Milstein Program scholars enroll in specialized courses during their time at Cornell including a First-Year Advising Seminar, a First-Year Project, and the MStudio speaker series, allowing for cohort-bonding, faculty and graduate student mentorship, and opportunities to engage in advanced research at the intersection of technology and the humanities.
Course Spotlights
ANTHR 3200 Heritage Forensics
Lori Khatchadourian and Adam T. Smith
3 credits. Offered Spring 2024 and Fall 2024.
This course provides students with an orientation to the new technologies reshaping the effort to preserve cultural heritage. The course introduces students to the tools that Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and remote sensing (especially aerial and satellite imaging) provide for advancing heritage preservation and detecting cultural erasure. Our focus will be on contexts where heritage has emerged as a site of conflict, from Bosnia to Syria to Ukraine. Students will develop proficiency in a range of spatial technologies and their application to the human past. The course will culminate in projects that use new technologies to save heritage at risk.
MUSIC 4412/6412 Making Sound Futures
Marinthi Papalexandri-Alexandri (MUSIC)
3 credits. Offered Fall 2024.
Making Sound Futures is a transdisciplinary, transformative, hands-on studio course that nurtures curiosity and promotes experimentation, intuitive decision-making, and risk-taking. Embracing imperfection and uncertainty, we will construct sonic instruments to facilitate self-discovery, promote understanding of others, inspire imaginative exploration, and serve as a tools for problem-solving. Our activities will include close listening to sounds and then designing new instruments, individually and collaboratively, to recreate these sounds and others that have not yet been imagined. Raising awareness about how we contribute toward the future, we will devote ourselves to creating materials and techniques that the next generation of students can use and develop further. We will aim to generate designs for the future that are themselves open to reuse and reimagination. Open to any Cornell students with several spots reserved for Milstein scholars.
AS 1111: Milstein First-Year Project
Milstein scholars enroll in AS 1111 in the Spring of their first year. Students work independently and in small teams to research, design, produce, and revise interdisciplinary projects in a variety of fields (advocacy, education, arts, etc.) often with partner organizations both on-campus and locally in Ithaca, NY.
For Spring 2024, the focus of the First-Year Project was on audio storytelling. Community partners included the History Center in Tompkins County, StoryHouse Ithaca, and Open Doors English, among many others.
