablished in 1965 to expand on White’s idea of having distinguished non-resident scholars visitthe university for prescribed periods of time. Today as many as 20 outstanding intellectuals fromaround the world hold the title of A. D. White Professor-at-Large at any one time.A. D. White professors-at-large are considered full members of the Cornell faculty. Their mission, asstated by the terms of their appointment, is “to enliven the intellectual and cultural life of theuniversity.” Toward that end, each professor-at-large makes three to four visits to the campus for aperiod of one to two weeks each time over the course of a six-year appointment, meeting withfaculty and students and delivering public lectures. The 16 prominent humanists listed here areamong the 117 A.D. White professors-at-large who have served, or currently are serving, in theirpositions at Cornell:NorthrupFrye, literarycritic, 1969–75Adrienne Rich,poet, 1981–87John Cleese, writer, actor,1998–2004Jane Goodall, primatologist,environmentalist,1996–2002Toni Morrison MFA ’55,novelist, 1997–2003Michelangelo Antonioni, film director, 1981–87Elliott Carter, composer, 1967–71Oliver Sacks,Jacques Derrida, philosopher, literary critic, 1982–88physician, author,2000–06Andy Goldsworthy, sculptor, 2000–06Donald Kuspit, art critic, 1991–97Octavio Paz, essayist,Denise Levertov, poet, critic, 1992–97poet, 1972–74Ali Mazrui, political scientist, 1986–92Richard Schechner, theater director, theorist, 1999–20057

T HE JOHN S. KNIGHT INSTITUTEWritingin theService ofLearning18751940-42Kurt Sage Vonnegut Chapel opens. attendsCornell Designed with by the Cornell intent professorCharles chemistry, Babcock, but leaves thetostudychapel to join has the since Army hosted during aWorld vast War range II. of His speakers, experiencesamong as them a POW 19th in Germany centuryform orator the Henry basis Ward of his Beecher mostfamous and 20th novel, century the anti-war civiltreatise rights Slaughterhouse-Five,activist and Georgiacongressman which was made John into Lewis. apopular movie.by Susan LangDemocracy and Corporate Power (Anthropology 133). Pests,Pesticides, People, and Politics (Plant Pathology 101). Imagining theHolocaust (English 221). Biotechnology and the Law (Biology andSociety 406). Meditation in Indian Culture (Asian Studies 277). Euclideanand Spherical Geometry (Math 451). No, these aren’t random selectionsfrom the Cornell catalog. They are among the 300-plus writing-intensivecourses offered by Cornell’s John S. Knight Institute for Writing in theDisciplines, a diverse, universitywide undergraduate program that incorporatesthe teaching and use of writing as a way to promote learning in a broadspectrum of academic disciplines.The program’s first-year and sophomore writing seminars are guaranteedto be small. The advanced courses in students’ majors (Writing in theMajors, or WIM), such as astronomy, Asian studies, natural resources, designand environmental analysis, and even physics, attend to languages of thespecific disciplines and have specially trained graduate-student teachingassistants who are supported by the Knight Institute to help with the extraworkload a writing-intensive course generates.“We understand that there is no one way to teach writing and that thelearning that goes on in each field is inseparable from the content,” saysJonathan Monroe, professor of comparative literature, associate dean of theCollege of Arts and Sciences, and director of the Knight Institute. “Thekinds of writing in each discipline are completely integral to the quality andquantity of learning that takes place. We know of no writing program thatexceeds Cornell’s in the richness and diversity of its course offerings.” TheTime/Princeton Review named Cornell the private research university“College of the Year” in 2001 because of its writing-in-the-disciplinesapproach and strength.The roots of the institute were sowed in 1966, when Cornell revitalizedits teaching of first-year writing by redesigning the freshman humanitiescourses across nine departments to emphasize writing in the disciplines. Asone of the first colleges in the nation to do so, it has served as a model forother universities such as Harvard, Duke, Princeton, Florida A&M, andTemple. By 1975, some 50 courses across 17 departments were beingoffered, and in 1986 the John S. Knight Program was created with a $5 milliongrant from the Knight Foundation, in the memory of its founder andCornell alumnus John S. Knight.In 1988, a Cornell President’s Initiative grant founded the WIM program,which was endowed by the Knight Foundation in 1992. In 1997, the Knightand Park foundations provided further funding for WIM, and in 1999 theKnight Foundation gave Cornell $5 million (of which $3 million is endowingthe new sophomore writing seminars), with Cornell contributing an additional$1 million. In 2000, the institute took on its current title.Today, the institute coordinates, annually, more than 300 first-year writingseminars across 30 departments, up to 30 advanced courses across 15 departments,and collaborative sophomore seminars intended to excite students invarious “gateway” courses into the majors. The Knight Institute also offers8

training to help instructors to teach writing; a peer collaboration project to mentor TAs; and walkintutorial assistance across campus to help students and specialists instruct students for whomEnglish is a second language.The vast majority of first-year undergraduates take two first-year writing seminars, saysKatherine Gottschalk, the Walter C. Teagle Director of First-Year Writing Seminars. Although theseminars cover myriad subjects—for example, Moral Panics: What Americans Are Afraid of andWhy (Psychology 114) and Technology: Utopia or Brave New World? (Science and TechnologyStudies 107)—they all have specific requirements. These include six to 12 formal writing assignmentsthat total about 30 pages, some with drafts and revisions, and at least two private conferenceswith the instructor.“Writing always occurs within, and for the purposes of, specific contexts. Students learn towrite in the context of learning about a particular discipline—for example, music or anthropology,”says Gottschalk.Lauren Mary Boehm, who majors in industrial and labor relations, took Reading about Fiction(English 270) as one of her first-year writing seminars. “This was undoubtedly the best educationalexperience of my life,” she said. “The class was small enough to have intimate, intensivediscussions and guided enough to keep those discussions focused. The idea of synthesizing apiece of writing as a exploration in thought was revealed to me in the best possible way; I was“Writing is agreat way tolearn math.”Professor David Henderson says his WIMmath course “cultivates imagination anda willingness to struggle with ideas.”DistinguishedCORNELLIANSSidney Kingsley ’28, socialdramatist; Men in White, hisplay about the medical profession,won the PulitzerPrize in drama in 1934.Alan Funt ‘34, televisionpersonality, host of CandidCamera.Arthur Laurents ’37, awardwinningplaywright, screenwriter,director, and author;wrote the screenplay for TheWay We Were and librettosfor West Side Story andGypsy and directed La Cageaux Folles on Broadway.allowed to find it on my own. I learned so much in that class—a lot aboutwriting, of course, as every paper had specific, detailed commentary fromthe instructor, but also about thinking, most importantly perhaps, about themerger and unity of the two.”Avi Giladi, a premed in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciencesmajoring in cell and molecular biology, took Gender, Race, Society, andSpace (History 100). “The analytical and historical writing required verydifferent styles than I was used to,” says Giladi. “As someone interested inresearch and medical sciences, I will need to write very detailed and analyticalpapers later in life, and many of the skills that I used in this class willdefinitely give me a great advantage.”The WIM program was launched in 1988 to integrate more writing intoadvanced courses for juniors and seniors. “Our initial perception was thatlearning in many upper level courses was too passive and solitary,” saysKeith Hjortshoj, senior lecturer and the John S. Knight Director of Writingin the Majors. “Thus, our initiatives not only include extensive writing asone form of active learning but also oral presentations, lively discussions,field studies, peer review of works in progress, and collaborative projects.Ideally, it should be impossible to distinguish our writing initiatives fromthe learning experiences of students and the content of the course.”“I use writing, usually weekly, in all my math courses, because it is mostimportant for students to think about the meanings of mathematics,” saysProfessor David Henderson, who teaches Euclidean and SphericalGeometry (Math 451), a WIM course. “This course cultivates imaginationand a willingness to struggle with ideas, starting with the question ‘What isstraight?’ and ending with ‘How can we determine the shape of our universe?’The students write their attempts to answer such questions andthen I respond with comments and they respond to my comments. Thisdialogue continues and produces increasingly refined and complex understandings of geometry.”Writing in math class? Naturally, says Ji-Yoon Kim, a junior computer science major takingHenderson’s course. ”I think the process of writing helps greatly in formalizing initial ideas thatyou had in your head, and the errors (if there were any) come out clearly when you start writing.Sometimes new ideas come out while you are writing, and you realize that the initial ideas werewrong. Overall, I think writing is really a great way to learn math, especially geometry, where thewords you use to describe the problem are very crucial in clarification.”Chris Conway, a doctoral student in psychology and a TA for the WIM course Introduction toCognitive Science (Cognitive Studies 101), agrees: “The types of writing exercises I assign aremeant to encourage the students, not to merely regurgitate information, but to think criticallyabout and integrate the material they are exposed to in the readings and lectures.” ❧9“How can wedetermine theshape of ouruniverse?”

T HE D EPARTMENT OF C LASSICSRumors of the death of Latin are greatly exaggerated. Forone hour each weekday, first-year students gather inDanuta Shanzer’s class to unravel the pretzel logic of classicalLatin. It’s unlikely any of them will become classics scholars.But they are a committed and hard-working group, saysShanzer, professor of classics and director of graduate studies inclassics at Cornell.“Many of my students took Latin in high school and are herebecause they want to be here,” she says. “It’s not a requiredcourse for any of them.”That’s the way Andrew Dickson White wanted it to be.Cornell’s first president had been force-fed the classics at YaleUniversity, and it did not agree with him. At his direction, Latinand Greek were offered at Cornell for those who desired it, butnot pressed upon those who did not.T HEOriginalInterdisciplinaryP ROGRAMby Franklin Crawford1948-1957Vladimir Nabokov serveson English departmentfaculty. A Russian émigréwriter, he wrote suchacclaimed literary masterpiecesin English as Lolita,which was started whileNabokov was teaching atCornell, and the Ithacabasedcomic novel Pnin.At the same time, it was White who made the first significant hires when the Department ofClassics at Cornell was founded in 1868. Today, with 14 full-time faculty members, the departmentis not only one of the oldest but one of the largest of its kind in the country. Classics instruction iscross-listed with courses from nearly every field in the humanities. The department also sponsorsfield projects, most notably the archaeological digs at Halai and Lokris in Greece.“Classics is the original interdisciplinary program,” says BarryStrauss, a professor of classics and history who specializes in ancienthistory and military history. “It requires philology, history, literarycriticism, philosophy, archaeology, and art history. Anyone who studiesclassics gets a wonderful grounding in poetry, prose style, andrhetoric as well.”Hayden Pelliccia, chair of the department, says the classics couldbe described as Western civilization’s “area studies program.”“But it’s an area of studies that takes on the extra burden of claimingand/or accepting responsibility for certain key features and tendenciesof European culture and thought,” he says. “So the study ofclassics usually ends up being a study of ‘us,’ if you identify yourselfas part of the Western Civ ‘us’ in the world today, or the study of‘them’ if you don’t.”Strauss adds that the “Greco-Roman classics, along with the Bible, still provide a wonderfulintroduction to the Western tradition. They force us to think about big questions, questions thatremain with a student for life. What is the good life? What is a good society? What can we learnfrom the past? From literature? These are the questions that the classical humanities ask us.”For those seeking a non-Western orientation, there are varieties of courses within and outsidethe classics.Ayele Bekerie is an expert in ancient African history, with particular focus on the history of writingsystems in Africa. Bekerie’s work seeks to give equal voice to a perspective lacking in many traditionalWestern civilization studies.10

“In my courses, apart from reading some historical narratives, students are encouraged to lookinto approaches and interpretive strategies in the making of historical narratives,” says Bekerie.“Silenced histories, such as ancient African history, particularly, become relevant in the cultivationof critical and thinking minds. Students are usually able to dispel the often-repeated stereotypesregarding African peoples. They also learn the critical importance of oral traditions in the understandingof African histories and cultures.”While Bekerie’s courses and research expand ancient history into exciting nontraditional scholarlylandscapes, Shanzer’s work follows the perennially fertile contours of classical study. Trainedas a classical philologist, literary historian, and textual critic, her specialty is Latin. Shanzer saysshe’s a stickler in the classroom: “Details matter, and I’m precise and rigorous about them . . .Latin is an unforgiving language [but] it is a wonderful medium through which to teach the linguisticprecision that illuminates English and, indeed, any sort of thinking in all sorts of ways.Once we get out of beginning language, I’m teaching vital, fascinating, and controversial material:how pagans and Christians, Jews and Christians, and Romans and barbarians interacted.”She also sees classical study in a modern light. Her freshman course called Voyages to StrangeWorlds has a reading list that includes Dante, Homer’s Odyssey, and Margaret Atwood’s TheHandmaid’s Tale. Voyages offers Shanzer the chance to show “the continuity of the great classicalworks, problems, and themes from antiquity to the modern period,” she says, adding, “I also teachsexual and humorous material that is risqué and sensitive. I tryto do this in an open and unafraid manner, while also keepingstudents’ minds on why this sort of thing was indeed funnythen—though often not now.”“The great advantage of my fields is that they are clearly notordinarily matters of concern to anyone,” says Charles Brittain,an assistant professor of classics who also teaches philosophy.“But they are also fields that are vital for understanding whatwe take to be ordinary and to be of value; they provide historicaland theoretical insight into the social and intellectual contextsthat tacitly structure most of our ordinary concerns.”At a time when some lament the decline of the liberal arts,especially at a research university like Cornell, teachers likeBrittain, Strauss, and Shanzer hold their ground.“Are the humanities really as irrelevant and dispensable to‘the man in the street’ as some would suggest?” asks Shanzer.“Well, most of most peoples’ leisure is the humanities. Leaveaside the delivery medium—radio, personal computer, film,video, television—all the business of engineering—what is leftfor most human beings in the United States for their discretionarytime? The humanities.”“I think that the function of an education in the humanitiesis to help encourage or, if necessary, force students to thinkcarefully and critically about something in a way that is not limitedby their ordinary concerns,” says Brittain. “This requireslearning how to read texts seriously and how to argue.”Strauss notes the relevance of the classics to the sequence ofevents initiated by the terrorist attacks on the World TradeCenter and the Pentagon.“Despite all the revolutions in technology, the main principlesof strategy and tactics have remained remarkably constantin human history,” he says. “If you want to understand contemporarywarfare, begin with the classics: Thucydides, Machiavelli,Guicciardini and, above all, with Clausewitz and SunTzu. And the pain and waste and loss of warfare, everythingthat we’ve had a bitter taste of since September 11, can all befound in Homer. The heroism, too, but without any punchespulled about what heroism costs.” ❧DistinguishedCORNELLIANSAustin Kiplinger ’39, journalist,editor, and publisherof the internationally knowninvestment newsletter “TheKiplinger Report.”Harold Bloom ’51, literaryand cultural scholar-critic;winner of a MacArthur“genius” grant and authorof The Western Canon: TheBooks and School of theAges and Shakespeare: TheInvention of the Human.Toni Morrison MFA ‘55,author of such acclaimedworks of fiction as Song ofSolomon and Beloved, winnerof the Pulitzer Prize inliterature (1988) and theNobel Prize in literature(1993).Classics professors Charles Brittain(above, inset) and Danuta Shanzer:providing historical and theoreticalinsight into age-old themes andconcerns that continue in contemporaryculture.11

1953M.H. (“Mike”) Abramspublishes The Mirror and theLamp: Romantic Theory andthe Critical Tradition. Thebook of literary criticismmade the Modern Library’slist of the 100 best nonfictionbooks written inEnglish in the 20th century.Abrams also began theNorton Anthology of EnglishLiterature series.S EEINGIN A NEW LIGHTby Franklin CrawfordWith 47 tenured or tenure-track faculty members,Cornell’s Department of English is one of thelargest and most respected English departmentsin the country. The Cornell Class of 2001 included 104English majors, which is about average, according to departmentchair Harry Shaw. Paul Sawyer, professor of Englishand director of undergraduate studies, has a simple explanationfor the enduring popularity of this discipline: “A lotof students crave literature.”One of the attractions of an English major is its flexibility.Courses need not be taken in sequence and studentsoutside the field commonly pair English with psychology orbiology or art history, for example. The department offers awide range of courses in English, American, and Anglophoneliterature, as well as in creative and expository writing.It is the home of the Creative Writing Program andEpoch magazine, Cornell’s highly respected literary journal,which helped launch the careers of novelists Don DeLillo,Thomas Pynchon, and Joyce Carol Oates. The departmentalso sponsors an array of visiting lecturers and major readingsthat draw top names in the field.Current English literature courses still focus on the closereading of texts, emphasizing particular authors and genresand questions of critical theory and method. But Sawyer, aVictorianist by training, also teaches The History andCulture of the Sixties, one of the most popular courses inthe department. His 1960s syllabus and reading list includemanifestos, newspaper articles, and films, as well as books.Such courses reflect the demographic and interdisciplinarytrends that now influence the English Department. Thereis substantial departmental growth in “Third World” minorityand other non-Western noncanonical literatures, worksby women, and 20th century American literature. Thenotion of what constitutes literature itself is changing aswell.A quarter century ago, the typical English survey coursedefined the field: a chronological march of genres and centuriesstarting with British authors, moving into Americanauthors. Not anymore.“The traditional canon is still important; it hasn’t disappeared,”says Shaw. “But important as it is, it no longerdefines literary studies. A student might take AsianAmerican fiction one semester, Scottish literature the next,add a creative writing class, an intro to cultural studiescourse, and a course in African American literature. All ofthose could be part of an English major, and only one ortwo of those courses would have existed 25 years ago.”This shift toward ethnic and transnational studies, andthe department’s efforts toward “redefining the contours ofAmerican literary studies,” are what drew Shelley Wong toCornell. Wong is professor of English, director of the AsianAmerican Studies Program, and a member of the Americanstudies steering committee.“In the classroom this new focus introduces students tothe ways in which their lives are implicated with those ofothers in a broader geographical network than that of theU.S. proper,” Wong says. “At the same time, it also givesstudents another way to think about their own situation visa-visothers at home in the U.S. In the case of studyingAsian American literature, students are asked to thinkabout how a population often thought of as ‘perpetual for-12

YujinChungDavideigners’—despite the native-born status of much of that population—could be seenas belonging within the American nation-state.” Through the interplay of symbolicfictions, Asian American literature lets students see the complicated and conflictedways in which claims to belonging to this country are made or denied, she says.Given these trends, the traditional survey course is still a big draw, says AndrewGalloway, professor of English and faculty member in the Medieval Studies Program.He is now teaching 80 students enrolled in English 201, which covers the earliestEnglish writings to Milton.“Students also flourish in smaller seminars in such subjects as Old English,Icelandic sagas, Middle English, and Chaucer, and in the more specialized seminarsfor graduates and undergraduates,” says Galloway. “In my experience, undergraduatesat Cornell have always responded far more eagerly to early literature in all its extraordinaryvariety than they themselves or anyone might suppose likely . . . [They] havebeen among the first to benefit from the intellectual and curricular experimentation,and sheer scholarly and critical power, that early literatures here have been notablygood at.”Creative writing courses typically make use of a workshopmethod in which participants develop their skills in response to critiquesof their work by classmates, but classes also incorporatestudy of established writers. Roughly 550 to 600 students enroll inundergraduate creative writing courses, says Stephanie Vaughn,professor of English.“Because writing is thinking, students in creative writing coursesare engaged in the kind of imaginative work that might producea very small number of practicing artists but will certainlyproduce a very large number of creative thinkers in other fields,”says Vaughn, author of Sweet Talk, a critically acclaimed collectionof short stories. “Whatever quality of mind makes a good poet orfiction writer also makes a good physicist, engineer, economist,architect, historian, or literary theorist . . . From time to time, awriter of exceptional talent, like Thomas Pynchon, fetches up inone creative writing course or another. [Pynchon came to Cornellto study engineering and physics.] But more often the creativewriting students will be taking their good and adventurous mindsback to another department, where what they have practiced as fictionwriters or poets will be put to work in a different kind of creativeendeavor.” ❧DistinguishedCORNELLIANSDick Schaap ’55, journalistbest known for televisionsports reporting; winner ofsix Emmy awards for sports,news, and feature programs;author of 33 books, including,with Jerry Kramer, thebestseller Instant Replay.Susan Brownmiller ’56,feminist author andactivist; wrote the influentialbook Against Our Will:Men, Women, and Rape.Electrical engineering major Yujin David Chung ’03 thought about dropping his Narrative Writing (English 382)class. Then he learned that only 15 of the 30 students who had signed up for it would be admitted, based onwho submitted the best examples of original fiction writing. Ambivalence gave way to competitiveness. “Istayed up all night to write,” says Chung. His piece, about a man who robs a bank and later goes to a churchand tries to explain himself to a priest, was among the selected entries.Chung’s interest in fiction writing began while he was in high school in Irving, California, when an Englishteacher encouraged him to focus more on ideas and imagery and less on spelling and grammar. At Cornell, hisinterest in writing was enhanced by a first-year writing seminar called Secret Story, which explored the hiddenstories behind certain novels. In his sophomore year, he took Creative Writing (English 280), in which hewrote prose and poetry. With his teachers’ encouragement, Chung began to experiment, composing characterstudies and other short pieces. He also began reading more to study different styles.by Martha GoldFiction Writing Helped ThisEngineering Major Broaden His ViewChung “stayedup all night” towrite the storythat got him intoone writing class.Chung contrasts fiction writing with electrical engineering.“Engineering is more like a job,” he says. “Ifyou work hard enough and persist, you will succeed.Writing is more of a sport. There is still lots of workinvolved, but you can reach a point where you canplay around with it, have fun with it.As much as he enjoys writing, Chung says hedoesn’t have any immediate plans to trade inhis calculator for a thesaurus. He chose tocome to Cornell after reading about how JeffHawkins, who earned a BS in electrical engineeringat Cornell in 1979, invented the PalmPilot.“That was something I wanted to do—adapttechnology into a product that people liked,”says Chung.He is also interested in business and eventuallywants to run his own company.“My focus is on engineering and business, but I likecreative writing because it broadens the mind,” hesays, adding that someday he also hopes to write abook, perhaps a family memoir.Chung believes Cornell was a very good choice for himbecause it enables him to pursue his many interests.“This is the best university I could have gone to,” hesays. “It’s got a great engineering program and agreat liberal arts program. I’m happy about that.”13

THE SAGE SCHOOL OF PHILOSOPHYThePursuitofWisdomby Franklin Crawford1954Karel Husa joins the musicdepartment faculty andremains until his retirementin 1992. The Czechcomposer receives the 1969Pulitzer Prize in music forhis String Quartet No. 3 andthe 1993 Grawemeyer Awardfor his Concerto for Celloand Orchestra.It’s just coincidence that one of Cornell’s oldest academicunits is called the Sage School of Philosophy; it is namedfor Henry W. Sage, a wealthy philanthropist with aninterest in philosophy and Christian morality. However,there’s no question that the Sage School offers undergraduatesthe skills by which wisdom may be achieved.“Philosophy at Cornell offers an excellent preparation fora wide variety of careers, especially given the emphasis thatwe tend to place both on independent thought and on effectivewriting,” says Jennifer Whiting, an associate professor ofphilosophy. “There are also relatively few requirements inphilosophy, so one can easily double-major in philosophyand another area. And studying philosophy often leads to akind of methodological self-consciousness that is useful inother areas of study, including both scientific and humanisticones.”Housed in the southern wing of Goldwin Smith Hall, theSage School of Philosophy is composed of 13 faculty members,all of whom are affiliated with other departmentsacross the disciplines. For instance, Richard Boyd teachesphilosophy of science and has co-taught courses with scientists;Professor Zoltan Szabo specializes in philosophy of languageand has co-taught courses with linguists; andProfessor Richard Miller regularly teaches courses that arecross-listed with sociology and government. MicheleMoody-Adams, professor of philosophy, is director of theEthics and Public Life program, which serves the entirecampus. Other faculty have connections to departments andprograms, including Women’s Studies, Classics,Mathematics, Religious Studies, Medieval Studies, andCognitive Studies.Harold Hodes, professor of philosophy, says the SageSchool is a “good place to study logic.“Logic is my main beat,” Hodes says. “We now regularlyoffer courses in logic that start at the beginning and that,together with what the mathematics and computer sciencedepartments offer, can carry an interested student toadvanced levels.”The Sage School is also home to The Philosophical Review,one of the most highly respected philosophical journals inprint. In publication since 1892, The Philosophical Review wasthe first journal of its kind, and it continues to publish original,scholarly work in all areas of philosophy, with an emphasison material of interest to generalists.Gail Fine, chair of the department, specializes in ancientphilosophy. Her work, along with that of other faculty membersin ancient philosophy, is part of the reason why theSage School continues to rank among the top programs inthe country. Fine’s passion for the field dates back to herdays in secondary school.“I fell in love with Plato in high school, both for thebeauty of his prose and the depth of his thought,” she says.“I still think that reading him is one of the best introductionsto philosophy. I liked the challenge of trying to thinkclearly and critically. And I think the central issues in philosophy—issuesabout the nature of knowledge, reality, andmorality—are of vital importance.”Fine says one of the significant trends in philosophytoday is an increased attention paid to Hellenistic philosophy:the Stoics, Skeptics, and Epicureans.16 14

JacqueDarrellKant Laid theGroundwork in theMaking of aYoung Philosopherby Franklin CrawfordJacque Darrell ’02 was introduced to 18thcentury philosopher Immanuel Kant at asummer camp near Allentown, Pennsylvania.Darrell, a counselor, immersed himself inKant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics ofMorals during his off-duty hours. Not exactlylight summer reading; but Darrell wasn’tseeking escape or distraction from reality. InKant he had discovered a moral voice thatresonated with his own nascent sensibilities.“Kant presented the idea of duty and obligationsto me in a way that was compatiblewith what I felt,” Darrell says.It wasn’t until his sophomore year at Cornellthat Darrell returned to Kant in a course withTerence Irwin, the S. L. Sage Professor ofPhilosophy and Humane Letters. Re-readingthe Groundwork from a more mature perspective,under the guidance of a philosophicalscholar and in the context of Critique of PureReason, inspired Darrell to pursue independentstudy with two philosophy departmentfaculty members: assistant professor WilliamBracken and associate professor JenniferWhiting. His work with Bracken and Whiting,a study of the Groundwork and the Critique ofPractical Reason, resulted in an oral presentationfor the Cornell Undergraduate ResearchBoard (CURB). Darrell continued his researchon Kant with Irwin the following year,engaging in a close reading of ReligionWithin the Limits of Mere Reason. This wasfollowed by a semester-long study of Kant’sCritique of Judgment with Harold Hodes,associate professor of philosophy. The resultsof Darrell’s research were presented at CURB’sannual forum.“He has worked with remarkable pertinacityon the work of an extremely difficult andimportant philosopher,” says Irwin.Darrell says his efforts were sustained largelythrough “the generosity and availability ofthe Cornell faculty.“When I was a graduate student, courses in these areas were few and far between. Now anyoneworking in the field has to know about them, and the field is better for it, both because all threeschools are intrinsically interesting and important and also because they form a sort of bridge from earlierphilosophy to modern philosophy—17th century and later,” she says.Increased attention to Hellenistic philosophy has helped philosophers like Fine “achieve a moreaccurate picture of the history of philosophy as a whole,” she says.“Cornell is a wonderful place for me to pursue my research and study,” says Fine, who joined theSage School faculty in 1975. “The students at all levels are terrific, and I have very productive interactionswith a number of my colleagues in both philosophy and classics. I’ve been able to teach courses Ireally want to teach, and this has helped me grow as a philosopher. I think it’s a good place for undergraduatesto study philosophy . . . we offer a number of interesting and important courses and put a lotof work into teaching and commenting on papers.”Michael Fara, assistant professor of philosophy and a relative newcomer to the department, agreesthat “Cornell is a fantastic place for students to learn how to ‘do’ philosophy. As soon as I arrived here,it was apparent to me that our department takes its commitment to undergraduate teaching extremelyseriously and expects its faculty to devote a significant portion of their time to undergraduates. Sothat’s one reason why I think it’s a good place for students. The second reason comes from the studentsthemselves . . . I have frankly been amazed by the level of commitment and interest that thestudents have displayed toward the material they’re learning in class. In general, most of my studentshave seemed genuinely excited and eager to learn, and this attitude infects the class as a whole, makingfor a lively and entertaining learning environment in which everyone stands to gain.” ❧“Kant presentedthe idea of dutyand obligationsto me in a waythat was compatiblewithwhat I felt.”“When a faculty member sacrifices his orher research or family time to engage indiscussions, supervise readings, and readpapers, one can bet that that person isa dedicated teacher,” Darrell says. “WhenI first began these independent studies,my head was filled with falsities, buteach semester I began to understandmore and more the materials that I read.This is in large part a reflection uponthe faculty members with whom Iworked.”Darrell is now focused on debates incontemporary ethical theory and willreturn to Kant in graduate school. Inaddition to professorial ambitions, he iskeen on producing original philosophicalworks. He is contemplating specializingin ethics and the philosophy of education.“The philosophy of education is an areathat has not been exploited to its fullpotential since the beginning of the20th century,” Darrell says. “It’s a neglectedbranch.”DistinguishedCORNELLIANSSteve Reich ’57, award-winningcomposer of contemporarymusic that embracesnon-Western and Americanjazz traditions; has beencalled America’s greatestliving composer by critics.Jennifer Tipton ’58, lightingdesigner, awarded the2001 Dorothy and LillianGish Prize for her work; hasalso won two Tony awardsand an Olivier and hasworked with JeromeRobbins, Mike Nichols, andTwyla Tharp.15

Questions such as how to combat evil without doing evilhave always kept moral scholars like Michele Moody-Adams and Henry Shue awake at night. But they havetaken on a new pertinence since the terrorist attacks ofSeptember 11, 2001, as Moody-Adams and Shue strive to teachCornell students how to reason beyond the latest sound bite.Moody-Adams is director of Cornell’s program on Ethics andPublic Life (EPL) and teaches an undergraduate course, alsocalled Ethics and Public Life. Shue, who teaches the courseGlobal Thinking, was director of the EPL program from itsinception in 1987 until July 2000.The Hutchinson Professor of Ethics and Public Life as well asprofessor of philosophy, Moody-Adams wrote about the problemof moral disagreement and the flaws in moral relativism in herbook Fieldwork in Familiar Places: Morality, Culture, and Philosophy(Harvard University Press, 1997). Academia is the ideal settingfor rational reflection on such subjects, she says, because it offers“time, quiet, a place for reflective deliberation” and, most important,a respect for patient, lengthy reasoning processes.Despite the difficulties of careful reasoning in a fast-track society,it is more important than ever to teach students how to reasonmorally, says Moody-Adams. “The social, economic, and scientificenvironments that students go into in their careers raisequestions of extraordinary moral complexity. Students need to beequipped with the tools to be responsible citizens, tools that willenable them to seek constructive solutions to complex moralproblems.”Professor Isaac Kramnick, vice provost for undergraduate education,was instrumental in establishing the EPL program 14years ago. “When EPL was founded, we wanted our students’undergraduate experience to include courses and seminars thatexplored ethical inquiry so that they could bring an ethical perspectiveto their role as citizens and professionals,” he says.“That perspective seems even more important for today’s students,who will enter a world where public service and concernfor the common good seem less valued than in the past.”And while the EPL program remains small, with one directorand only one affiliated faculty member currently on campus, itsrole—to engage students and faculty in moral reasoning—seemsat the bull’s-eye center of humanities study at Cornell.In the course Ethics and Public Life, Moody-Adams recentlyhad her students look at the moral aspects of such writings as1962Cornell University Presspublishes A History ofCornell by Professor MorrisBishop.“Students needto be equippedwith thetools to beresponsiblecitizens.”Henry David Thoreau’s classic treatise on civil disobedience,President Harry Truman’s diary and personal papers on the decision todrop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and “Letter fromBirmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King’s brilliant argument on theneed to challenge unjust laws. The class also discussed such contemporarymoral dilemmas as flag burning (why should it be protected asfree speech?), surrogate motherhood (should it be permissible?), andparental rights (when should they be regulated?).In leading the discussion on parental rights, Moody-Adams alternatelypraised the students for their questions and challenged them toprobe deeper and along different pathways. For example, after readingan article by Hugh LaFolette that proposes the licensing of biologicalparents, one student argued that such an action would interfere withthe basic human right to reproduce.“It’s easy to assume that there’s something so natural about procreationand parenting that the state should not be allowed to come inand regulate it,” Moody-Adams assented, nodding her head. But, sheadded, “even the most ardent defender of people’s fundamental rightswill concur that if others are likely to suffer harm as a result of one’sexercise of those rights, it is appropriate to consider restricting them.”She helped the class to see the solid and soft points in LaFolette’s caseand pushed them to define what the state’s view should be toward theEPExploring the MoralDimensions of Publicand Private Decisionsby Linda Myers16

parent-child relationship. The free-ranging discussion that followedtouched on the need for court-ordered contraception in the UnitedStates, China’s one-child policy, the rights of biological versus adoptiveparents, child labor exploitation, and the 19th century view inthe United States that children are a gift from God.Shue, the author of Basic Rights (Princeton University Press, secondpaperback edition 1996), has his students in Global Thinkingslog through such moral quagmires as the failure of developednations to intervene in the Rwandan genocide and NATO’s use ofmilitary strikes to further a humanitarian mission in Kosovo. He alsoteaches a course, Global Climate and Global Justice, in which studentslook at the moral dimensions of worldwide pollution. “Myemphasis is on what responsibilities we should have toward peopleoutside our country,” he says.Katie Hurley ’02, a double major in philosophy and governmentwho took Global Thinking, liked the course’s focus on human rightsand government responsibilities and duties. “It taught us to think innew ways and analyze . . . what is right and wrong and what peopledeserve.” The class and others like it are essential, she says, becausethey demand “sustained thought and intense analysis of deeply personaland highly difficult issues.” Hurley is now writing a senior thesison whether developed countries’ transactions with Third Worldworkers can be construed as exploitative and morally questionable.Her choice of subject was influenced in part by Shue’s course andwritings. She plans to go on to law school, then work in humanrights or public interest law.“The course was my first real introduction to ethical reasoningand its application to empirical cases,” says Ame Jo Brewster, a governmentmajor who took Global Thinking. “It greatly increased myunderstanding of the problems involved in humanitarian interventionand helped me direct my undergraduate career.” Brewster choseNATO’s bombing of Kosovo for her senior thesis topic, and hopes tostudy democratization in Croatia and do doctoral studies in publicpolicy and international relations, with an emphasis on conflict resolutionand post-conflict reconstruction.The EPL program supports other units at Cornell that are developingcourses on genomics, new biological developments and theirLProfessor Michele Moody-Adams:Stressing the importance ofteaching students how to reasonmorally before embarking oncareers that “raise questions ofextraordinary moral complexity.”ethical, legal, and social implications. EPL also invites youngscholars in moral philosophy to come to campus and discusstheir research with seasoned faculty from around the world. Inaddition, EPL has run workshops for a broad range of Cornellfaculty, offering instruction on how to include an ethics componentin their courses. Faculty members who took part in theearly years of this program, supported by a now-defunct Exxongrant, are still using what they learned. Plans to develop newfaculty workshops in relevant areas of ethics are currentlyunder way.“Initially I incorporated ethics in my income distributioncourse,” says Jennifer Gerner, professor and associate dean inthe College of Human Ecology. “Later I used it in my familypolicy course. Now I teach Introduction to Public Policy, andthere are some ethics pieces in that.” Gerner believes studentswould welcome more exposure to ethics in the classroom.“They often become extremely engaged in discussion aboutapplied ethical issues and frequently raise ethical dimensionsin major policy papers.”Michael Gold, associateDistinguishedCORNELLIANSprofessor of collective bargaining,labor law, andlabor history in the Schoolof Industrial and Labor Relations, isanother alumnus of the EPL summercourse. Gold offers two courses:Ethics at Work and Liberty andJustice for All; that provide a basicunderstanding of ethical thinking. Hisstudents begin with the classic moralphilosophers—Plato, Aristotle, Kant,and Mill—before moving on to discussethical issues that arise in theworkplace and society. EPL’s summercourse was useful, he says, in that itexposed him to literature in the field,spurred him to discuss ethical issues, and, hesays, “fortified my resolution to teach undergraduatesabout ethics.” In the future he would like to teach his courseon labor law in tandem with a Cornell faculty member whoseRichard Fariña ’59, authorof the 1950s cult classicBeen Down So Long It LooksLike Up to Me and brotherin-lawof Joan Baez.Peter Yarrow ’59, singerand musician with the trioPeter, Paul, and Mary, coauthor(with CornellianLeonard Lipton) of theclassic children’s song “Puffthe Magic Dragon.”primary field is moral philosophy and have students look at lawthrough the lens of ethics.Just being able to call on faculty whose research examinesthe moral aspects of human actions can enrich the campus climate.For example, as a guest lecturer in the Imagining theHolocaust seminar, Moody-Adams discussed whether freedprisoners’ seemingly vengeful acts against their former jailerscould be justified under moral law. And a few days after theSeptember 11 terrorist attacks, she and Shue joined a handfulof Cornell scholars in a teach-in organized by Kramnick. Theirpresence was important to students like Umair Khan, an undergraduatemajor in government and Near Eastern studies.“Following the attacks, many people’s emotions were runninghigh,” he says. “As a Muslim, I felt that people were scapegoatingIslam and failing to realize the diversity within the 1.2 billionMuslims around the world.” Khan praises participants forbringing rational thinking to a tension-filled environment.Looking at the world’s events through a moral frameworkcan be discouraging, because it reveals civilization’s failure tohalt bloodshed. But Moody-Adams believes that moral progressis possible: “Often, it’s two steps forward, one step back orsideways. But sometimes a hopeful moral promise—the late20th century consensus on the importance of human rights, forexample—emerges out of a period of great horror. Where we’vemade moral progress, we need to hold onto that.” ❧17

T HEHUMANITIESCrucial,Central, EnduringSince taking office in 1995, President Hunter Rawlings has made the vitality of thehumanities a key focus of numerous private and public addresses. At a celebration forformer Cornell President Dale Corson in December 1999, Rawlings delivered a dedicationspeech titled “The Role of the Humanities in a Research University.” These words, spokenby a powerful advocate for the humanities, serve as a primer on the challenges they confronttoday and a reminder of their centrality in our time.“. . . The ascendancy of science and the rise of theuniversity-industrial complex contributing to and serving the needs of global capitalismhave attractions and benefits on many levels. In fact, they are nearly irresistiblefor universities. But while we reap many advantages from the revolutions we arehelping to drive, we must also be aware of the risks and the downsides . . .“One of the risks of our new status is that we will be so driven by financial considerationsthat we make an unbalanced situation even more so by favoring the fieldsthat attract resources and spawn economic activity, as opposed to fields that participatevery little in economic development . . .“Viewed from any perspective, the humanities have fallen behind their moreworldly disciplinary cousins in the contemporary university . . . (However) thehumanities remain central to research universities for several compelling and interrelatedreasons:“First, the humanities play a crucial role as the keepers and conveyorsof culture in its many forms. The old aphorism is true: those who areignorant of the past are indeed condemned to repeat it. It is essential in a democraticsociety that citizens be informed about the forces that have made themwho they are.“Second, the humanities, in the past 25 years or so, haveopened our eyes to formerly marginalized cultures and led in the developmentof gender studies and ethnic studies, which have enlarged the worldviewof all of us . . . those earning university degrees today are far more capableof broad thinking than those who graduated 25 years ago.1964A.R. (“Archie”) Ammonsjoins the English departmentfaculty. Ammons winstwo National Book Awardsand virtually every prize forpoetry in the United States,including the Tanning andBollingen prizes. In 1990he is inducted into theNational Institute andAcademy of Arts andLetters.“Third, the humanities, and the arts, help mediate betweenhigh culture and mass culture, between elitism and populism. They thusexpand our cultural reach, address problems of social structures, and raiseenduring questions about what is worthy of our students’ study.“Fourth, humanists, more than other scholars, havehistorically looked for insights in other areas of endeavor and usedthem to inform judgments of human value, relevance, and historicalsignificance.“Finally, the arts and humanities perform a deep and essential role that goesto the heart of universities, and to the heart of individual women and men . . .A work of art or literature, when ‘read’ by an informed observer, contains withinitself a kind of knowledge that is different from other kinds that depend uponthe incremental buildup of information: it has a human, moral dimension at itscenter.“As Cornell English professor emeritus Mike Abrams has said, ‘The necessity,vitality, and vexatiousness of literary and other humanistic studies lies in thefact that they raise and reraise questions about the concerns we live by, towhich they offer and reoffer answers that, however strongly supported, turn outnever to be the last word’.” ❧18

The Societyfor the HumanitiesGainingby DegreesLife and Work SkillsThe Society for the Humanities at Cornell (SHC) wasestablished in 1966. It is currently under the directionof Dominick LaCapra, the Bowmar Professor inHumanistic Studies. Located in the Andrew DicksonWhite House on central campus, the society’s mission isto support research and encourage imaginative teachingin the humanities.SHC programs, which include fellowships, are fundedfrom endowment, with supplemental funding throughCornell’s College of Arts and Sciences. In addition topromoting research on central concepts, methods, andproblems in the humanities, the society’s numerousactivities promote sustained scholarly discussion amongall members of the Cornell community and beyond.The A. D. White House also serves as the summer site ofCornell’s prestigious School of Criticism and Theory(SCT), an intensive summer program founded in 1976 bya group of leading humanists. Hosted on campus, theSCT offers faculty members and advanced graduate studentsof literature and related social sciences the chanceto work alongside preeminent figures in critical thought.Past participants of note include Perry Anderson, JudithButler, Stanley Fish, Fredric Jameson, Joan Scott, andHayden White.In addition to these activities, SHC also creates yearlytheme-focused fellowship programs that attract innovativescholars from around the world. The society’s2002–03 theme explores “The Idea of a University.” Thebrochure introducing that theme notes that “In thethought of John Henry (Cardinal) Newman and others,some relation existed, however abstract, between theuniversity as an institution and the universe as a structuredset of knowable objects. For them, the university existedto provide something approaching a comprehensive knowledgeof the world. Today few would subscribe to this idea of theuniversity. Many in fact regard the university as little morethan a curious anachronism. Its defenders continue to link theinstitution to its historic role in the production and disseminationof knowledge. However, what knowledge? How is it producedand for whom? These questions raise practical, political,and moral issues. The answers we give to them impinge on thepast, present, and future, not only of the largely mythicalcloistered university, but also of the way the university affectsand is affected by other key institutions.”LaCapra says scholarship from SHC fellows on this theme spansthe historical, critical, textual, comparative, artistic, and prescriptive,and any combination of possible perspectives.Activities include a conference of leading scholars, major figuresin foundations such as Carnegie and Mellon, and formeruniversity presidents, and a series of events, open to theCornell community, with the scholars in residence.19by Franklin CrawfordCornell University is not only one of the world’s best research universities—it’sone of the world’s best research universities at which to earn a liberal artsdegree. A Cornell liberal arts education prepares students for rewardingcareers, and the degree itself represents the acquisition of skills and abilities much indemand throughout the professional world.In 1999, English department alumni responded overwhelmingly when asked tooffer career advice to undergraduates. Those responses, on record at the College ofArts and Sciences Career Services office, provide solid evidence that the Cornell B.A.is an asset in today’s job market.“The skills I acquired in my study of English have allowed me to excel intasks requiring clear, concise communication skills, analytical thinking, logic,reasoning, and negotiation,” writes a class of ’94 alum, a project manager andconsultant with an architectural design and consulting firm.While a degree in the humanities may not be designed for a specific professionalcareer, students in the humanities and expressive arts “learn how tolearn,” and that’s a big plus, says Lisa Harris, assistant dean and director ofcareer services for the College of Arts and Sciences.“Many employers offer intensive training programs for new hires,” shesays. “So they are looking for talented students who can meet the learningcurve and grow.”A class of ’76 philosophy alum, now president of a public relations firm, hasfound that the mastery of language and meaning he gained at Cornell is a profoundlyinfluential negotiation tool. “When I’m trying to persuade a client todo something that he or she doesn’t want to do . . . my philosophy backgroundhelps me choose my language so precisely that I can achieve what Ineed to achieve in being truthful, yet diplomatic,” he says.Harris says that while it may be difficult to quantify, the experience liberalarts majors gain in processing large amounts of complex information, and theflexibility they acquire in doing so, give them an edge in the professionalworld.This seems borne out in the experience of one class of ’84 English major,who went on to graduate from the University of Chicago Law School: “MyEnglish major was invaluable for preparing for the rigors of law school, as wellas for the practice of law.” The alum, who eventually became general counselfor a computer firm, proudly reports that “While surrounded by extremelyintelligent and experienced people, I am the one to whom they turn when itis necessary to reduce thoughts, plans, and actions to writing.” ❧DistinguishedCORNELLIANSThomas Pynchon ’59,award-winning novelist andshort story writer, author ofGravity’s Rainbow, V, andMason and Dixon.Robert Moog Ph.D. ’64,inventor and manufacturerof the first electronic musicsynthesizer, known as theMoog Synthesizer. Used bythe Beatles and countlessother recording stars, it wasthe forerunner of today’ssynthesizer industry.

C RITICALTHEORYEnlargingOur Capacity toImaginebe taken for granted. “Whatby Simeon MossProfessor Jonathan Culler:Questioning ideas or conceptsthat might otherwiseis meaning? What is context?What is an author?”1968Alison Lurie joins theEnglish department faculty.Her 1974 novel of contemporarymanners, The WarBetween the Tates, earnsher the reputation of a 20thcentury Jane Austen. In1985 she wins the PulitzerPrize in literature for hernovel Foreign Affairs.No American campus in the past 25years has been more involved inthe growth of critical theory, in allits modern diversity, than Cornell. Onceviewed by many faculty as a threat to thetraditional edifices of the humanities, theoryis now part of the fabric of many undergraduateclasses.“Critical theory has a very distinguishedhistory at Cornell,” says Jonathan Culler,the Class of 1916 Professor of English andComparative Literature, the university’ssenior associate dean in the College of Artsand Sciences, and a leading theorist andauthor of several important books in thefield of literary theory.“The vitality in the area of theory at Cornell grew constantly during the 1970s [a decade in which postmodernisttheory took off on American campuses] and it has remained at a very high level,” says PeterUwe Hohendahl, director of the Institute for German Cultural Studies at Cornell, a home for much interdisciplinarywork in critical theory on campus.Faculty members who practice and teach theory can be found in almost every department on the university’sArts Quad. They include Dominick LaCapra, director of Cornell’s celebrated Society for theHumanities and its School of Criticism and Theory; Susan Buck-Morss, professor of government, socialtheorist, and author of the influential Dreamworld and Catastrophe; David Bathrick, chair of theatre, filmand dance and editor of New German Critique, a leading international interdisciplinary journal focusing oncultural studies and theory; Nelly Furman, director of the French Studies Program and a leading voice intextual and psychoanalytic criticism; Richard Klein, professor of French literature and author of Eat Fatand Cigarettes Are Sublime, which bring the insights of critical theory to bear on contemporary social issues;Leslie Adelson, chair of German Studies and well known for her work on gender and ethnicity and theirimplications for German cultural and literary theory; Naoki Sakai, professor of Asian studies and senioreditor of the multilingual journal of cultural theory and translation, Traces (see story, page 22); and TimMurray, professor of English and co-curator of the new Internet art journal, CTheory Multimedia.“We have outstanding humanities faculty here . . . and you can feel the excitement,” says English professorSatya Mohanty, who is known for his development of a “realist theory” of social identity and multiculturalpolitics. Mohanty was one of the organizers of a major, bicoastal (Stanford-Binghamton-Cornell)research project titled “The Future of Minority Studies: Redefining Identity Politics,” which convenedon the Cornell campus in November 2001.“One of the exciting things about this place—for people looking at us from the outside—is that weproduce literary theory of various stripes; we’re not all deconstructionists or new historicists,” explainsMohanty. “More importantly, we produce different strands or even schools of thought that can interact20

Professor Satya Mohanty: The vitalityevident in the practice andteaching of theory at Cornell stemsfrom the fact that “we produce differentstrands of thought that caninteract with one another.”with one another, debate one another. That’s where the vitality comesfrom.”“Theory at Cornell is perhaps distinguished by the fact that, whendue acknowledgement has been made of the high visibility of poststructuralismin its many formations—deconstruction; psychoanalysis;gay, lesbian, and bisexual studies; and visual culture—there is no central orthodoxy, no reigning currentof theory here, unlike some of the other prominent ‘theory’ places on the West and East Coasts,” addsBiodun Jeyifo, another noted theorist and a professor of English whose focus is in the areas of colonialand post-colonial studies.For many people outside of the field, and outside of the academy, theory is at best a murky and atworst a subversive pursuit that in literary studies, at least, offers “too much discussion of non-literarymatters, too much debate about general questions whose relation to literature is scarcely evident, [and]too much reading of difficult psychoanalytical, political, and philosophical texts,” as Cullerobserves in his book, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 1997).But there’s no getting away from theory. “Even literary critics who are ‘against theory,’ as thetitle of an essay put it, tend to be not only familiar with it but marked by it in ways that stronglyinfluence their thinking,” says LaCapra.Students and scholars who complain about the difficulties of theory have no excuse, saysMohanty. “If you’re indifferent, everything will seem difficult. But if you have the right amount ofcommitment and passion, you will realize that it’s not that hard to understand.”“Some forms of literary and cultural theory have been accused for years of being unintelligibleand closed to all but a very few professional scholars of theory,” says Cornell Provost Biddy Martin,widely known for her work on gender theory and cultural theories of sexuality. “Ironically, however,the development of theory can be credited with having posed fundamental questions about theconstruction of meaning that have expanded the purview of literary criticism. One of the mostimportant questions theorists ask is: What historical, social, and psychological forces limit what wetake to be intelligible? Of what value is it to us and to our students to stretch our minds beyondthose apparent limits? How have creative writers enlarged our capacity to imagine and understandwhat is only apparently unimaginable?”When describing the approach to theory in most undergraduate courses on campus, it is probablymore accurate to say it is not so much “studied and taught” as it is encountered in use andabsorbed, as faculty and students pursue the analysis of texts and materials.Mohanty teaches an undergraduate course called Literature as Moral Inquiry, which involvessome moral philosophy, including Aristotle and Kant, and close reading of literary works such asConrad’s Heart of Darkness and Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. “I don’t teach it as a theory class,although the theory is there,” he says. “You begin with where students are—their questions, theirconcerns—and then you move deeper into those questions. You don’t begin by saying ‘Here is anew technical language you need to learn.’ The moment you do that, you squash their enthusiasmand their originality.”As humanities departments and the range of their concerns have become more diverse and multidisciplinary,theory has grown in importance and vitality within the curriculum. But its impact hasbeen demonstrated, at the undergraduate level, not in a growth in the amount of theoretical terminologyrequired for learning, but by an expansion in the fields of investigation and possible areasof inquiry.Two of the university’s departments, Romance Studies and German Studies, have long beennoted for their commitment to interdisciplinary work on literature and culture and for the varietyDistinguishedCORNELLIANSMary Woronov ’66, actress,star in such movies as AndyWarhol’s Chelsea Girls andPaul Bartels’ cult classicEating Raoul.Susan Rothenberg ’67,internationally acclaimedpainter.Richard J. Price ’71, novelistand screenwriter; wrotethe screenplays The Color ofMoney and Sea of Love andthe novels Clockers andBloodbrothers.of critical paradigms that enter into their curricula. Both have several faculty members whose courses arecross-listed in other departments, and both cover areas of study as varied as post-colonial theory, film andvisual culture, psychoanalytic theory, gender studies, music, the history of ideas, and theatre.But during the past 25 years or so, the growth in the influence of theory in America seems to have hadits greatest visibility in the area of literary studies. And the repercussions of the accompanying expansion ofthe so-called literary canon—works deemed to be essential to the study of literature—have been a topic ofdebate for social critics of all stripes. The direct effect of the burgeoning canon, at universities, has beenthat previously excluded works by women and other historically marginalized groups are now routinelyincluded on course syllabi, along with many things not perceived to be literature at all, such as television,movies, songs, pamphlets, and other cultural artifacts.“Literary theory and other forms of theory expand the horizon of how we think about all sorts of things:language, meaning, culture, gender, history; they open the possibility of new paths for imagination,” saysNatalie Melas, associate professor of comparative literature, whose work focuses on the problem of culturalcomparison in the context of colonialism and its legacies. “Over the past 10 years, at least, what goes underthe name theory in the humanities has exceeded the bounds of literature, per se, and of language. It ismore varied, harder to define, and goes under different names—cultural theory, for instance.”21

The genre of literary theory now encompasses the perspectives ofanthropology, art history, film studies, gender studies, linguistics, philosophy,political theory, psychoanalysis, science studies, social andintellectual history, and sociology.“Literary theory makes you think directly about the conceptualframework and the concepts and assumptions that you bring to bearon the cultural objects,” says Culler. “It can be of value in helpingexplore cultural objects, by giving you more tools to think about them,but also valuable by its questioning of ideas or concepts that peoplemight otherwise just take for granted: What is meaning? What is context?What is an author?”The expansion of the canon and the proliferation of theory hasbeen accompanied—and possibly driven—by “the underlying energyof the social movements that define our times,” says Mohanty. “Theanticolonial struggles, the anti-war movement, the civil rights movement,the women’s movement, the gay, lesbian, and bisexual movement,the human rights movements of various kinds—they’ve generatedideas everywhere. It wasn’t just a political change, it was also anintellectual one—we thought in new ways, we came up with newquestions.”Adds Jeyifo: “Literary theory in the last three or four decades camein the wake and on the heels of the great social movements of the1960s and early 1970s and proposed ideas and perspectives questioningage-old Eurocentric ideas about what literature is and isn’t, howwe determine value, who is included and excluded in constructions oftraditions and canons of writing, what writing itself is, and the authorityit exercises in relation to speech and other expressive forms andmodes. And while theory did not initially create the conditions thatbrought women and minority scholars into the nation’s academies, itdid act as a powerful bulwark for the consolidation of their presence inthe so-called ‘mainstream’ departments.”1971–81John Henrik Clarkeserves as DistinguishedVisiting Professor of Africanand African AmericanStudies. A prolific writerand historian, Clarke helpedinitiate the study of AfricanAmerican history and culturein American schools.He also was instrumental inestablishing Cornell’sAfricana Studies andResearch Center curriculum.22NaokiSakaiNaoki Sakai, professor of Asian studies and of comparative literature,is senior editor of Traces, a new multilingual journal of culturaltheory and translation. Associate editors of the journal includeCornell faculty members Brett de Bary (Asian studies) and J. VictorKoschmann (history), and graduate student Yukiko Hanawa; includedamong the members of the journal’s advisory collective areCornell faculty members Benedict Anderson (government), TimothyMurray (English), and James Siegel (anthropology).Within the academy, the debate over the expansion of the canon was played out during the so-called“culture wars” of the 1970s and 1980s. Some popular critics bemoaned what they saw as the compromisingof literary standards and the marginalization of the “classics.”“In the culture wars, people were worried that this expansion of the canon would result in the completeloss of the study of ‘serious’ literature, and people would be spending all their time studying soap operas,”says Culler. “But the fact that this hasn’t happened has helped calm the culture wars. People discoveredthat the fact that students at Cornell or Stanford were now reading a wider range of literary works was notbringing down Western civilization after all.”In fact, Culler says, theory has reinvigorated the traditional canon, “opening the door to more ways ofreading the ‘great works.’ . . . Certainly Shakespeare, who is always cited as the major cultural monument,has never been more popular.”It stands to reason that the growth of theory would go hand in hand with the re-examination of a onceself-evident canon. “As a critique of common sense and exploration of alternative conceptions,” says Culler,“theory involves a questioning of the most basic premises or assumptions of literary study, the unsettling ofanything that might have been taken for granted.”“The funny thing is that this is the way many cultures of the past used to do ‘literary criticism’,” saysMohanty. “It’s only in the last hundred years or so that criticism has become narrowly focused on textswhose value was taken to be self-evident. When the Greeks talked about literature—and it wasn’t just agroup of professional critics talking about it—they were examining it in the context of life and ideas in general.Almost every culture had this sort of practice of talking about texts that were written or orally transmitted.I think we may be getting back to that more expansive and engaged way of doing literary criticism.”Mohanty tells a story about a student in one of his classes who came to his office one day holding up hercopy of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethic. “This is very exciting,” she said.“We’re talking about what some consider very dry stuff, philosophy and theory, and she’s visibly moved,”Mohanty says. “I’ve seen that kind of response a number of times. And it is something theory has broughtto the literature classroom. The Greek philosopher Aristotle, taught by an Indian American professor in theEnglish department who’s also teaching Beloved and Achebe’s Things Fall Apart in the same course—that’sthe experience of ‘theory,’ all those new and odd and exciting connections!” ❧

How long have you been at Cornell, and whatattracted you to this place?Traces Theoryfrom East to Westand Back AgainI have been here since 1987. In 1997 I was invited to join the Department ofComparative Literature, so I now belong to both the Department of Asian Studies andthe Department of Comparative Literature. Before I came to Ithaca I was familiar withwork done by some faculty members in the humanities at Cornell. I thought thatCornell scholars in English, comparative literature, and history were doing theoreticallyvery innovative things, and naturally I was very curious about their research. In manyrespects, I thought Cornell was one of the leading centers in the humanities in general.I also liked the generally open atmosphere that some faculty members managed tocreate in the studies of Asia. I felt I would be able to conduct the sorts of study thatcalled into question the old assumptions underlying what were referred to as areastudies and would seek different and critical approaches to Asia and other regions inthe world.When did you develop the idea forthe journal Traces?The idea of Traces as a multilingual journal was born in 1996 out of casualdiscussion with friends of mine, Pheng Cheah and Thomas LaMarre, who happenedto be in Ithaca then and are now members of the Traces editorial collective.The following year, we wrote the original prospectus together and,based upon that, I began to discuss the idea with my friends in other countriessuch as Taiwan, Britain, Korea, China, Australia, Japan, and Germanywhenever I was invited to those countries for conferences and lectures. Totell you the truth, I was surprised that many of my friends thought veryhighly of the project and volunteered to help me create a new journal in languagesother than English . . . Currently Traces is published in four languages:Korean, Chinese, English, and Japanese. We are negotiating with publishersin Europe for the German and French versions. Of course, Traces is nota journal exclusively for Asian readers or about Asia.What void in the dissemination oftheoretical writing does Traces fill?Most of the academic publishing companies in the United States do notinclude the translation into English of works in languages other than westernEuropean languages, mainly French and German, in their business oftheoretical writing publication. American academic publishers are interestedin translating classics or contemporary literature of those languagesfrom Asia, Africa, and Latin America into English, but they normally do notregard them as literature of a theoretical nature. I believe this is becausethe prevailing view of the global circulation of information makes a hierarchicaldistinction between flows of factual data from peripheral cultures tometropolitan centers and flows of theory from “the West” to “the rest ofthe world” . . . publishers in this country do not expect some importanttheoretical insight to come from “the rest of the world.” And, usually, theytalk of “the West” and the United States almost interchangeably.Until three or four decades ago, we used to encounter such a statement as“modern technology and scientific spirit were inherently European,” butnowadays one scarcely associates modern scientific rationality exclusivelywith Europe. We no longer presume that mathematics, which was onceviewed as the spiritual essence of the European civilization, is the exclusiveproperty of European people. European heritages, which may well havestarted in Europe, are increasingly dissociated from people of Europeanethnic origins, and are criticized, evaluated, and developed by people in“the rest of the world.”Thus, the prevailing view of the distribution of theory and culture is increasingly becoming obsolete in contemporaryglobalization. Its definition of theory is inadequate in view of the academic conversation going on betweenvarious locations in the world, particularly around Pacific Asia. Traces is expected to fill the void created by thisold view of theory . . . So we will publish comparative cultural theoretical research that addresses a multilingualaudience engaged in disciplines such as philosophy, gender studies, intellectual history, anthropology, social history,sociology, aesthetics, literature, art history, cultural studies, women’s studies, political economy, history ofsciences, linguistics, and economic and labor history.Have you collaborated with others at Cornell on this project?Yes, I have worked with my colleagues at Cornell for Traces. I was helped tremendously by J.Victor Koschmann, Brett de Bary, and many others, both faculty and graduate students, insideand outside Cornell. At Cornell our project could not have survived without support from ourfriends in a wide variety of departments and programs: Asian studies, history, comparative literature,English, Romance languages, anthropology, German studies, government, and soforth, not to mention the dean’s office in the College of Arts and Sciences, the East AsiaProgram and the Society for the Humanities.23

Karen Brazell is no stranger to the idea that computer technology enhancesliberal arts instruction. In 1981, when typewriters, photocopiers, and overheadprojectors were still the teacher’s only techno pets, Brazell was one ofthe few humanities faculty to win an Ezra Cornell computer grant. The machineshe purchased had less capacity than a Palm Pilot, she says. But Brazell, theGoldwin Smith Professor of Japanese Literature and Theatre and professor of Asianstudies, made innovative use of her electronic dinosaur, creating an index of 3,000teaching slides.That computer grant marked the beginnings of a scholarly database and Web sitethat is flourishing today. Brazell is now director of GloPAC—the Global PerformingA NCIENT ARTS, MODERN METHODS: KAREN BRAZELL’SHelps Lend ato theby Franklin Crawford1984David Feldshuh, playwright,director, physician,joins faculty of Cornelltheater department and isnamed artistic director ofthe theatre arts center. Hisplay, Miss Evers’ Boys, isnominated for a PulitzerPrize; a television adaptationwins several Emmys.Arts Consortium, an organization committed to the creation of an authoritative,multimedia, and multilingual database of images, sound, and video of the performingarts. Institutions, performing arts groups, and individuals currently contributematerial to GloPAC’s projects from places as far-flung as St. Petersburg andSingapore.Not only will the database provide access to material that would otherwise beunavailable to most people, but it also allows students and scholars to examine theperforming arts in a cross-cultural context. Instead of searching through scores ofbooks on the use of puppets in Japan, Vietnam, China, Russia, and the UnitedStates, for example, researchers will be just a few clicks away from hundreds ofimages worldwide—with authoritative, peer-reviewed information attached.Brazell is working on this project with Ann Ferguson, the library’s curator fortheatre arts, and with the staff of the Cornell Institute for Digital Collections(CIDC).“Very little has been done with metadata in the performing arts, so Karen and Iare collaborating in uncharted territory,” says Ferguson. “Creating an effective24

“Not everyone assumes Shakespeare. . . is the standard,” says ProfessorKaren Brazell. “The student populationtoday is more internationaland more visually oriented.”international database of this scope is a majorundertaking, and we have spent hundreds of hoursworking together on this project. Collaborations likeours—between faculty and librarians—can result inthe creation of digital scholarly tools that offer excitingnew ways of studying the arts and humanities.”Brazell has long anticipated the need for puttingperforming arts, particularly non-Western forms ofart, into global perspective. Her extensive knowledgeof Japanese Noh plays, for example, has given her a different perspectiveon what constitutes the standard in performing arts.“You learn that not everybody is assuming that Shakespeare’s plays or 19thcentury realism is the standard,” Brazell says. “The student population todayis more international—and more visually oriented. Many students arrive with agreater global awareness of culture and a powerful visual sense.”Many students also expect high-end technology to serve as their vehicle tonew knowledge. To meet that challenge for the past decade, at least, Brazellhas intensified her efforts to present instruction materials in multimedia formats.GloPAC, a work-in-progress, is an example of that effort.In addition to the staff at CIDC, Brazell has been assisted in this project bya diverse group of students. Ray Wenderlich ’01, computer science, helpeddesign the original database. Other students contributed to the GlobalPerforming Arts Database (GloPAD) and GloPAC’s other major initiative,Performing Arts Resource Centers (PARCs). They include Tang Fang ’99,architecture; Mien Wang ’99, painting and printmaking; Thomas Lent ’00,Asian studies; Othilia Kim ’02, electrical engineering; and Zixue Mi ’04.The initial PARC focuses on Japan (JPARC) and includes an interactiveplay script, a streaming video performance, and a dynamic slide show, as wellas a multi-layered glossary, an index of translations, and a Web source station ofJapanese clip art and Internet links. At the present time, anyone may freelyenter these Web sites simply by registering.“This is not just for my own class—it’s meant for an international audienceof teachers and students. The interactive learning modules can be usedinstead of more conventional reading assignments orin-class presentations,” Brazell says. For example, apage on “Costuming a Warrior for a Japanese NohPlay” shows digital images of an actor being dressedfor the role of a warrior, enhanced by text; pertinentterms are highlighted for reference to a glossary that’sjust a click away. A sequence of links allows a studentto explore the subject more deeply. The glossary definitionsare written by “top-of-the-line scholars specificallyfor this project,” says Brazell. “They are notmerely items from a dictionary.”The GloPAC Web site allows students to learn more efficiently on theirown time outside the classroom, Brazell says. Time saved outside the classroomtranslates into quality time inside the classroom. It gives Brazell moretime to focus on research. And it is a vast improvement on the smelly purplemimeographs of the pre-database era. “You can’t write about visual thingswithout using pictures,” says Brazell. “The fact that we can reproduce picturesand sound has revolutionized how we can teach.” ❧DistinguishedCORNELLIANSMollie Katzen ’72, authorof The Moosewood Cookbook,The Enchanted BroccoliForest, other well-knownvegetarian cookbooks.Diane Ackerman M.F.A. ’73,Ph.D. ’79, poet, naturalist,and author of the bestsellerA Natural History of theSenses.Christopher Reeve ’74,stage, screen, and televisionactor best known for creatingthe movie role ofSuperman. A 1995 accidentleft Reeve paralyzed. He hassince founded theChristopher Reeve ParalysisFoundation and starred in aremake of the film RearWindow.JPARC includes an interactiveplay script, an index oftranslations, and a Websource station of Japaneseclip art and Internet linksthat anyone can register touse.25

From“NewJudith Peraino’s History of Rock Music might sound like aneasy “A” to students looking for three cool cross-listed credits.“Then I tell them in the first lecture they’ll have to learn torecognize a few chord changes and they panic and line up tochange their grade option to ‘satisfactory-unsatisfactory’,” saysPeraino, assistant professor of music. “Students don’t need musictraining for the course (but) close listening means developing anear for another type of language and being able to hear the culturalcodes. This can be challenging.”Nevertheless, Peraino’s very popular class, cross-listed in musicand American studies, can have well over 100 students on its waitinglist. History of Rock takes them on a scholarly trip from theblues, gospel, and Tin Pan Alley to current pop incarnations likeMedieval alternative rock and hip-hop.Rock music is but one of three of Peraino’s specialties, whichtoinclude medieval music—specifically 13th century French secularmusic—and music and queer theory. She is affiliated with themedieval and women’s studies programs as well as American studies.Peraino was appointed to the music faculty in 1997, with a doctoratein music from the University of California at Berkeley,where she also earned her masters. Her arrival at Cornell markeda departure from more traditional music faculty appointments.Peraino was later joined by Steven Pond, who also has a UC-Berkeley doctorate, and together they represent the department’scommitment to new directions in music studies.“Cornell has certainly taken on what used to be viewed as avery non-traditional study of music of the 20th century—studieswe now view as historical—with two scholars who have quicklybecome extremely important voices in the contemporary musicworld,” said Mark Scatterday, former chair of Cornell’s musicdepartment. “Their research in what might be considered modernor popular musicological areas—including Judith’s research in themusic before 1600—is not only high-powered scholarly work butalso gives both our undergraduates and graduate students a newview into jazz, rock, pop, and world music. Judith also brings toour department a compelling intellectual voice in gay, lesbian, andbisexual studies.”Peraino was an undergraduate at the University of Chicagowhen she first became intrigued by medieval music and, later, fascinatedwith Middle Eastern music. For a time she considered acareer in ethnomusicology, studying sacred and secular music ofthe Arabic world. But her love for early music won out, fortifiedby new trends developing within the field of Western music history.The introduction of feminist theory and its sub-field, queertheory, was having an influence even on relatively staid disciplines”such as musicology. Peraino eventually refined her calling alongsideother musicologists who were incorporating feminist andqueer theory into their music studies. Akin to an undergroundmovement in the field, the trend toward linking music and sexualitygained momentum through the late 1980s and by 1990,by Franklin CrawfordPeraino says, she was among a “critical mass” of pioneering musicologistswho were moving beyond the discipline’s traditionalboundaries into new scholarly territory. “These things were so new to musicology, they actually called what wewere doing ‘new musicology,’ and still do,” says Peraino.With the new scholarly territory of feminist and queer theory was a new serious consideration of popular musics,especially rock. Most of Peraino’s work in queer theory concerns popular musics, although her book, Listening to theSirens: Musical Technologies of Queer Identity, will cover a wide range of styles and historical eras.Although the Department of Music originally made its reputation on 18th century studies and a fairly traditionalWestern music tradition, Peraino says she feels supported by her colleagues. And visiting parents love her Historyof Rock class.“When I lecture during Parent’s Weekend, mothers and fathers come up to me and say ‘This is fantastic, this iseverything I’ve always wanted to know’,” she says. “Rock music is the lingua franca of their generation, too.” ❧Hip-Hop,JudithPerainoRocks theMusicology1985Wole Soyinka, Nigerianplaywright, is a seniorfellow with Cornell’s Societyfor the Humanities. He winsthe 1986 Nobel Prize inliterature for such plays asThe Swamp Dwellers and TheTrials of Brother Jero.26

B RIDGING THE GAPSalah HassanHopes to Broaden the Field ofArt HistorySince his arrival at Cornell in 1993, Salah Hassan has been a tireless advocatefor the arts in general and African and African Diaspora art and artists in particular.“The arts should reflect the diversity of the human experience,” says Hassan.The chair of Cornell’s Department of History of Art since fall of 2001, Hassanis an associate professor of Africana studies and a specialist in African and AfricanDiaspora art history and visual culture. “In all my classes I emphasize Africa as ahistoric and dynamic entity which has maintained a global presence,” he says. “Byoffering students a comparative perspective, they can look at the African experiencein light of the global human experience, and the multitude of world experiencein art.”Born in the Sudan, Hassan received his B.A. from the University of Khartoumand his M.A. (1984) and Ph.D (1988) from the University of Pennsylvania. One ofhis current tasks as chair of the history of art department is to help guide theemerging Visual Studies Program at Cornell.“My interest in art goes beyond the study of traditional genres of art, such aspainting and sculpture, and includes new media and multi-media installations,performance, and digitally based arts,” says Hassan. “The nature of contemporaryAbove: Jeff Donaldson (American, b. 1932), TarikTreat, 1989; acrylic with sand. Collection of theartist. Tarik Treat was among the pieces featuredin the 2000 exhibition Blackness in Color, whichHassan curated.27by Franklin CrawfordProfessor Salah Hassan: “The artsshould reflect the diversity ofhuman experience.”art practice is characterized by the dissolution of boundaries,which has resulted in bridging the gap between many disciplinesand bringing together many genres of visual art.”Another consuming project has been the creation of a firsteverDatabase on Contemporary African Artists. Funded withgrants from the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, the databaseis now implemented by the Cornell Institute of DigitalCollections in collaboration with Cornell’s Africana Library.Hassan is also founder of Nka: Journal of ContemporaryAfrican Art with two colleagues: Olu Oguibe, a New YorkbasedNigerian art historian, artist, and art critic, and OkwuiEnwezor, also a Nigerian art critic and curator. The journal,based and supported through Cornell, is a vital publication,Hassan says.“Nka is important because the field of contemporaryAfrican and African Diaspora art has been neglected withinthe discourse of art history, a discourse that has primarilyfocused on the so-called ‘authentic’ and ethnographic Africanart forms. As a curator and art critic, I felt the need to addressthe gaps in knowledge about modern and contemporary African art movements and other non-Western art movements within the discourse of history of art as a discipline.”Hassan has curated several major art exhibitions, internationally and on campus. With a grantfrom the Ford Foundation, he organized “Visualizing Blackness,” a major conference held inOctober 2000 at Cornell. The conference coincided with the exhibition Blackness in Color: VisualExpressions of the Black Arts Movement (1960–Present), curated by Hassan and launched at theHerbert F. Johnson Museum of Art in August 2000.“The presence of a world-class museum run by first-class professionals has been a great help tome in both my classroom work and my research interests,” says Hassan. “(And) the library andvisual resources on campus make it much easier for me to meet the demands of a challenging studentpopulation.” ❧

In spring 2001, more than 50 Cornell undergraduate studentssigned up for a course called Introduction toVisual Studies, taught by English professor TimothyMurray. Independent study in visual studies or its corollary,visual culture, has been offered since 1985. But Murray’sclass marked the first core course offered as part of a concentrationin visual studies at Cornell. Designed to providea wide-ranging approach to visual art, media, performance,and perception, the concentration features an interdisciplinarycast of faculty and draws on art history, film, literarystudies, psychology, theatre, and political theory, amongother disciplines. Requirements include a core course thatintroduces students to critical thinking about visual studiesas well as close textual analysis in social and historical contexts.In addition, students choose four Cornell coursesfrom among the different categories offered in the concentration.One of those courses must include a hands-on projectthat demonstrates a working knowledge of the subject.“The driving force for the concentration is the studentsthemselves,” says Murray. “There’s a real imperative comingfrom students for training in visual literacy. A growingnumber of undergraduates coming to Cornell are incrediblyliterate in multimedia and are seeking a match and an academiccontext that increases their critical skills and theirProfessor Tim Murray: “Agrowing number of undergraduatescoming to Cornellare incredibly literate inmultimedia.”1987Roald Hoffmann, Cornellprofessor of chemistry and,later, of humane letters,and co-winner of the 1981Nobel Prize in chemistry,publishes his first poetrycollection, The MetamictState.vision. They have a wide array of visual materials at their fingertips. Our task is to make this floodof visual information critically advantageous to them.”Administrative oversight of the new concentration has been assigned to Salah Hassan, chair ofthe Department of History of Art. Hassan believes his department will benefit from day-to-dayinteractions with a progressive visual studies program.“The emphasis is to move toward comparative, cross-cultural studies that look seriously on bothsides of the traditional boundaries of Western and non-Western art, high art versus popular culture,visual and discursive aspects of art, and the institutional separation of art, architecture, film, video,and new media,” he says.One reason for the trend toward visual studies at Cornell is the need to “look at European artwithin a larger picture,” says Hassan. The recruitment of new scholars whose work bridges traditionalboundaries is a priority. A search is underway for an art historian producing “innovative workthat is relevant to the latest global developments in the field of visual studies and visual culture,”he says.28

“For years now traditional definitions of art have comeunder attack and/or have fallen into historical dissolution,”Hassan says. “But that doesn’t mean replacing arthistory with visual studies. Attention has long sincewidened to other objects in film, mass media, and popularculture, in conjunction with new methodologicalapproaches and new social imperatives, such as feminism,gay cultures, and multiculturalism.”Brett de Bary, director of the Visual Studies Programand professor of Asian studies, says the concentrationdoesn’t fit neatly into a traditional academic framework.“[Visual studies] draws on many practice- and production-orientedcourses engaging visuality at Cornell, whilemaintaining the emphasis on reflection, criticism, and historicaland cultural interpretation that is at the heart of aliberal arts education,” says de Bary. “Studies of multimediaart forms—from the medieval illuminated manuscriptsto television, Web-cam and cyber dance—requirecollaboration across a range of disciplines, as do attemptsto combine a practical mastery of information technologieswith an understanding of their social and culturalimpacts.”David Bathrick, a professor of German studies who alsochairs Cornell’s Department of Theatre, Film and Dance,and Marilyn Rivchin, a senior lecturer in that department,Clockwise from top: techflesh, a multimedia artists'exploration of the HumanGenome Project, appearedin the Internet-based artjournal CTheory; Let's TellLies, by Cristina Casanova;Focusing, by TamasWaliczky; An AnnotatedArchive From the Cold War,by George LeGrady.29DistinguishedCORNELLIANSPhilip Gourevitch ’80,author of We Wish to InformYou That Tomorrow We WillBe Killed With Our Families,a chronicle of the 1994Rwanda massacres, namedby the National Book CriticsCircle as best nonfictionbook of 1997.Sheryl WuDunn ’81, authorand New York Times correspondent,received 1990Pulitzer Prize in internationalreporting for coverageof the TiananmenSquare massacre.were some of the first on campus to discuss visual studies inthe mid-1980s. Bathrick says he has incorporated visual studiesinto his teaching because it “helps students think aboutthe formal structures of visual representation and how theyoperate beyond the mere communication of a particular contentor subject matter.”“Teaching courses on culture and politics, I have increasinglycome to stress the importance of students being able toread images as a way of understanding how societies organizetheir needs and articulate power beyond the medium of writtenor spoken texts,” says Bathrick. “For instance, my courseson the Third Reich and the Holocaust have focused onthe subtle ways that images serve to confirm or question valuesand thereby create political consensus.”Rivchin says the visual studies concentration is a reasonedeffort to meet the needs of students who would like to buildtheir studies around two or more established fields. Thosemight include film, art history, theatre design, computerimaging, the psychology of perception, and architecture,including both theory and practice across such disciplines.“Although filmmaking and video production courses havealways been in high demand here, there are many undergraduatesfor whom an interdisciplinary visual studies approachmakes sense,” said Rivchin, who teaches filmmaking anddigital video production. “For these students, and for the facultythat teach them, the value of the visual studies concentrationlies in the mutual knowledge that the study and creationof visual representations surrounding us in culture, andthat we contribute to culture, have meanings, ideologies, and impacts that are complex and overlapping.They are not easily contained within existing and arbitrary borders of academic study and need.”Enthusiasm for the young program is not universal within its parent department. Professor RobertCalkins, a noted expert on medieval architecture and illuminated manuscripts, is concerned about losingwhat he calls “the art historical rigor”—the principles of investigation developed over time into anestablished discipline—to an as-yet undefined course of study.“As far as I’m concerned, it’s a quibble over semantics: art history is visual studies,” Calkins says.“It’s an add-on to what we already do. I have nothing against that. But if the traditional discipline getssupplanted, how are students ever going to look at a work of art and understand the how and why andthe context of it before analyzing it in other ways?”Nourishing innovation while preserving valuable tradition is a challenge, but it’s one that Cornell’sfaculty expect to meet. The department chair speaks confidently of “a revitalized art history departmentwith a strong visual studies component.“Cornell, more than any other institution, is well positioned to meet the goal of building an interdisciplinaryprogram of study that creates synergy between departments, scholars, and students of visualculture across campus,” Hassan says. “The Department of History of Art will provide the central organizationalspace for this initiative. It will provide, through seminars and thematically focused workshops,the intellectual climate to explore this emerging field of study with its great potential forgrowth.” ❧

I MAGE AND INSPIRATION2000Gap Creek, a novel byEnglish professor RobertMorgan about a family’sstruggle in AppalachianNorth Carolina, is named anOprah Winfrey book clubselection and soon hits theU.S. bestseller fiction list.30

Sisters PursueParallelStudiesinbutby Linda MyersVisualitycame in for an advising session three years ago. She had already combed through thecollege catalog for courses that had to do with visuality. Her list was longer than ours.”About the decision to concentrate in visual studies, Erica says, “It found us. We’vealways been interested in finding creative connections between writing and visualarts.” Growing up in a small Central New York town, both sisters were intrigued bythe power of visual imagery. As young girls they wrote and illustrated children’s stories(still an interest) and later made murals to augment lessons in such subjects asAmerican history and calculus.Once they got to Cornell, the sisters were exposed to what Erica calls an “explosion”of new ideas in a range of subjects. Visual studies has led them into areas asdiverse as psychology, government, theatre, film, and Asian studies, creating linkagesthat uncovered new and exciting fields of study.“A place like Cornell encourages diverse thinking. There are so many opportunities,”says Erica.“Like the chance to look at actual medieval illuminated manuscripts at the library,”says Alicia, who studied them to determine how image conveys meaning as part of afreshman writing seminar on art and society in the Italian Renaissance.Alicia’s honors thesis asks how rising visual technologies—namely photography—provided a new vocabulary for narratives of place in the 1800s. In her honors thesis,Erica is looking at problems that “doubleness” presents, from Edgar Allan Poe’s doppelgangersand the double vision of 19th century stereoscopes to more contemporaryrepresentations of twins in Diane Arbus photographs and Japanese mass media.“They are prototypical Cornell humanities students—independent-minded, able tostrike out on their own, and hungry to develop their own projects,” says Murray, whoserves on both sisters’ honors thesis committees. “They personify the visual studiesstudent who is comfortable with cross-disciplinary study. In their case, visual studiesgrounded and catalyzed their combined interests in art, art history, and literature.” ❧When students at Cornell first saw televisedimages of the World Trade Center towerscollapsing, “Everyone was saying ‘It’s sounreal, it’s like watching a movie,’” says EricaAnderson ’02. She and her twin sister, AliciaAnderson ’02, immediately thought of Like a Film, abook by one of their professors. In that book, authorTim Murray discusses what it means when the distinctionbetween the real and the imagined onscreen begins to blur.The Andersons were both concentrating in visualstudies, an emerging field that tries to make sense ofthe images and words that permeate people’s lives.Erica likens people’s confused sense of reality onSeptember 11, 2001, to the way trauma triggeredmemory in Hiroshima, Mon Amour, a film that shestudied in a course she took with Murray. In thefilm, a Frenchwoman travels to Hiroshima to witnessthe devastation there and, through her relationshipwith a Japanese lover, comes to terms with her ownhorrific wartime memories. “The film is a complexlayering of language and discourse, what they aresaying and what you are seeing,” comments Erica.Brett de Bary, director of Cornell’s Visual StudiesProgram, professor of Asian studies, and Erica’sadviser, says that even before it became a formalconcentration, visual studies began to attract studentswho are able to ask new questions. “Erica firstDistinguishedCORNELLIANSLorrie Moore M.F.A. ’82,short story writer and novelist;author of the highlypraised story collectionBirds of America, whichincludes the much-reprinted“People Like That Are theOnly People Here.”Jimmy Smits M.F.A. ’82,actor; perfected the role ofDetective Bobby Simonefrom 1993 to 1998 on NYPDBlue, the Emmy awardwinningtelevision drama.31

“There’s a true communityof writers and scholars at Cornell.”An award-winning poet, Alice Fulton comes to the Cornell faculty from theUniversity of Michigan, where she was a professor of English. Her academicfocus is in the reading and writing of poetry; poetics and science; short fiction;critical writing; postmodernism; 20th century poetry; Emily Dickinson;and feminist theory. Fulton, who now is professor of English at Cornell,received an MFA at Cornell in 1982.“The chance for me to return to Cornell was truly unforeseen. It came as awonderful surprise . . . There’s a true community of writers and scholars atCornell, people I deeply admire as artists and thinkers, and this is fundamentallyimportant. That atmosphere—the spirit of a place—is somethingthat can’t be legislated or forced.”AliceFultononN EWF ACULTY“Cornell’s philosophy department is widely and justifiablyregarded as one of the best in the world.”MichaelFaraMichael Fara came to Cornellfrom Princeton University,where he earned his doctoratein philosophy. The academicfocus for the new assistant professorof philosophy is metaphysics,philosophical logic,and philosophy of language.“Cornell’s philosophy departmentis widely and justifiablyregarded as one of the best inthe world. The department iscommitted to the highest standardsof excellence in bothteaching and research in philosophy. I looked forward to working in the stimulating,challenging, and encouraging intellectual environment that Cornell’s philosophy departmentpromised to offer . . . those are the main reasons I chose to come to Cornell.”32

RaymondCraibRaymond Craib, assistant professor of history, came toCornell from Yale University, where he earned his doctorate.His primary area of interest is modern LatinAmerica, especially Mexico, where he had been a visitinginstructor at El Colegio de San Luís Potosí andCentro de Investigaciones y Esutios Superiores enAntopología Social.“I came to Cornell for many reasons. The school has anexcellent reputation in the humanities, as does the his-tory department; I was impressed with the department itself when I visited for mycampus interview; and, more broadly, the resources available for scholars working onLatin America are excellent. I was particularly excited by the strong commitment tointerdisciplinary and comparative teaching and research, and the myriad opportunitiesto team-teach across disciplines.”“History and the humanities . . .are absolutely essential tocritical and creative thinking and to the creation of anopen, egalitarian civil society.”DingXiang Warner“ Examining another culture ispart of better understanding one’s own.”Ding Xiang Warner, assistant professor of Asian studies,came to Cornell from the University ofMassachusetts at Amherst, where she was a visitingassistant professor of Chinese. Her areas of study andresearch include literature and literary thoughts fromthe Han through the Song dynasties, early andmedieval Chinese history, and textual transmissionand reception in traditional China.“Here at Cornell there is a large and vibrant Asian studies faculty with whom I canwork and share ideas. I see my role in this field as not just to promote Chinese languageand literature, or even Asian studies, but as a member of the broader highereducation community whose role is to open students’ horizons in the humanities.”NicoleWaligora-Davis“Literature demandsa level of critical inquiry and engagement . . .that fosters a practice of thinking fundamental to any profession.”Nicole Waligora-Davis, assistant professor of English,came to Cornell from Duke University, where sheserved as an instructor and earned her doctorate inEnglish literature. Her primary areas of academicstudy include 20th century African American literature,20th century American literature, and criticaltheories of race and gender.“My interest in Cornell arose out of not only mydepartment’s, but also the institution’s, shared commitmentto open intellectual inquiry and its dedicationto fostering and sustaining both a communityof outstanding scholars and an environment that promotesintellectual exchange across fields. Secondly, thesocioeconomic, national, religious, ethnic, and culturaldiversity found on this campus provides a unique,exciting, and enriching space for scholarship.”33

BethMillesBeth Milles, a 1988 alumna of Cornell with a B.A. in history, earned her master’sin theatre arts at Harvard University. She came to Cornell from Broadway,where she was a freelance theatre director, and from the University ofRedlands, where she was a professor in theatre arts. The academic focus for theassociate professor in the Department of Theatre, Film and Dance is directing,acting, playwriting, and the adaptation of classical texts.“Cornell is where I discovered how to learn, and Iwant to inspire that in my students. I think Cornell’sunique mix of students forces professors to start atstep one with each individual student to create aneven playing field. I think the diversity on campusalso forces students not to be intellectual snobs. Itwas here that I found that I could learn somethingfrom everyone—and that was a powerful discovery—even those I did not on the surface agree with.”“Theatre isn’t about being safe.It’s about picking up a rock and seeingwhat’s under it.”Karen B.GraubartKaren Graubart left the University of Massachusetts tojoin Cornell’s College of Arts and Sciences as an assistantprofessor of history. Her academic focus is colonialLatin American history and women and gender inLatin American history. Her research and teaching tryAmandaStarrDeborah“It is exciting to participate in a departmentthat is distinguished by its commitment to anintercultural curriculum withboth depth and breadth.”to link present and past by exploring thehistorical bases for conquest and dominationthat still have such a hold on theworld.“Cornell’s history department is wellknown for its interest in bridging regionsof study and interdisciplinary research. Mywork, which draws connections betweencolonial Latin America, early modernEurope, and Islamic Iberia, is well-suitedfor the present strengths as well as needsof the department. Also, Cornell anthropology’slong tradition of Andeanist workgives me wonderful supporting colleagues,as well as a remarkable library.”“Reasoning skillsand good writingare pretty universally applauded.”Deborah Starr was an assistant professor ofcomparative literature and Jewish studies atPenn State University before coming to Cornell,where she is an assistant professor in theDepartment of Near Eastern Studies. Her academicfocus is in modern Arabic and Hebrewliterature.“Near Eastern Studies at Cornell is a small butvibrant department. It is exciting to participatein a department that is distinguished byits commitment to an intercultural curriculumwith both depth and breadth. In addition, thelively intellectual community, the extensivelibrary holdings, and the generous support ofscholarship also contributed to my decision tocome to Cornell.”Mary K.McCullough34

Miller-Ockhuizen“The kind of argumentation and logicalproblem-solving skills entailed in linguisticsare very good training for studentswho want to pursue many diversecareers.”Amanda Miller-Ockhuizen was aninstructor at Ohio State University,where she earned her doctorate, beforecoming to Cornell as an assistant professorin the Department of Linguistics.A former trainer of language teachers inthe Peace Corps, her areas of academicconcentration include phonetics, thephonetics-phonology interface, andKhoesan languages.“As a linguist, I really like the way thatthe phonetics lab is integrated into theDepartment of Linguistics at Cornell andappreciate the balance found at Cornellbetween linguistic description and linguistictheory. As a phonetician, I amappreciative of the facilities available for doing phonetics here,and I strive towards furthering the reputation of the labaround the world. Cornell University’s academic reputation, andthe belief in academic freedom that the university encourages,as well as the natural beauty of Ithaca, all attracted me toCornell.”Mary McCullough, associate professor of English andwomen’s studies, was a visiting professor at Cornell prior toher current appointment. Before that, she was an associateprofessor in English and women’s studies at MiamiUniversity. Her academic focus includes 19th and 20th centuryAmerican studies, lesbian studies, ethnic studies, feministtheory, British and Irish women’s narratives, Britishand American popular culture, Anglo-Irish literature, andcomposition.“One thing that attracted me to Cornell was the faculty inthe English and women’s studies departments. There are somany people who have made exciting contributions to bothareas of studies. In women’s studies there is Biddy Martin,Sandra Bem, and Amy Villareho, among others, and inEnglish—Laura Brown, JonathanCuller, and Hortense Spillers, toname a few. In broader terms, I wasvery drawn to the women’s studiesprogram. It’s a very old program andmore interdisciplinary than a lot ofothers. It benefits from ongoinginvolvement from faculty, drawingpeople from across the universityand a range of disciplines.”“ One thing thatattracted me toCornell was thefaculty in the English and women’sstudies departments.”Michael Jones-Correa came to Cornell from HarvardUniversity, where he was on the government faculty.The assistant professor of government’s areas of studyinclude inter-ethnic conflict, negotiation, and coalitionbuilding in U.S. urban areas; institutionalapproaches to urban politics and intergovernmentalrelations; immigrant naturalization and political mobilization;social movements; and racial and ethnic identityin the United States.“The appeal of Cornell for me was the number of peopleworking in related areas across the university, andthe possibility of workingwithin programs—like Latinostudies or American studies—thatbrought these peopletogether. The opportunityto join this rich intellectualcommunity, and to helpbuild on its strengths, was agreat attraction.”“Given that the U.S. is becomingmore ethnically diverse,the study of racial and ethnicpolitics is simply crucial.”MichaelJones-CorreaDeliaGraffDelia Graff, associate professor of philosophy,comes to Cornell from PrincetonUniversity, where she was an assistant professorin the philosophy department. Heracademic focus is in the philosophy of language,philosophical logic, and metaphysics.“I had many reasons for coming to Cornell. . . One main attraction was that Cornell’sphilosophy department, in addition to havinga long tradition of important peopleworking in philosophy of language, alsocurrently has a number of strong peopledoing work in technical philosophy of languageand semantics, my main areas ofspecialization. Added to this is a linguisticsdepartment that’s very strong in formalsemantics and that has an established connectionwith the philosophy department.”“I’ve found the studentshere, both undergraduateand graduate, to be absolutely top-notch.”35

This publication is adapted from a five-partseries published in the Cornell ChronicleNovember 1–December 6, 2001.CreditsEditor: Simeon MossContributors: Franklin Crawford, Martha Gold,Susan Lang, Simeon Moss, Linda MyersGraphic design: Clive HowardCopy editor: Claudia WheatleyUnless otherwise credited, photographs are byUniversity Photography: Robert Barker, FrankDiMeo,Charles Harrington, and NicolaKountoupes. Photographs in the table of contentsand on pages 2, 4, 6, 10, 14, and 16courtesy of Rare and Manuscript Collections.Cornell ChroniclePublisher: Henrik N. DulleaEditor: Simeon MossCopy editor: Karen WaltersProduced by Communication and MarketingServices and Cornell News Service, units ofthe Division of University Relations.Cornell University is an equal opportunity,affirmative action educator and employer.Printed on recycled paper.5/2002 4M MP39