Things to Do, April 7-14, 2017


Provided
John Hurt stars in Michael Radford’s “1984,” screening April 9 at Cornell Cinema.

Watching Big Brother

Cornell Cinema reopens April 9 at 7 p.m. with director Michael Radford’s “1984,” adapted in 1984 from George Orwell’s dystopian novel and starring John Hurt and Richard Burton. Admission is $2.

Cornell hosts one of nearly 200 screenings of “1984” during April in theaters across the United States and Canada and cities in five other countries. Most are on April 4, the date protagonist Winston Smith begins a forbidden diary (and Orwell his novel): “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” United State of Cinema says “Orwell's portrait of a government that manufactures their own facts, demands total obedience and demonizes foreign enemies, has never been timelier.”

Cornell Cinema also presents “Our Heavenly Bodies,” a 1925 German film about space travel, April 11 at 7:30 p.m. in Sage Chapel, with an original score performed live by Coupler. Advance tickets are $8/$10 at CornellCinemaTickets.com, $10/$12 at the door.

Race comparisons

A lecture and discussion on “White Innocence: Colonialism and Race in The Netherlands and the United States,” with feminist scholar Gloria Wekker and Paul Sawyer, professor of English, is April 10 at 5 p.m. at the First Unitarian Society of Ithaca, 306 N. Aurora St.

Presented by the Tompkins County Workers’ Center, and the Minority, Indigenous and Third World Studies Research Group at Cornell, the event is free and open to the public.

The discussion is intended to help better understand the parallels between how racism plays out in Europe and in the U.S. (specifically, in upstate New York), and potential solutions. Wekker is professor emerita of gender studies at Utrecht University whose books include “The Politics of Passion: Women’s Sexual Culture in the Afro-Surinamese Diaspora.”

The lecture will be followed by informal conversation at 6:30 p.m. with pizza and soft drinks. 

Humanities lecture, workshop

Earl Lewis, president of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, will deliver the Society for the Humanities’ annual Future of the Humanities Lecture at Cornell, April 11 at 4:30 p.m. in Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium, Klarman Hall.

Lewis’s talk is “When the Past is Not the Past: Slavery & the American Psyche.” A reception at the A.D. White House will follow the lecture.

Society for the Humanities fellows will hold a workshop, “Skin Practice,” on their 2016-17 focal theme (Skin), Friday, April 14, in the A.D. White House Guerlac Room. Panel sessions include “Tattoo: Art & Identity,” “The Medical & Theological Body” and “Practicing Embodiment,” with a plenary lecture at 4:30 p.m. titled “Othering Algorithms,” by 2016-17 Senior Scholar-in-Residence Mary Flanagan of Dartmouth College.

All events are free and open to the public.

Books: Murals and monarchs

Ananda Cohen-Aponte, assistant professor of the history of art, discusses her recent book “Heaven, Hell, and Everything In Between: Murals of the Colonial Andes,” April 12 at 4:30 p.m. in 107 Olin Library.

The book explores the intersections of art, politics, religion and society in the vivid mural paintings found in colonial churches across the southern Andes. Cohen-Aponte’s research looks at the ways that “artists appropriated European religious iconography to articulate local narratives, transforming the medium of muralism into a powerful barometer of indigenous and mestizo life under Spanish colonial rule.”

Also: Professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and entomology Anurag Agrawal will discuss “a migrating butterfly, a poisonous plant and their remarkable story of coevolution” April 13 at 4 p.m. in 160 Mann Library.

In his new book “Monarchs and Milkweed,” Agrawal looks at the recent decline in monarch populations and the influence of habitat destruction, and presents theories as to why their numbers are plummeting.

The Chats in the Stacks book talks are free and open to the public. Buffalo Street Books will have books available for purchase and signing.

Irish poetry

Poet Eamon Grennan will give the 2017 Eamon McEneaney Memorial Reading, April 13 at 4:30 p.m. in Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium, 132 Goldwin Smith Hall. A reception and book signing will follow in the English Department Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall.

The annual reading is free and open to the public and honors the memory of Eamon McEneaney ’77, killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center. It is sponsored by the Creative Writing Program as part of the spring Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series.

A Dubliner, Grennan also writes and directs plays in Ireland and taught for many years at Vassar College and in the Columbia and New York University graduate writing programs. He is the author of several poetry collections including “There Now” and “Still Life with Waterfall,” winner of the Academy of American Poets’ Lenore Marshall Prize; translations of Giacomo Leopardi and Sophocles’ “Oedipus at Colonus,” and a book of critical essays, “Facing the Music: Irish Poetry in the Twentieth Century.”

For information, email creativewriting@cornell.edu or call 607-255-7847.

Business and elections

Gligor Tashkovich ’87, MBA ’91, the Republic of Macedonia’s minister for foreign investment from 2006 to 2008, will give a public talk on “Business, Security and Elections,” April 13 at 4:45 p.m. in B25 Warren Hall.

The event is free, as part of the Cornell Institute for Public Affairs spring colloquium series. A reception will follow the lecture.

Tashkovich has served in a variety of roles in international business and energy sector investing. He was part of a Macedonian government administration elected on a strong anti-corruption and pro-business platform; his efforts contributed to the republic attracting nearly 1 billion Euros in new foreign direct investment and creating more than 1,200 jobs.

Business casual attire is required and no laptops or phones are allowed during colloquium events.

Student film festival

The fourth annual Centrally Isolated Film Festival (CIFF) will showcase a variety of short films, all under 20 minutes, by undergraduate and graduate students in New York state, April 14-15 at the Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts.

Festival screenings are April 14 at 4:30 p.m. and April 15 at 2 p.m. in the Schwartz Center’s Film Forum. Each screening will be followed by a reception, and a feedback and Q&A session with the judges is April 15. Tickets are $5, available at schwartztickets.com or the Schwartz Center box office (open Tuesday–Saturday, 2:30-8 p.m.) at 430 College Ave., Ithaca.

Animated films are among the student submissions from Binghamton University, the University at Buffalo, City College of New York, Cornell, Ithaca College, Rochester Institute of Technology and Syracuse University. Winners in each festival category (narrative, documentary, experimental, audience choice) receive a $200 cash prize.

“CIFF is finally starting to get word-of-mouth recognition among other upstate New York schools,” said Naomi Hill ’17, who organized the festival with a group of Cornell undergraduates, with guidance from Sabine Haenni, associate professor of performing and media arts. 

Media Contact

Rebecca Valli