Society for the Humanities - Cornell University

09/03/2026

"Living On After Failure," a Book Talk with Irving Goh
Tuesday, September 8 at 5pm in A.D. White House
This event is free & open to the public.
A light reception will follow the talk.

Living On After Failure

In this talk, Irving Goh will present on one of his recent books, Living On After Failure (Duke UP, 2025). He will share his thoughts on failure as failure, that is, failure without recuperation, or failure as true negativity. Such a thinking of failure as a thorough impasse not only resists narratives of progress, ideologies of success, and their accompanying notions of grit and resilience, but also registers, at the ontological level, the affective structure of existence. This might also mean reckoning with failure as an irreducible or indelible element of existence, and this can no doubt have implications for the question of a life after, if not always with, failure, that is, a question of survival, as this year’s theme for the Society would have it.

Author Bio

Irving Goh is Professor of Comparative Literature at Emory University. He is the author, most recently, of Living On After Failure (Duke UP, 2025) and Touching Literature, or the Experience of the Limit (Cornell UP, 2026). His other books are The Reject: Community, Politics, and Religion after the Subject (Fordham UP, 2014), which won the MLA 23rd Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Studies, L’existence prépositionnelle (Galilée, 2019), and with Jean-Luc Nancy, The Deconstruction of S*x (Duke UP, 2021). He was a recipient of a National Humanities Center fellowship in 2022/23 and was named a Franke Visiting Faculty Fellow at the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale in 2018.

https://events.cornell.edu/event/booktalk_Irving-Goh

08/27/2026

Still looking for the perfect class to round out your fall 2026 schedule?
Check out SHUM 4715/6715 Precarity Poetics!

This is special seminar offered one time only by visiting Fellow Lucy Alford, Associate Professor of Literature at Wake Forest University. This class meets on thursdays 2-4:30pm in the historic A.D. White House.

The notion of precarity has been theorized in terms of environmental, class, race, and gender vulnerabilities. But how do these vulnerabilities—these complexly layered precarities—play out in poetic form? This course will consider the forms language takes in unstable economic, political, and environmental conditions. We will ask into the relationships between dislocation and scarcity, between language and the (disparately vulnerable) body, and between the human voice and modes of dwelling. Through the lens of diverse works by Octavia Butler, Gloria Alzaldúa, Ilya Kaminsky, Claudia Rankine, Ling Ma, and Cecilia Vicuña, we will explore stabilities and instabilities of form, experimentations in vulnerability and dehabituation, and practices of making in contexts of survival.

https://classes.cornell.edu/browse/roster/FA26/class/SHUM/4715

08/11/2026

Attention, Cornell graduate students!

Applications for Mellon Graduate Fellowships are due October 30, 2026.
We invite applications for residential fellowships from Cornell graduate students whose research projects reflect on the 2027-28 theme of PLAY. The fellowships include a College of Arts & Sciences graduate tuition waiver, a $35,661 stipend, and health insurance. The two Mellon Graduate Fellows will share an office at the A.D. White House during the academic year.

More details on how to apply can be found here: https://societyhumanities.as.cornell.edu/mellon-graduate-fellowships

06/10/2026

SCHOOL OF CRITICISM & THEORY
50TH ANNIVERSARY CONFERENCE:
METHOD IN THE HUMANITIES NOW

June 16th at 3pm
June 17 9:15am-4:30pm
All sessions held in G64 Goldwin Smith Hall with light refreshments provided.
To add these events to your calendar click: bit.ly/SCTgcal26
The School of Criticism and Theory Near Eastern Studies - Cornell University Cornell Department of Literatures in English

05/21/2026

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

05/01/2026

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

04/29/2026

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

04/28/2026

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

04/26/2026

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

04/24/2026

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