The Lingua Mater competition invites students to translate Cornell's Alma Mater into a different language and submit a video of the performed translation. The inaugural Lingua Mater student competition took place in 2018 as part of Cornell's Global Grand Challenges Symposium. The top three videos received cash prizes.

2021 competition details

Can you translate Cornell’s Alma Mater into your mother tongue (or a language you are learning/have learned at Cornell) and sing it? We invite you to translate “Far Above Cayuga’s Waters” and submit a video of you (and your friends!) performing it somewhere on any of Cornell’s campuses.

Translations do not need to be exact or perfectly in meter but should capture the feel and tune of our university’s Alma Mater. As is customary, include the first verse, refrain, second verse, and refrain in your video submission (for guidance, listen to a performance and read the lyrics).

Video submissions need to be MP4 files at 1920 x 1080 (1080p), in landscape mode with an aspect ratio of 16:9. Please ensure that you have copyright permission for any images/videos you use.

Entries will be reviewed by a panel of judges. Submissions will be judged equally on the translation, the musical quality, and the creativity in visual presentation.

The top three entries will win cash prizes.

Winners will be announced during International Education Week (November 15-19, 2021) and the top three videos will be posted online that week.

Entries may be submitted by any registered Cornell student or group of students.

Submission deadline: Monday, November 8, 2021 at 5 pm ET

SUBMIT YOUR VIDEO AND LYRICS HERE

Please contact Angelika Kraemer, Director of the Language Resource Center, if you have any questions.

The Lingua Mater competition is co-sponsored by the Language Resource Center and the Office of the Vice Provost for International Affairs.

The Cornell Classical Chinese Colloquium welcomes Nathan Vieal, University of Toronto to lead the final text reading for the semester. He will present on Fan Zongshi's "Jiang shouju yuanchi ji" and the Reception of an Impossible Text

Cornell Classical Chinese Colloquium 古文品讀

The Cornell Classical Chinese Colloquium (CCCC) 古文品讀 is a reading group for scholars interested in premodern Sinographic (古文) text. The group typically meets monthly during the semester to explore a variety of classical Chinese texts and styles. Other premodern texts linked to classical Chinese in Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese have been explored. Presentations include works from the earliest times to the 20th century. Workshop sessions are lead by local, national, and international scholars.

All are welcome, with any level of experience with classical Chinese.

At each session, a participant presents a classical Chinese text. Attendees discuss historical, literary, linguistic, and other aspects of the text, working together to resolve difficulties in comprehension and translation.

No preparation is required, all texts will be distributed at the meeting.Contact eap-guwen@cornell.edu for more information.
Or subscribe to CCCC news for updates about events. Please make sure to send your subscription request from the email address at which you wish to receive CCCC updates.

"Arise! Ye Who Refuse to be Bond Slaves:" Paul Robeson, "The Black King of Songs, " and China

Professor Gao Yunxiang, History, Ryerson University

This lecture is adapted from a chapter in Gao Yunxiang’s new book Arise, Africa! Roar, China! Black and Chinese Citizens of the World in the Twentieth Century (UNC Press, December 2021). In this lecture, Gao unpacks the dynamic yet scarcely noted relations between Paul Robeson (1898-1976), the world famous African American singer, actor, athlete, lawyer, and political activist, and China throughout most of the twentieth century.

Sponsored by the East Asia Program, EAP Graduate Student Steering Committee, The Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, and the Global Racial Justice initiative.

Seymour Lecture Focuses on Japan’s Olympic History

ITHACA, NY: This summer, Japan hosted the Olympics for the first time since 1964; before that, the country was awarded the 1940 Olympics and intended to use them to promote a jingoistic national identity, until it had to forfeit the games as a result of war with China. Historian Ken Ruoff will discuss the Japan that was on display in 1940 and 1964 at this year’s Harold Seymour Lecture in Sports History. The talk, “The 1940 and 1964 Tokyo Olympics and Japan’s National Identity” is hosted by Cornell’s Department of History and will be held at 2:30 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 15, in the Guerlac Room in the A.D. White House on Cornell’s campus.

The event is free and open to the public. Campus visitors and members of the public must adhere to Cornell’s public health requirements for events, which include wearing masks while indoors and providing proof of vaccination or a recent negative COVID-19 test.

“Engaging, knowledgeable, and an insightful historian on post-World War II Japan, Ken Ruoff will explore the way Japan tried to use its role in the 1964 Olympics to showcase ‘New Japan,’” says Kristin Roebuck, assistant professor of history in the College of Arts & Sciences. “Ruoff will examine how stubborn transwar continuities were present at the 1964 Olympics and examine continuities traced back to Japan’s forfeiture of hosting the 1940 Tokyo Olympics in the context of war with China.”

Ruoff is a professor in the modern history of Japan and director of the Center for Japanese Studies at Portland State University. His publications include “Japan’s Imperial House in the Postwar Era, 1945-2019,” and “Imperial Japan at Its Zenith: The Wartime Celebration of the Empire’s 2600th Anniversary Celebration.”

The Harold Seymour Lecture in Sports History is presented annually by the Department of History and brings distinguished historians to Cornell each year. Harold Seymour was one of the first baseball historians in the country, known for his three-volume book detailing the development of the sport from an amateur pastime into a professional sport.

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CEAS welcomes author Glynne Walley to talk about his book Eight Dogs, or Hakkenden: Part One—An Ill-Considered Jest, a translation of Kyokutei Bakin's Nansō Satomi hakkenden. This multigenerational samurai saga was one of the most popular and influential Japanese books of the nineteenth century and has been adapted many times into film, television, fiction, and comics. Part One tells the story of Princess Fuse of the Satomi clan, whose tragic and heroic sacrifice leads to the creation of the Eight Dog Warriors.

Glynne Walley is an Associate Professor of Japanese Literature at the University of Oregon. His research interests involve popular literature and how it negotiates the requirements of industry and genre, the demands of a mass audience, and the aspirational pull of “serious” literature. His main focus is popular fiction of the late Tokugawa period, particularly Hakkenden. He is also the author of Good Dogs: Edification, Entertainment and Kyokutei Bakin's Nansō Satomi hakkenden (CEAS, 2017).

Housed in the East Asia Program, CEAS is an internationally known, award-winning scholarly press. CEAS publishes on subjects relative to the cultures of East Asia, covering topics in history, culture, and society, and translations of literary works.

Since its inception in 1973 as a venue for publishing papers that were submitted to the East Asia Program, the Series has grown into its current status as a publisher with a reputation for quality and specialized academic titles. More than 200 volumes have been published to date, with hundreds of titles in print and dozens of titles available digitally for free through the Cornell University Library.

Contact

For all publication matters, please contact the managing editor at ceas@cornell.edu.

A panel discussion and series of readings from the 2021 anthology Best! Letters from Asian Americans in the arts. Readings, annotations, and dialogue with editors and contributors Christopher K. Ho, Daisy Nam, Iftikhar Dadi, Rachel Ossip, and Dushko Petrovich.

This collection of seventy-three letters written in 2020 captures an unprecedented moment in politics and society through the experiences of Asian-American artists, curators, educators, art historians, editors, writers, and designers. The form of the letter offers readers intimate insights into the complexities of Asian American experiences, moving beyond the model-minority myth. Chronicling everyday lives, dreams, rage, family histories, and cultural politics, these letters ignite new ways of being, and modes of creating, at a moment of racial reckoning.

Registation is required to attend this online event. The registration link is:

https://cornell.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_09xS16fkTcmiiQc3Kvge2g