Society for the Humanities - Cornell University

Announcing the 2027-28 focal theme!

2027-28: The Year of PLAY

Easily dismissed as frivolous, juvenile, or unserious, play represents a core human activity (homo ludens) with a rich tradition of scholarship in the humanities.

We invite applications that approach ideas and concepts that address play in a critical spirit. Critical studies of play can be found in a wide range of disciplines including anthropology, literature, history, performance studies, music, theater, media studies, gender and sexuality studies, cultural studies, and game studies.

Society Fellowships: One-year residential fellowships at Cornell University with a $64,000 stipend. Application deadline: September 1, 2026
https://societyhumanities.as.cornell.edu/society-fellowships

Faculty Fellowships: Open to Cornell faculty members only, one-year residential fellowships located at the A.D. White House. Application deadline: October 30, 2026
https://societyhumanities.as.cornell.edu/faculty-fellowships

Mellon Graduate Fellowships: Open to Cornell graduate students only, nine-month residential fellowships located at the A.D. White House, includes a $36,684 stipend, tuition, and student health insurance. Application deadline: October 30, 2026.
https://societyhumanities.as.cornell.edu/mellon-graduate-fellowships

Image: Takino Rainbow Nest, Toshiko Horiuchi MacAdam, netplayworks.com

Were you part of the Society’s earliest years?

Even before the Andrew Dickson White House became our campus home, the Society for the Humanities was already building an intellectual community that would shape generations of scholars.

As we mark 60 years, we’re giving a special shout to Fellows from the 1960s and 1970s, those who helped define what the Society would become.

All previous Society Fellows are invited to join us in Ithaca on September 18-19, 2026 to celebrate, reconnect, and reflect.
Know someone from those early cohorts? Pass this along. We would love to see them.

Plan to attend? Let us know by May 31, 2026 so that we get a sense of numbers.

https://societyhumanities.as.cornell.edu/60th-anniversary-fellows-alumni-reunion

Seniors in the Humanities Scholars Program - Cornell University (HSP) in the College of Arts & Sciences will showcase their research at an all-day conference May 1 at the A.D. White House.

Their work, developed over multiple semesters of sustained, interdisciplinary inquiry, spans across humanities fields and also highlights intersections with science, technology, business, law and other disciplines. HSP is open to students from across the university who are majoring or minoring in a humanities discipline. It offers curated courses, structured mentorship, special programming, research opportunities and funding.

Read more about the upcoming conference here: https://as.cornell.edu/news/humanities-scholars-tackle-research-across-disciplines

Juniors, Seniors, Grad Students, enroll today!
SHUM 4720/6720 Japanese American Wartime Incarceration Literature in the Twenty-First Century

Rei Magosaki
3 Credits
T 2-4:30pm

This seminar engages with the wide range of perspectives and imagination in recent Japanese American literature to think through the changing possibilities and responsibilities of survivance and memory work in the twenty-first century. Our focus will be on works of poetry collections, narrative fiction, graphic novels, and creative nonfiction from selected U.S. writers who are descendants of Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II. The selections center around Topaz (UT), which was, from the beginning, a particularly vibrant site of cultural production, but will also engage with lesser-known sites like Gila River (AZ) and Missoula (MT). These works display an array of literary sensibility reflecting their collective cultural inheritance of memory, taking agency in providing their readers with critical consciousness about the way in which descendant lives are complicated in the twenty-first century.

Image: Mt Swasey and Moonlight by Charles Erabu Suiko Mikami
https://classes.cornell.edu/browse/roster/FA26/class/SHUM/4720

Cornell’s Society for the Humanities Fellow’s Conference - Scale
April 24th 2026, 9:30am-5:00pm, A.D. White House

We are delighted to host Nick Salvato, Cornell’s Frederic J. Whiton Professor of Liberal Studies, as the keynote speaker for our 2026 Fellow’s Conference! Building off his monograph, Television Scale, Slavato will delve into the complex role of scale in the television industry in his speech, “Scale’s Remainders; or, Television’s Impossible Floor Plans”. Engaging with multiple aspects of the entertainment industry, this lecture explores how “scale is both an irresolvable intellectual problem and an invaluable methodological tool for the field of television studies.” Elaborating on previous arguments, Salvato is now turning his attention to the perplexing floor plans of famous tv set productions, and how some challenges might persist beyond the surface level of scalar use.

Join this year's cohort of Fellows at the Society for the Humanities for presentations on work-in-progress on the 2025-26 focal theme of Scale, and experience a wide array of intellectual deep dives into the intricate world of Scale across disciplines.

https://events.cornell.edu/event/spring-fellows-conference-on-scale

Happening now! Join us!

How does "Scale" shape our history and our ideas? 🌍

Next Friday, April 24, the Society for the Humanities invites you to our annual Spring Conference. We’re bringing together fellows from across the country—including scholars from USC, Barnard, and SUNY Cortland—alongside Cornell’s own faculty to share their latest research.

Highlights include:
Panel 1 (9:30 AM): Anarchist movements & medieval formlessness.
Panel 2 (10:45 AM): Scalar histories of Southeast Asia & imperial perspectives.
Panel 3 (1:15 PM): Afro-Native land acknowledgments, q***r kinship, and Poussin’s "Blind Orion".

Keynote (3:00 PM): Nick Salvato on "Television’s Impossible Floor Plans".

Admission is free and the public is welcome. Join us in the Guerlac Room for a day of rigorous discussion and community.

Full schedule available on the Cornell Events Calendar: https://events.cornell.edu/event/spring-fellows-conference-on-scale

How does "Scale" shape our history and our ideas? 🌍

Next Friday, April 24, the Society for the Humanities invites you to our annual Spring Conference. We’re bringing together fellows from across the country—including scholars from USC, Barnard, and SUNY Cortland—alongside Cornell’s own faculty to share their latest research.

Highlights include:
Panel 1 (9:30 AM): Anarchist movements & medieval formlessness.
Panel 2 (10:45 AM): Scalar histories of Southeast Asia & imperial perspectives.
Panel 3 (1:15 PM): Afro-Native land acknowledgments, q***r kinship, and Poussin’s "Blind Orion".

Keynote (3:00 PM): Nick Salvato on "Television’s Impossible Floor Plans".

Admission is free and the public is welcome. Join us in the Guerlac Room for a day of rigorous discussion and community.

Full schedule available on the Cornell Events Calendar: https://events.cornell.edu/event/spring-fellows-conference-on-scale

"Survival can be individual or collective, shaped by cultural imperatives, ideological commitments, or existential negotiations in the face of political, economic, environmental, social, and technological upheavals.”

Announcing the 2026-27 the Society for the Humanities Fellows on SURVIVAL!

The 2026-27 cohort of Survival Fellows will pursue projects on precarity in poetic form, q***r Asian cinema, parenting (or not) in climate change, and more exciting topics, and will be offering courses for advanced undergraduate and graduate students at Cornell related to their research.

For a full list of incoming Fellows and their projects, visit the Society's website:
https://societyhumanities.as.cornell.edu/news/2026-27-year-survival-0
Image: Coral Confection, Lauren Kussro, www.laurenkussro.com

Tonight!

Join us for a talk on Humanities & AI - April 16 at 5:15pm in A.D. White House!
“Humanities & AI: Modeling Culture Across the Disciplines”
by Meredith Martin, Professor of English, Princeton University

Computational social scientists have long worked to show the necessity of integrating social scientific expertise into data science workflows. Kate Crawford and dana boyd (2011) Hanna Wallach (2014), and Justin Grimmer (2015), to name a few, have developed research programs that model this interdisciplinary work. Grounded in many aspects of the humanities, cultural analytics and computational humanities research only flourishes in Information Science departments in the U.S. Practitioners in humanities departments struggle to find community in their home institutions, even those with data science programs. In this talk, I urge us to use this moment of AI’s marketing as a ‘cultural technology’ to build mutually reinforcing interdisciplinary collaborations that both address and overcome the history of unequal methodological integration for social sciences and humanities in machine learning research.

Meredith Martin is Professor of English and Faculty Director of the Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton, which started under her leadership in 2014.

This event is free & open to the public. A reception will follow the lecture.
For more information visit: https://events.cornell.edu/event/digital-humanities-lecture-by-meredith-martin

Call for applications!
Joseph E. Connolly ’72 Memorial Prizes
for undergraduate essays on religion and politics/society
Due April 24

Throughout history and across the contemporary global sphere, religious practice and ideology interweave themselves in the political and social fabric of human life. The Joseph E. Connolly ’72 Memorial Prizes are awarded to undergraduates who have demonstrated exceptional scholarship at the intersection of religion and politics or society. The Connolly Prizes seek to support, recognize, and inspire imaginative, wide-ranging undergraduate research that addresses these themes in any area of the humanities, and relating to religion(s), religious beliefs, and religious practices in the broadest sense.
Up to two prizes of $500 each will be awarded for essays by students at the freshman, sophomore, or junior levels. In addition, up to two prizes of $1500 each will be awarded to seniors for a senior honors thesis or capstone project.

Cornell undergraduates from all colleges are eligible to apply, including December 2025 graduates.
Applications must be submitted as pdf files to the at [email protected] by April 24, 2026.

Detailed instructions can be found here: https://societyhumanities.as.cornell.edu/connolly-prize