‘Performing Skin’ conference

The Society for the Humanities will hold its 2016 fall conference, “Performing Skin,” Oct. 21-22, with lectures and panel presentations on research topics related to the Society’s focal theme for 2016-17, “Skin.” Events are free and open to the public.

The conference features a dance performance and panel Oct. 22 in the Schwartz Center’s Class of ’56 Dance Theatre, and includes panels on “Literary Skins,” “Medial Membranes” and “Social Skins” at A.D. White House with faculty, graduate students and visiting scholars. Debjani Ganguly of the University of Virginia delivers the plenary lecture, “The Skin of the World: Allegories of Global Terror,” Oct. 21 at 4:45 p.m. in Goldwin Smith Hall’s Kaufmann Auditorium.

Lectures at A.D. White House include Senior Scholar-in-Residence Cristina Malcolmson, Oct. 21 at 1:15 p.m., speaking on “‘The Fairest Lady’: Gender and Race in William Byrd’s ‘Account of a Negro-Boy that is dappel’d in several Place of his Body with White Spots’ (1697).” Irene Tucker of the University of California, Irvine lectures on “Seeing Skin: Before Racial Construction,” Oct. 22 at 2 p.m.

The Society’s visiting fellows, along with Cornell faculty and graduate student fellows, pursue research on an interdisciplinary focal theme each year. Spring 2017 courses related to this year’s theme include “The Powers of Skin in Africa” and “Deep Skin in Digital Architecture.” 

Art and ‘Seoul’

Cornell Cinema screens the John Hughes-inspired teen movie “Seoul Searching,” Oct. 24 at 7 p.m., with director Benson Lee via Skype.

Sundance Institute/Provided

The cast of Benson Lee's John Hughes-inspired teen movie "Seoul Searching."

The film follows a diverse group of Korean high schoolers from around the globe who come together in 1986 at a summer camp in Seoul, where their parents have sent them to learn what it means to be Korean.

Also at Cornell Cinema: An evening with experimental media artist Jesse McLean in person, Oct. 26 at 7:15 p.m., featuring her video works and short films “Somewhere only we know” (2009), “The Invisible World” (2012), “Just Like Us” (2014), “I’m in Pittsburgh and It’s Raining” (2015) and “See a Dog, Hear a Dog” (2016).

Dance: ‘Walking With ’Trane’

The music of innovative jazz legend John Coltrane is the soundtrack for Urban Bush Women’s production of “Walking with ’Trane,” Oct. 25 at 7:30 p.m. in the Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts’ Kiplinger Theatre. Tickets for the one-night-only dance performance are $25, $20 for senior citizens, students and the Cornell community, available at schwartztickets.com or the Schwartz Center box office, open Tuesday-Saturday, 2:30-8 p.m.

The program is patterned on a two-sided album, beginning with “Side A: Just a Closer Walk with ’Trane,” drawing on the history of Coltrane’s music as well as the broader traditions of spirituals, blues, free jazz and other forms. “Side B: Freed(Om)” features live original music by Grammy-winning composer and pianist George O. Caldwell, inspired by Coltrane’s 1965 album “A Love Supreme.”

The dancers embody the collaborative and improvisational nature of Coltrane’s musical legacy, with choreography by the Brooklyn-based company’s founder, artistic director Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, and associate artistic director and dancer Samantha Speis.

The event is cosponsored by the Department of Performing and Media Arts and the Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies program.

Talking game design

Walker White and Traci Nathans-Kelly will discuss “Game Design: Bridging Computing, Humanities and the Arts,” Oct. 26 at 4:30 p.m. in 106G Olin Library. Their talk is free and open to the public.

White, Ph.D. ’00, is director of Cornell’s Game Design Initiative and a senior lecturer in computer science. Nathans-Kelly is a senior lecturer in the engineering communications program.

The event is part of the Conversations in Digital Humanities series, featuring the work of Cornell faculty and graduate students. It is sponsored by Cornell University Library, the Society for the Humanities and the College of Arts and Sciences.

Saving and savoring foods

Best-selling author Simran Sethi will speak about endangered foods and ways to sustain agricultural biodiversity, Oct. 26 at 7:30 p.m. in Statler Auditorium.

The Audrey O’Connor Lecture, presented as part of Cornell Plantations’ Fall Lecture Series, is free and open to the public. It will include a tasting of Finger Lakes Cider House cider, tracing the journey of local historic apples into non-alcoholic and hard cider.

Sethi is an award-winning journalist and educator focused on food, sustainability and social change, and the author of “Bread, Wine, Chocolate: The Slow Loss of Foods We Love.” She maintains that the threat of losing agricultural biodiversity is embedded in every conversation about feeding people, conserving natural resources and ensuring a healthy diet.

She spent five years meeting and working with people dedicated to making the food supply more secure, abundant and delicious. Sethi will relate stories from her travels across six continents to interview scientists, farmers, chefs, winemakers, conservationists, and advocates and experts of all types to learn the intimate histories of our foods.

Sethi is an associate at the University of Melbourne’s Sustainable Society Institute in Australia, a contributor to Orion Magazine and a recent visiting scholar at the Cocoa Research Centre in St. Augustine, Trinidad.

SPARKing community

SPARK Talks – Scholars Present About Research and Knowledge – will feature Cornell graduate students and postdocs giving five-minute lightning talks, Oct. 27, 4-6 p.m. in 107 Olin Library. Sponsored by Cornell University Library, the talks will have the interdisciplinary theme of community.

SPARK Talks are an opportunity to present research to a wider audience across disciplines, get feedback and network. With a public presentation held once a year on campus, the aim of the talks is to help scholars to clearly communicate their research – whether to undergraduates in the classroom, prospective employers, funding agencies or the general public.

Accepted presenters for this event attended a workshop Oct. 20 led by David Feldshuh, professor of theatre in the Department of Performing and Media Arts.

Holocaust history

Scholar Christopher R. Browning will give a lecture on “Holocaust History and Survivor Testimony: The Case of the Starachowice Factory Slave Labor Camp,” Oct. 27 at 5:30 p.m. in Lewis Auditorium, Goldwin Smith Hall. A reception will follow in the History of Art Gallery. The events are free and open to the public.

Browning, the award-winning author of eight books on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, is an emeritus professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He has served as an expert witness at trials of accused Nazi criminals in Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom, as well as in two “Holocaust denial” trials.

His lecture is sponsored by the Jewish Studies Program as part of the “Technologies of Memory” series and by the Department of History.