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

2023 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, wherever you may be!

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 student entries will win cash prizes, the top alumni entry will receive financial support and Cornell swag for a local alumni event.

Winners will be announced during International Education Week (November 13-17, 2023), and the top video will be posted online that week. For alumni, be sure to subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay in the know of this competition and international alumni activities.

Student entries may be submitted by any registered Cornell student or group of students.
Alumni entries may be submitted by any Cornell alumni groups outside of the United States and Canada.

Submission deadline: Thursday, November 9, 2023

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, the Office of the Vice Provost for International Affairs, and the Office of International Alumni Relations.

Three-day conference: Friday, October 27 to Sunday, October 29.

South Asia is an empirical microcosm of the ecological and epistemological upending caused by climate change. Forming a quarter of the world's population and inhabiting tremendous cultural and geographic diversity, South Asia provides a unique case study for examining the challenges of climate change on diverse cultural forms. Climate change has indelibly altered landscapes and people, from Bangladeshi river deltas to Nepali mountaintops to Pakistani deserts to Indian megalopolises to Maldivian islands.

This conference thus asks: How is climate change rendered in visual arts, cinema, literature, and architecture in South Asia? How do projects of cultural expression render visibility to place-based narratives in South Asia? A humanistic approach to climate change entails developing modes of attention to a world yet to come. Centering the human imagination in the scientized field of climate change engenders a view of environmental variation over time that highlights the flexibility, resilience, and persistence of human life and its relation to the nonhuman worlds. Such a perspective links meaning and materiality, ingenuity, imagination, literature and livelihoods, subsistence, and stories.

The full conference schedule is now available.

Supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Central New York Humanities Corridor. Cosponsored by the Johnson Museum of Art and its Stoikov Asian Art Lecture Fund.

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Nina Baker Capistrano, (Consulting Curator and Special Projects Consultant, Ayala Museum, Philippines), who will discuss reinscribing P’u-tuan (Butuan) in the metanarrative of Early Southeast Asia.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at the Rockefeller Hall 374. Lunch will be served, and this event is co-sponsored by the Department of History of Art, and by the Cornell Institute for Archaeology and Material Science. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

About the Talk

Maps delineate the imagined contours of history and empire. Exclusion from cartographic representations thus marginalizes, blurs, and erases narratives and geographies. This paper attempts to recover and reinscribe the enigmatic polity of P’u-tuan (Butuan) on northeastern Mindanao, Philippines, in the metanarrative of Early Southeast Asia. The arrival of trade missions from P’u-tuan at the Chinese imperial court in the 11th century is documented in the Song Shih (Song History) compiled in 1345 from earlier sources. The early polity’s existence is confirmed as well by archaeological excavations conducted by the National Museum of the Philippines since the 1970s. Archaeologists suggest the existence of a port settlement actively engaged in maritime trade between the 10th-13th centuries at the mouth of the Agusan River near Butuan Bay. The archaeological record further suggests that commercial activities ceased and the settlement declined after the 13th century. The purported decline and ‘mysterious disappearance’ of Butuan is disputed in part by a glorious description of the king of Butuan in the 16th century written by Italian chronicler Antonio Pigafetta, who accompanied Ferdinand Magellan in the Spanish expedition that arrived in the Philippines in 1521. This paper re-examines early accounts, documents, and related concepts in light of material evidence from Butuan and neighboring cultures to gain insight into early interregional connectivities.

About the Speaker

Florina H. Capistrano-Baker received the PhD, MPhil, and MA from the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. She was formerly museum director of the Ayala Museum (Philippines) where she is currently consulting curator and special projects consultant. Since 2000, her research has focused on Philippine specificities within a metanarrative of global exchange between the 10th-13th and 16th-19th centuries. Her book Philippine Ancestral Gold (Ayala Foundation and NUS Press, 2011) documents previously unpublished material suggesting early trade with neighbors in the Indian Ocean and South China Sea. In 2015 she co-curated the exhibition “Philippine Gold: Treasures of Forgotten Kingdoms” at the Asia Society Museum in New York and authored the exhibition catalogue of the same title (Ayala Foundation and Asia Society, 2015). She is co-editor of the volume Transpacific Engagements: Trade, Translation, and Visual Culture of Entangled Empires, 1565-1898 (Ayala Foundation with the Getty Research Institute and Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, 2021). Her scholarly work has been supported by grants from Columbia University, Ford Foundation, Asian Cultural Council, American Association of University Women, Japan Foundation, Locsin Foundation, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Getty Research Institute.

Mitchell A. Orenstein, Professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, will discuss how Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022 changed Europe. It shattered any remaining illusions that the EU could achieve peaceful coexistence with Russia through greater integration and united Europe instead around NATO. While Europe quickly reshaped its energy strategy and imposed unified sanctions on Russia, the invasion revealed Europe's continuing reliance on the United States for basic security and initiated a period of soul searching about Europe's lack of "strategic autonomy." Central and East European states that had long warned of Russia's violent intentions rose in importance, while France and Germany saw their influence diminished after decades of accommodating Russia. European leaders had to admit that they had been wrong to ignore the warnings of front-line states. In addition, the invasion reignited European Union and NATO enlargement, with Finland and Sweden joining NATO and Ukraine and Moldova offered EU candidate status. The result of these trends is a more geopolitical Europe with a sharper dividing line between an internal zone of integration and an external zone of power projection.

About the speaker

Dr. Mitchell Orenstein is Professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and Senior Fellow at Foreign Policy Research Institute. His sole-authored and co-authored works on the political economy and international affairs of Central and Eastern Europe have won numerous prizes. His most recent book, Taking Stock of Shock (Oxford University Press, 2021), co-authored with Prof. Kristen Ghodsee, evaluates the social consequences of the 1989 revolutions that ended communism in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Orenstein is also the author of The Lands in Between: Russia vs. The West and the New Politics of Hybrid War (Oxford University Press, 2019), a study of how intensifying geopolitical conflict has shaped politics in the lands in between Russia and the West.

Cohosts

Institute for European Studies
Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Van Nguyen Marshall, (Associate Professor of History at Trent University), who will discuss associational life in South Vietnam, 1954-1975.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at the Rockefeller Hall 374. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

About the Talk

In Between War and the State, Van Nguyen-Marshall examines an array of voluntary activities, including mutual-help, professional, charitable, community development, student, women's, and rights organizations active in South Vietnam from 1954 to 1975. By bringing focus to the public lives of South Vietnamese people, Between War and the State challenges persistent stereotypes of South Vietnam as a place without society or agency. Such robust associational life underscores how an active civil society survived despite difficulties imposed by the war, government restrictions, economic hardship, and external political forces. These competing political forces, which included the United States, Western aid agencies, and Vietnamese communist agents, created a highly competitive arena wherein the South Vietnamese state did not have a monopoly on persuasive or coercive power. To maintain its influence, the state sometimes needed to accommodate groups and limit its use of violence. Civil society participants in South Vietnam leveraged their social connections, made alliances, appealed to the domestic and international public, and used street protests to voice their concerns, secure their interests, and carry out their activities.

About the Speaker

Van Nguyen-Marshall is Associate Professor in the Department of History at Trent University with particular research interests in Modern Vietnamese History, focusing on associational life, civil society, and the Vietnam War. She is the author of In Search of Moral Authority: The Discourse on Poverty, Poor Relief, and Charity in French Colonial Vietnam (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2008) and the recently published Between War and the State: Vietnamese Voluntary Association in South Vietnam (1954-1975) (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2023).

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Van Nguyen Marshall, (Associate Professor of History, Trent University), who will discuss the public lives of South Vietnamese people, Between War and the State.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at the Rockefeller Hall 374. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

About the Talk

In Between War and the State, Van Nguyen-Marshall examines an array of voluntary activities, including mutual-help, professional, charitable, community development, student, women's, and rights organizations active in South Vietnam from 1954 to 1975. By bringing focus to the public lives of South Vietnamese people, Between War and the State challenges persistent stereotypes of South Vietnam as a place without society or agency. Such robust associational life underscores how an active civil society survived despite difficulties imposed by the war, government restrictions, economic hardship, and external political forces. These competing political forces, which included the United States, Western aid agencies, and Vietnamese communist agents, created a highly competitive arena wherein the South Vietnamese state did not have a monopoly on persuasive or coercive power. To maintain its influence, the state sometimes needed to accommodate groups and limit its use of violence. Civil society participants in South Vietnam leveraged their social connections, made alliances, appealed to the domestic and international public, and used street protests to voice their concerns, secure their interests, and carry out their activities.

About the Speaker

Van Nguyen-Marshall is Associate Professor in the Department of History at Trent University with particular research interests in Modern Vietnamese History, focusing on associational life, civil society, and the Vietnam War. She is the author of In Search of Moral Authority: The Discourse on Poverty, Poor Relief, and Charity in French Colonial Vietnam (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2008) and the recently published Between War and the State: Vietnamese Voluntary Association in South Vietnam (1954-1975) (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2023).

Stories of Queer Feminist Alliances in the Peacebuilding Movement

Lesbian feminist organizing has played a significant role in women’s peacebuilding work, including anti-war and abolitionist organizing. Yet women’s lesbian and queer identities as a part of their organizing are continually marginalized in the histories of the women’s peacebuilding movement and feminist strategies for resisting patriarchal violence. What can explain the silence about these lesbian and queer lives, especially as told about the American and UK women’s peacebuilding movements?

Jamie Hagen, Lecturer in International Relations at Queen’s University Belfast, will discuss how this silencing perpetuates heteronormative practices in gender, peace, and security work. Her research surfaces stories of queer women in organizing for peace, both past and present. Part of this work is also articulating the complex ways people align themselves with LGBTQ identities and how this has shifted historically when working in international security spaces such as the United Nations.

About the Speaker

Dr. Jamie J. Hagen is a Lecturer in International Relations at Queen’s University Belfast, where she is the founding co-director of the Centre for Gender in Politics. Her work sits at the intersection of gender, security studies, and queer theory. Jamie brings a feminist, anti-racist approach to her work, bridging gaps between academic, policy, and activist spaces. She is the lead researcher on a British Academy Innovation Fellowship (2022-2023) focusing on improving engagement with lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer women in Women, Peace, and Security Programming. She is co-editor of the forthcoming edited volume Queer Conflict Research: New Approaches to the Study of Political Violence (BUP).

Host

Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies

Timothy Cheek, History, University of British Columbia kicks off this semester's CCCI lecture series with the theme of "China, the Central State and All Under Heaven."

How is China governed? It is a question on our minds today as the rule of Xi Jinping in China challenges American hopes and stokes our fears. Is it Communist? Capitalist? Confucian? Making sense of Chinese statecraft, or of how any state is governed, requires not only political analysis but also some sense of the context, inherited problems, sense of self, that is, of its history.

This is a fundamental historiographical challenge: how and in what ways can knowledge of past practice inform our understanding of later or current practice? How can specific knowledge of history inform, deepen, challenge, and open up new questions about what we think we know of our present rather than simply reinforcing our current assumptions and prejudices?

This lecture explores that challenge to the practice of history through the example of one sort of governance—state-sponsored, village-based local public education in civic virtues. This state attempt to create ideal subjects began with the Confucians of the early 11th century, continued in rural education programs in Republican China in the 1930s, re-emerged in Communist ideological remolding campaigns under Mao, and appeared once again in political study sessions in Xi Jinping’s China today.

China: The Central State and All Under Heaven is the theme of this semester's CCCI lecture series directed by Professor Yue (Mara) Du, History, Cornell. At the core of the “China Dream” and China’s rise in power on the global stage is the Chinese Communist Party’s proclaimed role in the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese Nation”—a restoration of China’s historical glory and its rightful place as a “Central State” of “All under Heaven.” To achieve this goal, China’s current leader Xi Jinping requires the party “not to forget the original intention,” which could be interpreted as either a return to Marxist-Leninist fundamentalism, to Mao’s integration of “Marx” and Legalism of China's first imperial dynasty, to Republican ethnonationalism, or to state Confucianism combined with territorial expansion in imperial China. As China’s past looms large in its present, understanding the historical relationship between the "Central State" and "All under Heaven" is critical for our analysis of China’s economy, society, politics, and international engagement at the present and in the future.

The Cornell Contemporary China Initiative lecture series is co-sponsored by The Levinson China and Asia-Pacific Studies Program, Cornell Society for the Humanities, and the Department of History.

This talk, based on the 2022 book with the same title, explores how diverse phenomena, such as populism, anti-black racism, and islamophobia in various countries share the same core: nativism. It Includes an in-depth, original analysis of political developments in three countries: the US, France, and the Netherlands, some of the most liberal countries in the world, and shows why liberalism is not a safeguard against the rise of nativism. The talk offers a distinct approach from alternate explanations of the rise of far-right nativist discourses.

Speaker
Jan Willem Duyvendak is the Director of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS-KNAW) and Distinguished Research Professor of Sociology at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). His main fields of research currently are belonging, urban sociology, 'feeling at home' and nativism.