Humanities Corridor co-sponsors conference on religion at University of Rochester April 20; SU hosts graduate presentations in linguistics April 21

Humanities Corridor co-sponsors conference on religion at University of Rochester April 20; SU hosts graduate presentations in linguistics April 21 April 19, 2007Sara Millersemortim@syr.edu

Faculty members from the Central New York Humanities Corridor and other national universities will take part in a conference, “Religious Transgressions of Modernity,” on Friday, April 20, at the University of Rochester. The conference is co-sponsored by UR’s Humanities Project and by the Humanities Corridor, a collaborative inter-institutional engagement among Syracuse University, Cornell University and UR focused on strengthening and enhancing scholarship in the humanities disciplines.

Ann Grodzins Gold, professor of religion in SU’s College of Arts and Sciences, will moderate conference discussions, along with Thomas Gibson, professor of anthropology at UR. UR President Joel Seligman will offer the introductory remarks.

This conference is designed to serve as a counterpoint to UR’s yearlong series on “Law and War on Terror,” in which scholars from a range of disciplines examined “the impact that the current ‘war on terror’ has had on political, civil, personal and military institutions” in the “West.” “Religious Transgressions” will examine the impact that this war is having on peoples in the “East.”

The conference will also feature leading academic experts from universities across the country, including Juan Cole, professor of history at the University of Michigan, who will deliver the keynote address, “Islamic Politics and the American Impact in the Middle East,” at 7:30 p.m. in UR’s Interfaith Chapel.

As a second Humanities Corridor event, on Saturday, April 21, the Corridor’s focus group in linguistics will offer a workshop of presentations by graduate students in linguistics at SU, Cornell and UR. All talks will be held in the Hall of Languages, Room 107, on the SU campus and will run all day, beginning at 9:30 a.m. The workshop is organized by Jaklin Kornfilt, professor of linguistics in SU’s College of Arts and Sciences, and features presentations spanning three areas of linguistics: syntax, semantics and phonology.

Graduate student conferences are vital focal points in the world of formal linguistics?a relatively young discipline, where cutting-edge, new work takes place to a good part via unpublished papers, talks and conferences. The three participating institutions have complementary strengths, with SU being particularly well known in the field of second language acquisition and, more recently, in the syntax of Turkish and Persian; Rochester in formal semantics and psycholinguistics; and Cornell in such areas as historical linguistics, the syntax of East Asian languages, and phonetics/phonology. Existing links between the programs include a series of annual workshops jointly sponsored by Cornell and SU, held at the latter since 2005.

Created in 2006, the Humanities Corridor is supported by a three-year, $1 million grant awarded to SU to collaborate with Cornell and UR for the creation of this large-scale initiative to connect teaching and research in the humanities among these three leading institutions. Inspired in part by the mission of the science/technology Research Triangle in North Carolina, the Humanities Corridor works to enhance the profile and connectivity of the humanities in Central New York by drawing on the strengths of three Association of American Universities (AAU) member institutions.