Society & Culture

Rochester will join forces with the Cornell Prison Education Program next year, as assistant professor of religion Joshua Dubler and his students bring the value of a higher education to an often invisible population while addressing the epidemic of mass incarceration.

Chad Post, creator of Three Percent and a founder of the awards program as publisher of the University’s Open Letter Books, announced the winners May 4 during a ceremony in New York City.

In May, the University is hosting the Rochester–St Andrews Conference on Older Scots Literature and Culture, where specialists from the U.S., Canada, and Europe will share papers on 14th- to 16th-century literature in Older Scots

Joshua Dubler, assistant professor of religion, will spend the next two years pursuing the question of whether the prison itself is a necessary component of modern society.

Joseph F. Cunningham ’67 and his wife, Andrea, have created an endowed fund to support research, lectures, and public forums within the humanities.

Noam Chomsky, professor of linguistics, emeritus, at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is the University’s Distinguished Visiting Humanist. Chomsky, an esteemed linguist, philosopher, political commentator, and activist, will meet with students and faculty this week. In advance of his visit, Jeffrey Runner, Chair of the Department of Linguistics, and Theodore Brown, Professor of History and Charles E. and Dale L. Phelps Professor of Public Health and Policy, talked with Chomsky about his seminal works in linguistics and politics.

Urszula Gacek, consul general of the Republic of Poland in New York, will discuss the transformation of local government in Poland and its integration of public-private partnership, participatory budgeting, and civil society.

On April 14, 1865, Albert Barrett, a member of the University’s Class of 1869, was in Ford’s Theater, celebrating his birthday two days before. His seat in the balcony box immediately opposite the president afforded him a clear view of events

A new study coauthored by accounting professor Sudarshan Jayaraman predicts that access to cross-border financing by multinational firms reduces the firms’ reliance on domestic banks, causing those banks to take on more risk to remain competitive.

Linguist David Peterson, best known for creating the Dothraki and Valyrian languages for the HBO series Game of Thrones, will discuss the craft of creating new languages at a talk April 13.

As this year’s keynote speaker for the Ferrari Humanities Symposia, literary critic Jane Tylus will outline some of her new ways of thinking about how artists and others in early modern Europe depicted rituals of separation in a public talk, “Saying Good-bye in the Renaissance: Leave-Taking as a Work of Art,” on April 5.

Mary Louise Roberts talk, “The Leroy Henry Case: Sexual Violence and Allied Relations in Great Britain, 1944,” takes place on Thursday, March 31, 2016, at 5 p.m. in the Hawkins-Carlson Room.