Fall harvest sampler

The public is invited to a Fall Harvest Kick Off celebration at the Cornell Orchards Store, 709 Dryden Road, Ithaca, Sept. 14 from 2 to 5 p.m.

The event will host vendors with free samples and products for sale, such as ice cream from Cornell Dairy, snacks from bumble & butter and Cornell Maple Syrup from Arnot Forest and the Cornell Maple Program. Vendors also include the Cornell Cheese Club, DarlingCake, Finger Lakes Tea Company, Knapp Farm, Howlands Apiaries and Clean Slate Farm.

Contemporary dramas

The Department of Performing and Media Arts (PMA) presents two staged readings of contemporary American plays on the Cornell campus this month, directed by Lisa Meixner McCullough ’20.

Excerpts from “The Christians” by Lucas Hnath will be performed Sept. 15 at 7 p.m. in Anabel Taylor Chapel, and a reading of “Informed Consent” by Deborah Zoe Laufer is Sept. 20 at 5 p.m. in G01 Stimson Hall. Both are free and open to the public.

Each reading will be followed by a facilitated discussion. “The Christians” tackles matters of organized religion and faith in America, and “Informed Consent” explores issues related to ethics in genetic research. Laufer is familiar to local audiences, having directed her play “Fortune” at the Hangar Theatre in June.

“This initiative is a staged reading series that aims to make theater accessible and relevant to lives of Cornell undergrads,” McCullough said. “We are taking our theater work outside the Schwartz Center, to show how plays can frame discussions already alive on campus.”

PMA also presents Racquel Gates speaking on “Double Negative: The Black Image and Popular Culture,” Sept. 20 at 4:30 p.m. in the Schwartz Center Film Forum. The event, part of the Voices & Visions in Black Media speaker series, is free and open to the public.

Gates is an assistant professor in the Department of Media Culture at the City University of New York’s College of Staten Island. The speaker series, featuring leading scholars in cinema and media studies, is organized by Samantha N. Sheppard, the Mary Armstrong Meduski ’80 Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at Cornell.

Local collective action

In celebration of its centennial, the Ithaca branch of the American Association of University Women (AAUW) invites the public to a free program highlighting the power of collective action to bring social change, Sept. 17 at 4:30 p.m. at The History Center in Tompkins County, 401 E. State St., Ithaca.

The featured speaker is Risa Lieberwitz, professor of labor and employment law in the ILR School and general counsel of the American Association of University Professors.

AAUW is one of the foremost national organizations promoting education and equity for women and girls. Since 1918, the Ithaca branch has promoted collective action and social change locally. AAUW’s Legal Advocacy Fund, supporting women nationwide in fighting workplace discrimination, began in Ithaca. In 1980, the branch supported the Cornell 11, a group of women professors who sued the university for gender discrimination and persuaded the national association to assist faculty women fighting unfair labor practices. Local members also organize public programs on issues of concern to women and girls and raise funds for scholarships.

For more information, email Jeanette Knapp.

Sound and text exhibit

Rare artifacts telling the story of 500 years of inventions that record and distribute information – from movable metal type to Thomas Edison’s wax cylinder-playing gramophone – are featured in “Mixed Media: The Interplay of Sound and Text,” opening Sept. 20 in the Hirshland Exhibition Gallery, Carl A. Kroch Library Level 2B.

An opening reception is Sept. 20, 4:30 to 6 p.m. in the gallery, free and open to the public.

On display through March 8, 2019, “Mixed Media” examines how representations of text and sound have shaped our perceptions of the material world, tracing technologies used to replicate and transmit them.

Artifacts demonstrating these transformations will be on view, along with items that explore the interactions of sound and print, such as early modern illustrations of acoustics, work by Cornell faculty who collected early field recordings of bird song, and examples of printed text rendered into audio.

The exhibition is supported by the Stephen E. (’58, MBA ’59) and Evalyn Edwards ’60 Milman Exhibition Fund. For more information, call 607-255-3530.

“RBG” with discussion

Cornell Cinema will screen the documentary “RBG,” a multidimensional portrait of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg ’54, Sept. 17 at 7 p.m. in Willard Straight Theatre. Advance tickets are recommended, available from CornellCinemaTickets.com. The event is co-sponsored by Cornell Democrats.

The film looks at Ginsburg’s life and its many lessons, her legal legacy, her status as a multigenerational pop culture icon, and her years at Cornell, where she met her late husband, Martin Ginsburg ’53.

Professor of government Gretchen Ritter ’83, former dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, will introduce the film and lead a post-screening discussion. Ritter and Ginsburg held a conversation in September 2014 at the New-York Historical Society.

Also showing: “Garry Winogrand: All Things are Photographable,” Sept. 20 at 7 p.m., with filmmaker Sasha Waters Freyer in a discussion facilitated by visiting associate professor of art Bill Gaskins. Cosponsored by the Department of Art.

Modern literature lecture

Erica Edwards of Rutgers University delivers the Wendy Rosenthal Gellman Lecture on Modern Literature, “‘How Very American’: Black Women Writers and the Long War on Terror,” Friday, Sept. 21, 4:30 p.m. in the English Department Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall. The lecture is free and open to the public.

The talk is drawn from Edwards’ upcoming book, “The Other Side of Terror: Black Women and the Grammars of State Violence,” which analyzes contemporary black expressive culture (including black feminist poetry, fiction, television and film) and the culture of U.S. empire from 1968 to the present, and maps the transformations of African-American literature against global and local campaigns of counterinsurgency.

Edwards, associate professor of English and Presidential Term Chair in African American Literature at Rutgers, is the author of “Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership” (2012), winner of the Modern Language Association’s William Sanders Scarborough Prize.

The Gellman Lecture, featuring a distinguished scholar of modern literature, was established by a gift from former English major Wendy Rosenthal Gellman ’81.

This year’s Gellman Lecture launches the 2018-19 African American Studies Speaker Series, a year-long series of talks focusing on current topics in African-American literary studies, supported by the Department of English and College of Arts and Sciences.