We give you the lowdown on what's happening around Ithaca this week.

The view from Karachi.

Walt offered an admittedly “grim forecast” of the potential impact of Obama’s policies in a lecture titled “Doomed to Fail: Barack Obama’s Foreign Policy.”

Each semester, Cornell invites one professor from another university to deliver three lectures in their specialization, as part of the University’s Messenger Lecture series.

Yesterday approximately 25 faculty members and graduate students gathered in the Guerlac room of the A.D. White House to consider ways to improve interdepartmental collaboration by bridging gaps between related fields of study at the University.

When people mention “paper architects,” they usually mean architects who design highly theoretical, exorbitant, unrealizable utopian projects that remain consigned to the drafting board. While such architects are sometimes critiqued for being overly academic, inattentive to the nuts-and-bolts of their craft as well as client needs, they are important for pushing the conceptual frontiers of the discipline. Paper architects can help expand the poetic possibilities of architecture’s collective imagination even if their designs are never intended to be built.

Barbara Maria Stafford, a professor of Art History at the University of Chicago, has been instrumental in bridging ideas from the sciences and social thought into the humanities: Her work focuses on how neuroscience and other recent developments in cognitive theory can help explain the unique visual knowledge we gain through artworks. Such is her far-ranging, trans-disciplinary appeal that she attracted an audience of students and scholars from fields as diverse as fine arts, literature, political science, philosophy and biology to her lecture in Goldwin Smith’s Lewis Auditorium yesterday entitled Slow Looking, co-sponsored by the departments of art history, architecture, art, urban and regional planning and chemical biology.

Minna Resnick is a local artist who has been printmaking and drawing for over 30 years. She was the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1980, one of many other honors she has received throughout her career. Her work is currently displayed at more than 50 public and private collections, both nationally and abroad. She has taught and lectured at many colleges across the nation, and was even an art instructor at Cornell for a few semesters.

An elegant woman takes the seat in front of me to talk to a man. She is sharply dressed, the dark combination of her clothing offset by a perfectly coiled blonde bun, red lipstick, light skin and the sharpness of her cheekbones.

“Why are you sitting all the way back here?” the man asks her.

“I am just here until I dance,” she answers.

Matthew Buckingham’s work challenges our understanding of historiography by its disquieting insistence that “narrative depends on silence,” as he remarked during his Monday lecture entitled “The Sense of the Past.” If the power of narrative derives from what gets left out, what’s implied and “what we are meant to forget,” then our understanding of historical narrative becomes troubled by a necessary void.