Omnia Magazine: Spring/Summer 2017 by Penn Arts & Sciences

SPRING/SUMMER 2017

Has Polling Lost Its Reputation?

Page 20

The Past, Present, 40 and Future of Human Migration

RealArts@Penn Internships: A Summer Like No Other

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SPRING/SUMMER 2017

PERCEPTION IS REALITY—AND VIRTUAL REALITY

DNA AS A TOOL TO UNDERSTAND HUMAN HISTORY

HAS POLLING LOST ITS REPUTATION?

By Rebecca Guenard

By Michele Berger

EDITOR’S NOTE

Piecing Together the Scientific Puzzles of Tomorrow

FINDINGS Call of Duty: Macbeth Edition

Astronomers Discover New Potential Dwarf Planet

Chemists Uncover a New Way Heat Travels Between Molecules

America’s Other One Percent

What Factors Lead Women to Run for Political Office?

The Red Guard Generation

By Susan Ahlborn

By Blake Cole

DEAN’S COLUMN

By Susan Ahlborn

Feeding Innovation’s Source By Steven J. Fluharty

By Michele Berger

By Ali Sundermier

SCHOOL NEWS

By Jacquie Posey

By Jill DiSanto

By Blake Cole

CONTENTS

SPRING/SUMMER 2017

PALEOBIOLOGIST PROBES FOSSIL RECORD FOR PERSPECTIVE ON TODAY

THE PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE OF HUMAN MIGRATION

REALARTS@PENN INTERNSHIPS: A SUMMER LIKE NO OTHER

By Abigail Meisel

By Blake Cole

By Katherine Unger Baillie

FACULTY OPINION

Making a Mockery By Ralph Rosen

IN THE CLASSROOM

A Meeting of Minds By Blake Cole

MOVERS & QUAKERS

INSOMNIA

Office Artifacts Three Questions: National Book Award

LAST LOOK

Joshua Bennett: The Sobbing School By Alex Schein

STUDENT SPOTLIGHT

PARTNERS & PROGRESS

20th Annual Physics Demonstration Show

EDITOR’S NOTE

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PIECING TOGETHER THE SCIENTIFIC PUZZLES OF TOMORROW Among the most exciting aspects of Penn Arts and Sciences is our faculty’s ability to take on the big questions of tomorrow from vastly different vantages. It’s a dynamic we here at the magazine love to cover. Last issue, we delved into the future of Artificial Intelligence, featuring faculty you might not immediately associate with AI. Continuing in that same spirit, our cover story this time around, “Perception is Reality—and Virtual Reality,” focuses in on a visual technology that promises to have a significant impact on research and everyday life. What can neural biology teach us about that future? How different is a psychologist’s take? And how do these incremental foresights add up to build a better picture of what tomorrow’s science might look like? These are questions we are committed to continually exploring. Also in this issue, our faculty tackle questions of immigration and global inequality in “The Past, Present, and Future of Human Migration.” On the heels of an election that revealed deep divisions in our society, one thing that most can agree on is the urgent need for respectful, open discussion on the issues that divide us. And speaking of

the election, what happened with the polls? Find out in “Has Polling Lost Its Reputation?” in which we speak to one of our political scientists who happens to double as Elections Unit Director at NBC News. We also invite you to explore how a unique internship program is shaping the lives of future artists, filmmakers, and writers in “A Summer Like No Other.” We speak with alums of the RealArts@ Penn program to get an idea of the kind of impact it had on their lives and careers, and what current students might expect from their own internships.

As you read through the features, keep an eye out for the below icons, which represent the key components of the Penn Arts and Sciences strategic plan: Foundations and Frontiers w w w. s a s . u p e n n . e d u / s t r a t e g i c - p l a n

In other OMNIA news, we are excited to announce the relaunch of our OMNIA website, which promises a better visual experience with completely overhauled Multimedia and Insomnia sections. We’re constantly striving to improve the presentation of our content here at OMNIA, but our core goal remains: to present cutting-edge research and forward-thinking expert insight from our faculty, students, and alums. Thanks for reading. —Blake Cole

Diversity, Inequality, and Human Well-Being Energy, Sustainability, and Environment Humanities in the Digital Age

Mapping the Mind

Arts and Culture

Global Inquiries

Public Policy and Social Impact Quantitative Explorations of Evolving Systems

OMNIA is published by The School of Arts and Sciences Office of Advancement EDITORIAL OFFICES School of Arts and Sciences University of Pennsylvania 3600 Market Street, Suite 300 Philadelphia, PA 19104-3284 Phone: 215-898-5162 Fax: 215-573-2096 E-mail: omnia-penn@sas.upenn.edu STEVEN J. FLUHARTY Dean, School of Arts and Sciences

LORAINE TERRELL Executive Director of Communications LAUREN R. THACKER Director of Advancement Communications BLAKE COLE Editor SUSAN AHLBORN Associate Editor MATTHEW LEAKE Art Director ANDREW NEALIS BROOKE SIETINSONS MATTHEW LEAKE Designers

CHANGE OF ADDRESS Alumni: visit QuakerNet, Penn’s online community at www.alumniconnections. com/penn. Non-alumni: e-mail Development and Alumni Records at record@ben. dev.upenn.edu or call 215-898-8136. The University of Pennsylvania values diversity and seeks talented students, faculty and staff from diverse backgrounds. The University of Pennsylvania does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, creed, national or ethnic origin, citizenship status, age, disability, veteran status or any other legally protected class status in the administration of its admissions, financial

aid, educational or athletic programs, or other University-administered programs or in its employment practices. Questions or complaints regarding this policy should be directed to the Executive Director of the Office of Affirmative Action and Equal Opportunity Programs, Sansom Place East, 3600 Chestnut Street, Suite 228, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6106; or (215) 898-6993 (Voice) or (215) 898-7803 (TDD).

Cover Illustration: Sam Chivers

DEAN’S MESSAGE

SPRING/SUMMER 2017

FEEDING INNOVATION'S SOURCE BY

STEVEN J. FLUHARTY

I'm writing this message as we approach that time of year when we welcome alumni back to Penn to join their reunion classes. Most of the alumni I meet tell me how struck they are by the physical transformation of the campus. And while I agree that this transformation is spectacular, I am equally struck by the new people and programs that enrich all we do.

I’m also energized by the innovative ways in which our faculty are applying their knowledge and involving their students in projects designed to address societal challenges. Through a new Penn Arts and Sciences program that we call Making a Difference in Diverse Communities, we are funding five teams of faculty and students in multidisciplinary projects that combine coursework, research, and service in communities at the local, national, and international level. One of these projects

We have also funded four additional projects as part of a new Dean’s Integrative Global Inquiries Fund. This fund was created to advance teaching and research projects that explore the complex cultural, social, political, and economic forces that shape peoples, nations, and regions, as well as their relations with one another. A project funded under this initiative, led by psychology’s Martha Farah, will examine whether the neurological impacts of childhood poverty that have been documented in the developed world have global applicability, and will further consider how the scientific knowledge on this topic may be applied to policy. I am personally inspired by the creativity of these projects and their great potential to open up new horizons for our students while addressing critical issues, both close to home and around the world. They exemplify how essential the knowledge and tools of the liberal arts are to meaningful innovation (see p. 4). These are just a few of the exciting people and programs that make up our vibrant Penn Arts and Sciences community. At the same time that we celebrate our progress, however, we view with concern proposals to dramatically reduce federal funding

Candace DiCarlo

Among the new faces at Penn this year is former Vice President Joe Biden, who has joined us as the Benjamin Franklin Presidential Practice Professor, with appointments in Arts and Sciences and the Annenberg School, and a secondary affiliation in the Wharton School. He, along with former Commissioner and CEO of the Philadelphia Water Department Howard Neukrug, represent a new kind of faculty presence at the School—individuals who have a record of substantial accomplishment in their fields and who are working to enrich our academic endeavors with their professional expertise (see p. 8).

will explore the future of rivers and coastal cities through faculty- and student-led research in Philadelphia and Mumbai—two cities where racial and class geography has been impacted by water and that could be further shaped by climate change.

Steven J. Fluharty, Dean and Thomas S. Gates, Jr. Professor of Psychology, Pharmacology, and Neuroscience

for research and financial aid. The U.S. has long enjoyed substantial economic and technological returns, thanks to the strong partnership that has existed between higher education and government. We hope to be able to sustain this strong partnership. But we know that we also need to think creatively about new ways of maintaining our long-term strength. In this environment, we are most grateful for the interest and support of all our alumni, friends, and partners.

SCHOOL NEWS

LEVIN FAMILY DEAN’S FORUM ADDRESSES ISLAMOPHOBIA Internationally known writer, professor, producer, and scholar of religions Reza Aslan spoke to a packed auditorium during the annual Levin Family Dean’s Forum this February. In “Fear Inc.: Confronting Islamophobia in America,” Aslan called for North Americans to confront and abolish hatred and discrimination against Muslim people. While at Penn, Aslan also screened the first episode of his new CNN television series, Believer. Aslan is a tenured professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside, and serves on the board of trustees for the Chicago Theological Seminary and the Yale Humanist Community. He is the author of two bestselling books, No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam and Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth.

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PENN ARTS AND SCIENCES INITIATIVES FUND INAUGURAL PROJECTS Faculty and students are pursuing a range of new multidisciplinary initiatives thanks to two special funds that have been established by Penn Arts and Sciences. The Making a Difference in Diverse Communities program is supporting five projects that will take place on four continents, involving teams of faculty and students in coursework, research, and service initiatives focused on issues of diversity and inequality at the local, national, and international level. The Dean’s Integrative Global Inquiries Fund is supporting four new transdisciplinary projects that explore a range of global cultural, political, and economic forces. Projects funded through the Making a Difference in Diverse Communities program include an effort led by Professor of English and Cinema Studies Peter Decherney that will bring Penn undergraduates to a United Nations

Reza Aslan speaks during the 2017 Levin Family Dean’s Forum “Fear Inc.: Confronting Islamophobia in America.” Lisa Godfrey

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Alex Schein

History of Art graduate students inspect “David with the Head of Goliath,” a 15th century bronze from the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s collection.

refugee camp in Kenya. There, they will collaborate with refugees to create video and virtual reality pieces. Another project will provide an advanced research experience for students to investigate the impact of poverty and migration on health, focusing on diabetes and obesity, in West Philadelphia and Guatemala. Students will also develop community health assessments and prevention and screening interventions. The Dean’s Integrative Global Inquires Fund is supporting an initiative, led by psychology’s Martha Farah, which will examine the relevance of documented neurological impacts of childhood poverty beyond the developed world, along with ways in which the scientific knowledge may be applied to policy. Other Making a Difference in Diverse Communities projects include Reducing Lead Exposure: Testing a Nationally Replicable University-Municipal-Community Partnership; Community-Based Ecology in the Galapagos Archipelago; and Rising Waters, an exploration of the future

of rivers and coastal cities focusing on Philadelphia and Mumbai. Other projects funded by the Dean’s Integrative Global Inquires Fund include Migration and Cognitive Change: Creating a Transatlantic Research Network; International Symposium on Race, Science, and Society from a Global Perspective; and Prenatal Air Pollution Exposure and Child Welfare in China.

MEANING IN MATERIALS A partnership between Penn and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, allows students in the Department of the History of Art to study the museum’s collection in person, up close, and in many different ways, to foster a greater appreciation of the direct study of

works of art. The grant allows students to explore objects in workshops along with Penn professors, museum curators, and conservators. A recent workshop was held in the museum’s Cloister Gallery, where students examined medieval sculptures from the 12th and 13th centuries. In 2016, one workshop involved works of art from the 15th to 20th centuries, focused on panel paintings and the artistic process, and another incorporated a museum exhibition of 19th-century painted American furniture. The Mellon Foundation recently renewed the grant, awarding Penn and the museum another $500,000 for the next three years to advance and expand the successful strategies developed during the project’s developmental phase. With the renewed funding, the partnership will hold additional object-based study workshops for Penn graduate students at the museum and regular seminars co-taught by Penn faculty and museum staff.

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Courtesy of Ashoka University

Dean Steven J. Fluharty participating in a ceremonial tree planting at Ashoka University during his visit to India in January. Penn Arts and Sciences has partnered with Ashoka since its founding in 2011, but this was the first opportunity Dean Fluharty had to visit the campus. While in India, the Dean also met with staff at the University of Pennsylvania Institute of the Advanced Study of India (UPIASI) and spoke to the Penn Club of New Delhi at a reception hosted by Harish and Priya Ahuja, PAR’07, PAR’12, and their sons Anand, C’07, and Anant, C’12.

NEW PROGRAM BRINGS STUDENTS FROM INDIA TO PENN FOR MLA A new agreement between Penn Arts and Sciences and Ashoka University in India has created the Global Gateway Program, which will allow Indian students to come to Penn to complete a Master of Liberal Arts (MLA) degree in a year-long program. With this agreement and other initiatives, the School is building on its long tradition of scholarship and teaching on South Asia and expanding its

connections to India, a goal in the School’s strategic plan Foundations and Frontiers. Ashoka was conceived as a liberal arts university in a nation that traditionally has focused on professional education. A group of Indian scholars and advocates, including Penn alumnus Pramath Sinha, GEN’89, GR’91, worked with Penn and other schools in the U.S. and U.K. to create the university. One of Ashoka’s first initiatives was a post-baccalaureate program, the Young India Fellowship (YIF), which offers the top graduates of other Indian universities an intense education in the liberal arts. Now YIF alumni will be able to earn a Penn MLA in an individualized, interdisciplinary program, positioning themselves to go in any number of directions. The agreement will benefit other MLA students at Penn, as well. “The addition of YIF students to the MLA cohort will

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provide new opportunities for all students to broaden their thinking on complex issues and to develop friendships and connections,” says Nora Lewis, Vice Dean for Professional and Liberal Education in Penn Arts and Sciences. The first group of Global Gateway students will arrive at Penn this fall.

is a member of the Cipactli Latino Honor Society. Sandoval is interested in public service and entrepreneurship and plans to pursue a Ph.D. in the history of science or science studies.

PENN PARTNERING WITH THE CENSUS BUREAU FOR RESEARCH

2017 COLLEGE GRADUATION SPEAKERS Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jennifer Egan, C’85, was the guest speaker at this year’s graduation ceremony for the University of Pennsylvania College of Arts and Sciences, held on May 14. Egan’s most recent novel, A Visit From the Goon Squad, won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. She is the author of four other books and numerous stories, and has also received honors for her nonfiction writing.

The University of Pennsylvania has become a founding member of a consortium to establish, in partnership with the Census Bureau, a Federal Statistical Research Data Center (FSRDC) in Philadelphia. Through this FSRDC, Penn faculty and students will be able to conduct statistical analysis of a wide range of non-public microdata collected by the U.S. Census Bureau and other government agencies. These datasets are among the largest and most important sources of statistical information in the U.S. and many only be accessed through a FSRDC. They represent a vital resource for researchers in economics, business, demography, sociology, medicine, statistics, criminology, and many other disciplines.

Student speaker Ivan Sandoval, C’17, of McFarland, California, was a science, technology, and society major with a minor in Latin American studies. Sandoval is a recipient of the Wharton Innovation Fund Award and a Collaboration Conundrum grant recipient from the University of Notre Dame. He was elected to the Undergraduate Assembly and

Courtesy of Ivan Sandoval

Ivan Sandoval, C’17 >

Jennifer Egan, C’85

Courtesy of Jennifer Egan

SCHOOL NEWS

PENN ARTS AND SCIENCES APPOINTS BIDEN, NEUKRUG AS PROFESSORS OF PRACTICE Penn Arts and Sciences has appointed former U.S. Vice President Joseph R. Biden, Jr., HON’13, and former Commissioner and CEO of the Philadelphia Water Department Howard Neukrug, CE’78, as the School’s first Professors of Practice. These professorships are intended to bring accomplished leaders from business, government, or the arts into Penn Arts and Sciences’ classrooms to complement the expertise of the School’s standing faculty. As Benjamin Franklin Presidential Practice Professor, Joseph Biden holds joint appointments in Penn Arts and Sciences and the Annenberg School for Communication, with a secondary affiliation in the Wharton School. Biden served as a U.S. senator from Delaware for 36 years before being elected the nation’s 47th vice president. During his career he played a pivotal role in shaping U.S. foreign policy, developing deep relationships with world leaders. At Penn, Biden will lead the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, located in Washington, D.C. and focused principally on diplomacy, foreign policy, and national security. He will also have an office on the Penn campus. Howard Neukrug is a professor of practice in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science. At the Philadelphia Water Department, Neukrug was responsible for all aspects of a drinking water, wastewater, and stormwater system serving 2.3 million people. He created Philadelphia's $2.5 billion "Green City, Clean Waters" program, which revolutionized how American cities approach land and water management for sustainability and resiliency. He is an honorary diplomat of the American Academy of Water Resources Engineers and an advisor to the Environmental Protection Agency and the water industry. Neukrug is establishing a Regional and Global Water Policy Center at Penn.

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PROFESSOR AND LIBRARIAN BUILD PENN’S MONGOLIAN COLLECTION FROM SCRATCH In less than one year, Penn’s collection of Mongolian literature grew from just 600 titles held by Van Pelt-Dietrich Library to the fourth largest collection in the United States. All it took was a professor on a mission, an intrepid librarian, a serendipitous conference, a late-night browsing session, and an excursion to Inner Mongolia. The determined professor was Christopher Atwood, who joined Penn in June 2016 as a professor of Mongolian and Late Imperial/Early Modern Chinese history in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations. He teamed up with Brian Vivier, Chinese Studies Librarian and the coordinator of area studies collections at Van Pelt Library. Atwood saw an opportunity in the International Association of Mongolian Studies Conference last August in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia’s capital. “The event is every five years,” says Atwood. “And academic booksellers come out of the woodwork to unload stock.” He and Vivier traveled to conference, connecting with a vendor who had a bulk supply of books stockpiled in an Ulaanbaatar apartment. From 10 p.m. to 3 a.m., Atwood and Vivier sorted through some 10,000 books roughly categorized in banana boxes. In the early morning hours and with waning energy, they counted 1,492 books in their “yes” pile. “We figured the books were going to the new world, so 1,492 was a good place to stop,” laughs Atwood. All told, after the conference and travel to Inner Mongolia for more acquisitions, Atwood and Vivier sent home 37 boxes of books weighing 1,453 pounds. The collection now includes an Inner Mongolian atlas and an extensive compilation of ethnographic field notes, as well as reference books and documents printed before 1945, which was when Mongolia stopped using traditional Mongolian script in favor of Cyrillic.

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Brooke Sietinsons

Christopher Atwood (R), Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and Chinese Studies Librarian Brian Vivier survey Penn’s Mongolian collection.

Their effort had many champions, including Penn Arts and Sciences, the Wang Kang Fu Mei Travel Fund, Van Pelt-Dietrich Library, and Nancy Steinhardt, Chair of East Asian Languages, who Atwood says “has been visionary in cultivating a Mongolian Studies program.” Recruiting Atwood and establishing the Van Pelt collection are recent milestones in a growing relationship among Penn, the City of Philadelphia, and Mongolia. A few years ago, the American Center for Mongolian Studies set up its U.S. office two floors below the East Asian languages department in Williams Hall. Last year, Mongolia’s president made a state visit to Philadelphia and spoke at Penn. This summer, the Philadelphia Orchestra will be the first Western orchestra to perform in Mongolia. Atwood will speak to the ensemble

about the country’s history and culture before the music-makers head to Ulaanbaatar.

MARGINALIZED POPULATIONS PROJECT Professor of Africana Studies Michael Hanchard established the Marginalized Populations Project after reflecting on his graduate work in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. There, he conducted primary research and ethnography for his dissertation and worked alongside several black activists who

helped organize street children and children living in government foster service centers, to demand access to better housing and education and an end to police harassment and violence. He and other activists found that Afro-Brazilian children were among the most marginalized populations in Brazilian society. Marginalized peoples generally have less access to broader social networks, education, health care, and formal employment. The Marginalized Populations Project, a collaborative research initiative operated out of Africana Studies, is designed to explore the dynamic interactions between national governments and populations with unequal, minimal, or non-existent state protections. Hanchard says one of the goals of the Marginalized Populations Project is to further develop and highlight the Department of Africana Studies as a site for innovative, cross-national comparative research on Afro-descendent populations. Hanchard and the project are partnering with Perry World House for the conference, Under the Gun: State Violence and Black Populations, which will feature experts from Penn Law, the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program, the Latin American and Latino Studies Program, and internationally renowned scholars from Africa, Latin America, and Europe.

FACULTY HONORS This spring saw a series of accolades for the teaching and research of Penn Arts and Sciences faculty.

SCHOOL NEWS

David Christianson, Roy and Diana Vagelos Professor in Chemistry and Chemical Biology, and Beth Linker, Associate Professor of History and Sociology of Science, received the Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching— the highest teaching honor at the University. The Provost’s Award for Teaching Excellence by Non-Standing Faculty was given to Lorene Cary, Senior Lecturer in English, while Madeleine Joullié, Professor of Chemistry, received the Provost’s Award for Distinguished Ph.D. Teaching and Mentoring. Nine additional faculty were honored with teaching awards from Penn Arts and Sciences. Marie Gottschalk, Professor of Political Science, and Evelyn Thomson, Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy, were honored with the Ira H. Abrams Memorial Award for Distinguished Teaching. The Dean’s Award for Innovation in Teaching was given to David Kim, Assistant Professor of History of Art, and the Dean’s Award for Mentorship of Undergraduate Research went to Herman Beavers, Professor of English and Africana Studies. Cullen Blake, Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy, received the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching by an Assistant Professor, while the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching by Affiliated Faculty was presented to Julia Bloch, Director of the Creative Writing Program in English, and Oscar Montoya, Instructor of Hispanic Studies in Romance Languages. In the College of Liberal and Professional Studies, Judith McLean, Lecturer in Biological Basis of Behavior, received the Award for Distinguished Teaching in Undergraduate and Post-Baccalaureate Programs, and James Pawelski, Director of Education and Senior Scholar in the Positive Psychology Center, Master of Applied Positive Psychology Program, was given the Award for Distinguished Teaching in Professional Graduate Programs. Sarah Tishkoff, David and Lyn Silfen University Professor of Biology and Genetics, and Robert Seyfarth, Professor of Psychology, were elected members of the National Academy of Sciences. Samuel Freeman, Avalon Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy and Law, was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Robert Aronowitz, Professor and Chair, History and Sociology of Science; Rita Copeland, Sheli Z. and Burton X. Rosenberg Professor, Classical Studies; Daniel J. Mindiola, Presidential Professor of Chemistry; and Daniel K. Richter, Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of American

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History, were awarded John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowships. Diana Mutz, Samuel A. Stouffer Professor of Political Science and Communication, was selected to receive a 2017 Andrew Carnegie Fellowship from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Barbara D. Savage, Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought and Chair of the Department of Africana Studies, was chosen as the Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at the University of Oxford for the 2018-19 academic year. Dorothy Roberts, George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology, Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights, and Professor of Africana Studies, won Columbia University’s Mamie Phipps Clark and Kenneth B. Clark Distinguished Lecture Award. Brendan O’Leary, Lauder Professor of Political Science, was elected an honorary member by the Royal Irish Academy. O’Leary was also given the Distinguished Scholar Award of the International Studies Association's Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Migration Studies, along with his regular co-author John McGarry. John MacDonald, Professor of Criminology and Sociology and Penny and Robert A. Fox Faculty Director of the Fels Institute of Government, was elected a fellow of the Academy of Experimental Criminology. Robert DeRubeis, Samuel H. Preston Term Professor in the Social Sciences and Professor of Psychology, is a recipient of the 2017 James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award, a lifetime achievement award from the Association for Psychological Science. Nancy Hirschmann, Professor of Political Science and Director of the Program on Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies and the Alice Paul Center for Research on Gender, Sexuality, and Women, received a 2017 American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship. She was also named a fellow by the National Humanities Center, and a Fernand Braudel Senior Fellow by the European University Institute.

BONUS CONTENT Be sure to visit OMNIA online for multimedia content related to this issue: https:// omnia.sas.upenn.edu/bonus-content

Here, you’ll find supplemental audio and video content from our features and other articles. Three professors featured in “The Past, Present, and Future of Human Migration” (p. 40), gathered for a panel on the topic as part of Penn Arts and Sciences' continued commitment to promoting civil discourse. Penn Lightbulb Café hosted an interview addressing similar questions to those in “Has Polling Lost Its Reputation?” (p. 30). If you enjoyed “Joshua Bennett: The Sobbing School” (p. 54), check out a reading and interview with the poet. Additional video content includes Grad Ben Talks presenters (p. 58), the Inglorious Comparisons event (p. 57), as well as in-depth coverage of the Penn-Philadelphia Museum of Art joint workshop on object-based learning (p. 5).

OTHER RECENT PENN ARTS AND SCIENCES MULTIMEDIA HIGHLIGHTS INCLUDE: “The Politics of Climate Change,” the latest episode of our OMNIA Podcast series, featuring Daniel Aldana Cohen, Assistant Professor of Sociology.

“The Stand at Standing Rock,” a video feature in which members of Penn’s Native American and Indigenous Studies community reﬂect on the historic gathering and grassroots movement.

Video highlights of the Alumni Weekend 60-Second Slam event, where faculty, students, and alumni provided quick, expert takes on hot-button topics.

Subscribe to the OMNIA Podcast series on Apple iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts, to automatically receive downloads of our most recent episodes, as well previous audio features from Penn Arts and Sciences. In addition, the Penn Arts and Sciences Vimeo channel houses dozens of videos featuring faculty, students, and alums. See you online!

FINDINGS

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CALL OF DUTY: MACBETH EDITION BY

SUSAN AHLBORN

We think of the events in classic tragedies as inevitable: The characters always make the same decisions, and the outcome never changes. But what if you could stop and rewind the action? If you gave Macbeth a second chance, would he make a different choice? Rebecca Bushnell, the School of Arts and Sciences Board of Overseers Professor of English, has spent much of her career studying tragedy, especially how its temporal structure affects our own experience of time. More recently she became interested in time-travel movies, where the characters try to fix history, and then in videogames, which often let the player just start over when things go wrong. Her new book, Tragic Time

in Drama, Film, and Videogames: The Future in the Instant, looks at the different ways these three forms treat time and how they can inform each other. Bushnell, the editor of A Companion to Tragedy, says that since ancient Greece, tragedy has been a model for experiencing time that is focused on a crisis: Everything leads up to a moment of critical choice, and then everything changes after that. She’s written about how this way of thinking about time may have handicapped our ability to see things in the long view, as opposed to through a short, crisis-directed window. She’s also challenged the idea of fate in tragedies. “A lot of people think that Greek tragedy and Shakespearean tragedy are all about the terrible workings of fate: You go into a play and you know exactly how it’s going to turn out, so the terror come from just watching the person walk into it,” she says. “But I don’t believe in fate.” Bushnell started watching movies like Twelve Monkeys and Run Lola Run because they explore whether it is possible to go back and correct a crucial error. Then her daughter Ruth Toner, a physics Ph.D. and longtime gamer, sent her an NPR article which looked at videogames as tragedies. Bushnell started playing complex

narrative games like Heavy Rain, as well as Mass Effect, in which the player is asked to save the galaxy. She says, “Videogames are played in this very complex relationship to time in which you’re in the present and pressured to make decisions, but you can also rewind and pull it back.” Bushnell argues that whenever there is a decision, there is a chance that things can happen differently. She also believes that those choices do not necessarily come out of psychological character in the way that we think about it, but rather that characters become defined by the choices that they make. It’s a process that is built into some video games: “The choices that you make regarding dialogue or action influence in turn how your character evolves.” Dramatic tragedies really have a new beginning each time they are performed—something different can always happen. Today some theater has become outright interactive. “Experimental theater and videogames feed off each other in a really interesting sort of way,” says Bushnell. “For a lot of young people, it has become their experience of story and narrative and theater.” Bushnell teaches an Introduction to Tragedy class that starts with the Greeks and wraps up with film and games. For their final paper, the students have to pick something from popular culture and analyze it to find the deep structure of tragedy. “I feel like it’s a success when the students say, ‘Oh, yeah, now I see it’: that is, they can see in popular culture and the world around them tragic language and models as they have been transformed.”

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ASTRONOMERS DISCOVER NEW POTENTIAL DWARF PLANET BY

MICHELE BERGER

NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory

It’s not every day that scientists get to say they have discovered a new planet in our solar system, but that day arrived this past July for Masao Sako, an associate professor of physics and astronomy, and Gary Bernstein, the Reese W. Flower Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics. Along with colleagues from the University of Michigan, Fermilab, and five Penn undergraduate students, the researchers found a dwarf planet candidate—called 2014 UZ224 and nicknamed DeeDee—around 8.6 billion miles from the sun. The planet is currently three times as far from the sun as Neptune and the second-farthest object (with a known orbit) in the solar system after dwarf planet Eris, which is 8.9 billion miles from the sun. The discovery was a happy accident, what Bernstein calls a “fringe benefit” of the Dark Energy Survey, a project that has so far resulted in 44,000 highly detailed images of the sky. The investigation initially aimed to confirm dark energy as one way to explain the acceleration of the universe’s expansion. But pictures of large swaths of sky are bound to reveal other hidden treasures. “Stars are always in the same arrangement; they are fixed,” Bernstein explains. But, he says, “something moving around the sun will appear to move among the stars.” If an individual were to compare two images of the sky weeks or even years apart and found an object in one but not the other, more than likely it’s not a star. Sako adapted some of the survey’s software to essentially subtract one image’s content from another, giving the researchers a list of dots to examine further. “It’s not immediately obvious that a dot in this place one night and in some other place a year later are the same thing moving through the solar system,” Bernstein says. “There’s the find-the-dots step and the connect-the-dots step.” Thanks to 17th century physics, astronomers know how to predict a planet’s orbit. For three dots suspected of being the same, single object, they can pinpoint where dot four should appear. The more numerous the accurately predicted dots, the more confidence about a scientific discovery.

UZ224 is around 8.6 billion miles from the sun, three times as far from the sun as Neptune.

As for DeeDee, it remains a dwarf planet candidate until confirmation of its shape. If it is round—meaning it has strong enough gravity to prevent tall mountains from forming—it becomes an official dwarf planet, like Pluto, and gets an official name. Given its size and brightness, Sako and Bernstein suspect this is the case, but will know more after further analysis. If the new planet isn’t round, it is a minor planet. Regardless of the final outcome, DeeDee is still one of the farthest known objects in the solar system. “Given the enormous amount of Dark Energy Survey data with tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions of dots in the sky, that we can actually identify four or five associated with a single thing, that’s amazing,” Sako says. “The technology is cool.” And, adds Bernstein, it’s another step toward learning about our solar system’s origins and finding a ninth planet the research community hypothesizes could be 10 times Earth’s mass. “These are relics of the very early solar system, undisturbed,” Bernstein says. “It’s like digging up a fossil from 4.5 billion years ago.”

FINDINGS

OMNIA

CHEMISTS UNCOVER A NEW WAY HEAT TRAVELS BETWEEN MOLECULES BY

ALI SUNDERMIER

A new model developed by Penn Arts and Sciences chemists could be the first step towards better harnessing heat energy to power nanoscale devices. Scientists have long understood that heat travels through vibrations. Molecules vibrate faster and faster as they heat up, and their vibrations cause other molecules around them to vibrate as well, warming cooler nearby molecules. For decades this was the only known way heat could be transferred in organic molecules. Only recently have researchers had the ability to take a closer look at what actually happens at the molecular scale during heat transfer. Abraham Nitzan, Professor of Chemistry, and Galen Craven, a postdoc in his lab, used new information about how to measure temperature on a nanoscale to revisit the mechanism of heat transfer. They created a model to find out how a temperature gradient affects molecular interaction, focusing in on the process of electron transfer. Their findings show that heat transfer occurs when the electron moves between two molecules that are at different temperatures. Electron transfer is possibly the most important process in chemistry, according to Nitzan. “Half of chemistry is electron transfer processes,” he says. “It has been investigated for 100 years on the molecular scale.” Electrons, the negatively charged component of atoms, orbit a positively charged nucleus. In metals, electrons

can move freely from molecule to molecule, producing an electric current. Electron transfer in organic molecules, however, requires more energy. When a molecule is energized, an electron will “jump” from one molecule to orbit another. This electron transfer process is essential for many common chemical reactions, especially ones that occur in biological processes. While electron transfer has been meticulously studied, only recently have scientists been able to look at temperature on the scale of atoms and electrons. Today, scientists can detect temperature differences on the scale of a few nanometers, allowing them to see how differences across individual molecules affect their behavior. This innovation is what inspired Nitzan and Craven to investigate how heat transfer occurs at the molecular level. They were able to create a theory of how electrons jump to molecules with less heat energy. Their model shows that heat transfer does in fact occur when an electron transfers to a lower temperature molecule. They also observed that, compared to heat transfer via vibration, electron transfer could move heat as much as a million times faster. Craven believes this could be a discovery that is key to improving the efficiency of nanotechnology devices that rely on small-scale interactions to operate. On the nanoscale, the movement of energy from a molecule with more heat to one with less could be harnessed to power emergent technologies and devices.

Courtesy of University Communications

While the researchers say there is still much work to be done before this knowledge can be applied, their model is a new discovery of a fundamental process that will change our understanding of how heat transfer works on a molecular level. “Eventually what we envision in nanotechnology is energy flow and charge transfer on the nanoscale,” says Nitzan, “so it is very important to properly know and understand how molecules interact.”

Abraham Nitzan (L), Professor of Chemistry, and Galen Craven, a postdoc in his lab.

FINDINGS

SPRING/SUMMER 2017

AMERICA’S OTHER ONE PERCENT BY

JACQUIE POSEY

A new book examines members of the Indian diaspora, both Indian- and American-born, and offers reasons for their successes in the United States. The Other One Percent: Indians in America is a collaborative book written by Devesh Kapur, Director of the Center for Advanced Study of India and a professor of political science. It is the first comprehensive account of the nation’s Indian community, which make up about one percent of the American population and, according to the book, is “the most well-educated and highest-earning income group among all immigrants in the country.” “Its impact is only now beginning to be felt, since the majority of the population migrated from India after 2000,” says Kapur, who is also the Madan Lal Sobti Professor for the Study of Contemporary India. Today there are more than twice as many Indians in the U.S. than at the turn of the millennium. The book explains that the group’s rapid rise is directly tied to the information technology boom, immigration policies in the U.S., and higher education policies in both India and the U.S. Kapur and his co-authors focus on reasons why the population chose America as a destination for international immigration, the multi-generational community’s gradual assimilation, and the decision by many group members to become entrepreneurs. The book documents the immigrants’ geographic movement within the U.S. and reflects on the social, linguistic, political, and class structure of their native land, and the resulting challenges of integration. The Other One Percent is a follow-up to Kapur’s prior book, Diaspora, Democracy and Development: The Impact of International Migration From India, for which he earned a 2012 ENMISA Distinguished Book Award of the International Studies Association. “The earlier book examined the impact of emigration of Indians from India,” Kapur says. “The new book is in a sense a mirror image. It examines the impact of immigration of Indians to the United States.”

The Other One Percent is data-driven and demonstrates the impact that people of Indian origin have had in various fields, most notably IT, higher education (especially engineering), and the health sector. The book further examines Indian entrepreneurship in industries ranging from hightech startups and medicine to hospitality and retail. The authors also show how selection, or determining who comes from India to the U.S.; global changes in technology and trade; and policy changes in both India and the U.S. have shaped the economic success of this group of immigrants. Kapur co-authored the book with Sanjoy Chakravorty, a professor of geography and urban studies at Temple University, and Nirvikar Singh, a professor of economics at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

FINDINGS

OMNIA

WHAT FACTORS LEAD WOMEN TO RUN FOR POLITICAL OFFICE? BY

JILL DISANTO

Courtesy of Dawn Teele

ed’ women into actual political candidates is extremely important for the representation of women all over the country and in all levels of government,” Teele says. “It’s amazing to see how many women go through the training, which costs a lot of time and money, but do not run.”

To understand the structural mechanisms that Dawn Teele (R) at the Women's March, January 2017. prevent interested, qualified women from running, Teele’s survey asked the group Since the 2016 election, scores of about deterrents such as financial women across the nation have enissues, media bias, donor networks, listed in political campaign training and party connections. programs like Emerge America and Ready to Run. One researcher is gathIf a potential candidate is a single ering their data to understand why breadwinner who is unable to give some women throw their hats in the up her income in order to run during ring while others don’t. an election, that’s a major obstacle that probably cannot be overcome by Dawn Teele, an assistant professor of adjustments to training programs. political science, examines the ecoHowever, Teele says, smaller issues nomic and psychological factors that might be remedied with intervendrive women to seek political office. tions. In a new research project, “Nudging Women to Run,” Teele, along with “One of the most-cited reasons as to scholars at Rutgers University, Yale why Emerge America women don’t University, and the University of run for office is because they have California, Berkeley, surveyed alumnot been able to find a campaign nae of women’s campaign-training manager,” Teele says. “If a woman programs and is in the process of dedoesn’t run because she had no sucsigning experimental innovations to cess finding a campaign manager, or encourage women to launch political has trouble tapping into fundraising campaigns. networks to secure seed money, marginal changes might make a differWithin five years of participating in ence in the ‘conversion rate’ of these a six-week Emerge America training programs.” program, about 50 percent of alumnae have run for or been appointed to Gender-related psychological factors political office. may influence a woman’s decision whether or not to run and Teele plans “Converting a group of ‘interest-

to look at that, too. “Gendered pathways into politics start very early on. In school, boys are encouraged to think about politics, whereas girls are not,” Teele says, adding that the same kinds of principles apply when women are seeking a new job or a promotion. “Women will generally apply for a position only if they meet every qualification, whereas men will go for it no matter what,” Teele says. “We plan to look at these kinds of psychological limitations, too, to see if different presentations of candidate histories change the rate of candidacy.” Teele is in the midst of organizing an academic conference for the fall that will bring the leaders of women’s campaign-training programs together with scholars and policy-oriented organizations for a brainstorming session. Through sharing ideas, the conference is designed to get attendees thinking about experiments that can be done within the programs to “nudge” participants forward. While the campaign-training organizations continue to collect data, Teele says that it will be a while before they see any tangible results. “We have to wait at least two electoral cycles before implementing any programmatic changes. But, we’ll continue to gather data and in one year we will try experimental interventions in some of the programs,” Teele says. “It’s a long-term project because it takes time for elections to happen and for posts to become open. We have to be patient.”

FINDINGS

SPRING/SUMMER 2017

THE RED GUARD GENERATION BY

BLAKE COLE

May 2016 marked the 50th anniversary of the launching of the Cultural Revolution in China, a political upheaval that rocked the country for a decade. Catalyzed by Mao Zedong, then chairman of the Communist Party of China, the movement was unique in that one of Mao’s major cohorts and agents of revolution was a mass of students who would become known as the Red Guard. From 1966 to 1968, these students—who had been educated in a system rife with pro-communist propaganda—waged war against administrative officials up to the highest levels in a crusade that often escalated into violence. Ironically, it was from these same students that pro-democratic protesters would emerge in the late 1970s, culminating in the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. “As kids, the Red Guard grew up very proud of the new socialist nation,” says Associate Professor of Sociology Guobin Yang, whose book The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China examines the evolution of the group. “These children were raised to worship soldiers that died in the wars before the communist regime came to power. So for the young generation it was an opportunity to prove themselves.” In June of 1966, an essay written by a Peking University student opposing university authorities was broadcast around the country and printed in all the official newspapers. Mao endorsed the behavior, calling the educational system corrupt. The Red Guard took up the call, deposing officials not only in the educational system and workplaces, but in all facets of government, and often through violent means. But soon infighting

would plague the group, and Mao would eventually intervene.

their vision for fundamental revolutionary change."

“Mao, who always used very appealing slogans, told the students of the Red Guard that it was time to take the revolution to the countryside, which began a new campaign called 'Up to the mountains and down to the villages.’ The program would send 17 million young people away from their urban homes,” says Yang. “Ironically, the political values they had learned from their Maoist education were rejected in the process of a very different kind of experience. After doing farm labor and growing older and focusing on marriage and practical things, they realized that it was okay and not morally wrong to take care of their personal interests.”

Officially, in China, there are no public discussions about the cultural revolution, as it is seen as a forbidden zone of history, but Yang says people still find ways to reflect. “There are collective memories,” he says. “People publish blogs. They write memoirs and circulate them among friends, and some get published in Hong Kong. They tell their stories of the past to challenge current situations and current politics.”

By 1978, the sent-down students began protesting with only one demand in mind: Let us come home. Some protests were successful due to local politics, while others were squashed. By 1981, the government was forced to abolish the policy. The student movements continued throughout the 1980s. Ex-Red Guard devotees came to serve a new function: advising the new student generation. Some of the protest tactics that were used in the cultural revolution became standard tactics for pro-democratic activists. "The connection between the two is not so obvious, since the Tiananmen movement was students fighting for democracy, while the 1966 protestors were not fighting for democracy at all," says Yang. "But my argument is that there is one very important connection, which is in their radicalism. Radical not in the violence, since the 1989 movement was non-violent, but in

FACULTY OPINION

MAKING A MOCKERY By Ralph Rosen

Illustration by Jon Krause

OMNIA

FACULTY OPINION

SPRING/SUMMER 2017

During the 2016 presidential election, Saturday Night Live’s political skits became a regular feature on the Sunday morning news. SNL has continued to satirize President Donald Trump, who slams the show on Twitter in turn. Though the media are new, they’re continuing a tradition that is centuries old, and whose tropes and rules have remained strikingly similar across historical periods. Some years ago I wrote a comparative study of the Roman poet Juvenal and rapper Eminem to make that point. A short, working definition of satire is that it’s a form of performance—literary or dramatic, for example—in which satirists present themselves as aggrieved by individuals, groups, or institutions; they take a stance of indignation and self-righteousness against their chosen targets; and respond with ridicule, mockery, and invective. It's a mode of complaint. Satirists like to imagine themselves as oppressed by the world and by people or institutions more powerful than themselves. They routinely present themselves as angry and powerless, but poised at the same time to fight back against all the people and things they object to. And they always claim the moral high ground—without that, no one would have much reason to sympathize with them. Satire presents itself as something that is straightforward, truthful, and honest, but it's actually very complicated because it depends on a highly specific relationship between satirists and their audiences. With satire there are in fact two audiences. If I'm attacking politicians and saying that something has to change, there’s a kind of fiction that the politicians are supposed to be listening to me

and hopefully will be persuaded of their evil ways. Of course, they almost never are, and as a satirist, I don't actually want them to be, because then I'd be out of a job! The satirist’s ‘true’ audience, however, is the people who are listening to him or her as a performer. This is one thing I have always found intriguing about satire: It claims to be an agent of change, but in fact the people you're trying to please are already for the most part on your side. As a performer, the first thing a satirist has to answer to is his audience—to make it funny. If that's actually the most important thing, as satirists typically say, it does call into question the idea that they’re there just to speak truth and tell it like it is, because they’re going to be the first ones to alter and distort things to get a good laugh. Whatever the motivation, satirical authors of all periods love to claim that what they're doing is dangerous because they make powerful people angry. This has the effect of making satire appear even more risky and enticing. Sometimes satirists do get into serious trouble, as we know all too well from recent events, and invariably defenders will claim that the satirists’ comic goals were misunderstood—as if that is supposed to make their mockery less threatening to targets. Lenny Bruce, a comedian in the 1950s and ‘60s, is an interesting example because he did get into legal trouble on obscenity charges, and in his last year, he often blurred the line between satire and preaching—lecturing his audiences on constitutional law, for example, often with little obvious humor.

It’s commonly thought that ‘anything goes’ in satire, but this is hardly the case. People get in trouble for different reasons at different times, but every period, and society, I think, has its limits and its pressure points. There's a kind of cultural rule book that people are supposed to follow, and when it gets violated, all hell can break loose and sometimes does. It’s a longstanding and open question whether satire actually “does” anything beyond entertain. Of course everything depends on what one means by “does” here. Here's an example: Aristophanes was a famous political satirist in Classical Athens (5th century BCE). In 424 BCE, he wrote the play Knights, which is a violent, vitriolic rant against an Athenian demagogue named Cleon (whose portrayal in the play, by the way, bears a remarkable resemblance to recent comic representations of Donald Trump). But the next year the Athenians voted Cleon in as general. That doesn't prove that all satire is ineffective, of course, but it's a great example of how people seemed to like the show—but it didn't make a huge difference when it came to actual political events. People seem to be able to take their comedy, go out of the “comedy club,” figuratively speaking, or turn off the TV, and know that, okay, now I'm in a zone of real life, where I need to approach things differently. Ralph Rosen is Vartan Gregorian Professor of the Humanities and Professor and Undergraduate Chair in the Department of Classical Studies.

OMNIA

SPRING/SUMMER 2017

By Rebecca Guenard Illustrations by Sam Chivers

OMNIA irtual reality is here. In fact, it’s everywhere. Beyond video games, it is helping therapists to treat PTSD, allowing medical students to do virtual operations, and letting engineers test vehicle safety before the car is built.

sor of Physics and Astronomy, is interested in the basic science of vision, its neural biology, and the perceptions created by the visual system. “I’d like to understand how the world around us isn’t necessarily the thing inside our head,” he says.

But in order to provide a genuine experience through virtual reality (VR), manufacturers must first understand how vision works in the real world. And understanding a complex system like vision requires advances on multiple fronts. At Penn Arts and Sciences, psychologists and physicists are looking more closely at the basics of how we see.

Five years ago he started collecting photographs in an effort to figure out one question about the human visual system: Why is the retina equipped with so many dark spot detectors? He assembled a series of images of natural landscapes in Botswana, in areas unaltered by human intrusion and similar to where the human eye is thought to have evolved. Balasubramanian and collaborators David Brainard, RRL Professor of Psychology, and Peter Sterling, now an emeritus professor of neuroscience, analyzed the photos pixel by pixel to evaluate the amount of contrast that exists in our natural surroundings.

“I’d like to understand how the world around us isn’t necessarily the thing inside our head.” The human visual system acts a bit like the cash-starved manager of a baseball franchise. Limited on resources, he must decide what is most important for a winning season. Which approach will he take? Will he focus on pitchers or hitters? Likewise, the human eye is constantly flooded with electromagnetic radiation, from which it must distinguish essential information like color, depth, and contrast. Photoreceptors in the flat retina transcribe the light they receive into electrical signals that the brain filters and manipulates into our perception of a vibrant, three-dimensional world. Like any good baseball manager, Penn’s researchers are relying heavily on statistics. They select and characterize known features about our visual world, such as the RBG (red/blue/green) value of a dot on a screen or the precisely determined distance of an object in a photograph from the camera. The scientists plug these numbers into computer programs that crunch the values together to predict how the visual system will process the features. Researchers then compare the results to experiments that were done with human subjects. The divide between idealized models and human behavior provides visual neuroscientists with clues about how our brains process light to produce our perception of the world. Vijay Balasubramanian, Cathy and Mark Lasry Profes-

One would imagine that bright spots dominate the sun-covered terrain of Africa, but statistical analysis of the photos showed that in a “certain precise sense” the world has more dark spots than light. “Peter Sterling and I were able to build a fully quantitative physics-style theory of exactly what increase in proportion of your dark spot detectors would be best for your vision,” says Balasubramanian. “We explained from first principles why the visual system of animals devoted so many more resources to dark spots than to bright spots.” According to Alan Stocker, Assistant Professor of Psychology, the phenomenon that Balasubramanian describes exemplifies a common theory in visual neuroscience: that an encoded trait in the visual system must be an evolutionary adaptation. “Neural resources are allocated according to what is more frequent in the world, more important,” says Stocker. When Balasubramanian builds his models to study the visual system, he programs the computer to take this assumption into consideration. However, this is not the only approach to determining how the brain manages vision. Instead of viewing the problem from the perspective of how the brain adapted to optimize the visual system, Assistant Professor of Psychology Johannes Burge accepts what is in place and investigates the best way to use it. Like Balasubramanian, Burge uses statistics to calculate his computer models. Burge implements what’s called an “ideal observer,” a computer program designed to pro-

OMNIA duce the best statistical estimates of what is in the world given the eye’s limitations. Recently he has applied his models to questions surrounding how the eye handles depth. To do this, Burge first produced an accurate data set of depth measurements to feed into his computer model. By fitting a robotic scaffold with a laser scanner atop a camera, his group collected occlusion-free left-eye and right-eye photographs of natural landscapes in which every

“We have the potential to revolutionize how autofocus mechanisms work in cameras.”

pixel has an accompanying known distance associated with it. Then he fed the image distance results into a computer to establish a true depth profile of the photos. Burge then exploited his ideal observer models to discover the best way for the eye to perform a task involving distance. One such task is focusing. Picture your iPhone, says Burge. The camera focuses in a jerky procedure of guessing and checking to find the point of focus. Human eyes (or at least young human eyes), by contrast, zero in immediately on a target. Using the ideal observer, Burge’s group calculated the statistically optimal way of determining focus, which turned out to be exactly how the human eye works, by exploit-

ing properties of the light hitting the eye. Burge wants to know if we could design technology to do the same thing. “We realized from studying natural images that there are some statistical properties within images that are relatively stable,” says Burge. To focus on a target, the human eye takes advantage of the way different wavelengths of light refract at different angles when passing through the cornea. Using image statistics, Burge found an analogous property in photographic images that could help a camera lens focus. “If you understand how best to perform a task using natural images then you can build it into imaging devices and robotics,” says Burge. Modeling the visual system in this

If they can understand vision at that level, researchers could unlock remarkable technologies like prosthetic eyes or robots with human-like vision. abstract way can lead to valuable applications in visual technologies. “We have the potential to revolutionize how autofocus mechanisms work in cameras,” says Burge. Robust models of the visual system are also critical. Alan Stocker developed a method that has proven to be influential in the field of visual neuroscience. He blends the statistics of Balasubramanian’s evolution-based approach while also considering Burge’s emphasis on how the eye performs with the system it has in place. “The visual system has adapted in both ways, not only in the way it interprets the truth from the information but also in the way it represents the information in our minds,” says Stocker. His model has proven to be quite effective in explaining the visual system’s biases in perceptual inference. When humans think they see an object, they inherently complete a mental picture of the object. “When I see an object, if I think it’s an apple then the features have to be consistent with that notion,” says Stocker. “We don’t perceive colors or shapes individually, we perceive them as parts of a whole.” All these examples of the research conducted by these professors have the potential to enhance a virtual experience. “Virtual reality is about how you create perceptions of things and the tricks that you can use to manipulate the visual environment to create this perception,” says Balasubramanian. “If you understand those tricks you can use them to your advantage as a virtual reality engineer.” David Brainard’s group is taking an indirect approach to the vision computation problem. Brainard is director of the Vision Research Center and co-director of the Computational Neuroscience Initiative at Penn. As well as working extensively to determine more about our perception of color, he has contributed to a number of the research efforts on visual neuroscience. He’s currently in the discovery stage on an experiment to create a fully computable model of the human eye. Brainard says, “Our motivation was to make the modeling more neurally realistic, so that we can ask questions such as how well can we train an artificial system embodying a precise model of the early visual system to accurately perceive object color despite variations in illumination.”

“Although the advances in computing capability have made these new approaches possible, one of the big challenges with virtual reality is that faithfully recreating the images present on the back of the eye requires way more computing power and bandwidths than even the best computers have right now,” says Burge. A complimentary branch of vision research aims to directly understand the brain’s computations. Assistant Professor of Psychology Nicole Rust measures the electrical pulses of neurons in the brain as her subjects search through images to find one that matches a specific target object. After recording these pulses, her team looks to see how the visual information was processed in the brain by using those signals to recreate the task of their subject. “We are considering the patterns of responses across a population of these nerve cells and we are looking to see how these patterns change with different variables in these experiments,” says Rust. She found that when a subject observed a target match, there is a distinct pattern of neuron activity different from when they were looking at other images. Balasubramanian also conducts experiments to directly measure neural signals as they leave the retina. The aim of the direct measurements carried out by Rust and Balasubramanian is to identify the algorithms used to transcribe visual information to the brain. If they can understand vision at that level, researchers could unlock remarkable technologies like prosthetic eyes or robots with human-like vision. “We are unquestionably taking advantage of the power of computers,” says Rust. “There is very little that I do that I could analyze in an Excel spreadsheet.” But as Burge points out, for all their improvements in capability, a computer cannot outperform the processing power of a human brain. The tasks that the visual system allows the brain to perform are remarkable when you think about the limitations weighted against its success. “A lot of the job of the visual system is actually to throw away information, because you have an incredible amount coming to the eye from all the photons everywhere all the time,” says Balasubramanian. “In the end you have to whittle this information down to whatever it takes to perfectly swing a bat, just now, to hit a ball.”

By Michele Berger

IF YOU WANT TO KNOW THE SECRETS OF HUMAN ANCESTRY AND EVOLUTION, LOOK NO FURTHER THAN GENETICS, SAYS THEODORE SCHURR.

SPRING/SUMMER 2017

Ömer Gökçumen

beyond the boundaries of “anthropology”—a potentially logical misunderstanding, given the heavy reliance on genetics and DNA analysis. But once you look closely how Schurr got where he is today, it makes sense.

His work-life began in the laboratory of Douglas Wallace, then at Emory University and now a professor at Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine and at the During fieldwork in Central Anatolia, Turkey, in 2006, Schurr and one of his students collected Children’s Hospital of anecdotes about the history of the village and the region through conversations with locals. Philadelphia (CHOP). Together, they studied human mitochondrial genetics, at that time a new and “Genetics allows you to look at population dynamfascinating fi eld Wallace founded, one that centers on ics, the history of genetic lineages, and relationships mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and biology. between individuals. With genetics, you can try to reconstruct the processes that gave rise to the human This kind of DNA differs from nuclear DNA in that it diversity we see today and determine where its roots only comes from the mother and has a very high rate lie,” says Schurr, a professor of anthropology. “Those of mutation. Researchers can learn from how mtDNA kinds of questions interest me.” interacts with nuclear DNA (which exists in cell nuclei), as well as use it to study certain diseases and reconBroadly speaking, Schurr’s research falls under the struct the genetic migration of women. “It gives us a category of biological or physical anthropology, or clear picture of maternal lines that extend back in time the study of human behavior, bones and biology. But many generations, and ultimately to the ancestresses of that’s really putting it too simply. During a career that our species,” Schurr explains. has spanned more than three decades, he’s traveled the globe, working with villagers in Turkey, Inuit in When Schurr began working as a technician in Walthe Canadian Arctic, and a dozen other under-studied lace’s lab, few other researchers were thinking about communities in far-flung outposts. He builds trust with this type of DNA. The pair co-authored the first paper the people, and then immerses himself to better undershowing that it could cause disease, and pioneered a stand their origins using DNA analysis. The overall goal new way to study it using well-tested anthropological is to create a comprehensive picture of each group’s practices. genetic history and the factors that have shaped it. “What I’ve aimed to do with my work is to determine where there are interesting historical questions to answer using genetic data, identify patterns of diversity that we don’t fully understand, and go to places where people haven’t yet traveled to do this kind of biological research,” he says. Some might view this kind of science as extending

“We only studied indigenous people. That’s critical to avoid drawing erroneous conclusions resulting from more recent migrations and genetic mixture,” Wallace says. “If you go back to the indigenous people, you find that they have very specific lineages that arose with the original population and are linked to the population’s identity. Tad’s research has continued to make this critical connection between careful anthropological

OMNIA

research and exacting molecular genetic analysis. This is true molecular anthropology, and is the approach now used around the world.” In graduate school, Schurr studied mtDNA variation in Siberia as it related to Native Americans, then began incorporating Y-chromosomes and autosomal markers into research to understand the entire familial genetic backstory. Y-chromosomes pass from father to son and complement the matrilineal mitochondrial DNA. Autosomes— chromosomes that are not sexlinked—reveal information about both parents that can’t be traced back to the other two ancestry signals. “Each of these different kinds of DNA gives us a slightly different picture of genetic history and the forces that have shaped it,” Schurr says. Spend any time talking with Schurr

about the places he’s been and the people he’s met, however, and it’s clear the work is about much more than DNA strands and genes. Schurr tries to visit every community in person to accomplish the purely anthropological aspects of his work impossible to do remotely. “There is no substitute for actually being on location and seeing a place and what the landscape looks like, meeting the people living there, talking to them, getting a sense of their history,” he says. “It’s personal contact, which makes the work more interesting. People all have the same questions about their history and genealogy, and their interest facilitates our efforts to elucidate them. Most communities are pretty welcoming to the research—as long as they understand” the work taking place. He cites the example of aboriginal Australians he and a team published about in late 2016 in the Journal of Human Genetics. This

group was, in relatively modern history, exploited and killed by white Europeans, and in the post-colonial context, socially and politically marginalized. As such, they were reticent to participate in any sort of genetic research, leaving large gaps in our understanding of their genetic history, and by extension, modern human ancestry. Recent policy changes started to offer them more protections. So, in coordination with an aboriginal Australian researcher, and strictly following the aboriginal communities’ ethical guidelines, Schurr and colleagues gained access to and the trust of more than 500 such Australians. The researchers were then able to conduct the first systematic mtDNA survey there, discovering new lineages. “It’s a testament to how [collaborating] with communities on projects like this can be successfully done and the results are fairly extraordinary because of their

Gino Noris

For the past six years, Schurr has worked with collaborators in Mexico to characterize genetic diversity in Native Mexican populations. This photo was taken in the State of Campeche during work with Maya communities.

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Courtesy of Theodore Schurr

“There is no substitute for actually being on location and seeing a place and what the landscape looks like, meeting the people living there, talking to them, getting a sense of their history.” Theodore Schurr, Professor of Anthropology

participation. It’s mutually beneficial,” he says. “You can work with individual communities on genetic studies and learn a tremendous amount by engaging with them.” He’s seen this time and again. In Turkey, research revealed that religious and ethnic backgrounds varied slightly from village to village. Some ancestry traced back to the Greeks, others to people from the Caucuses, some to invading Turkic tribes. In Trinidad, in the Caribbean, he discovered what he calls a “complex genetic dance” compounded by the arrival of non-natives. “The indigenous [people] have their origins in these areas,” Schurr explains, “but also, they themselves are the product of historical mixing of African, European, and South Asian peoples since colonial entry there.” Schurr says he tries to return to communities to share his results with participants, but if going back in person isn’t possible, he finds another way to provide them his findings. He also aims to publish all his data in peer-reviewed journals or as book chapters, to build on our archive of material about the path of the world’s people. He’s been prolific. He currently has three papers in press: about the genetic diversity of the Svan people in the country of Georgia, variations in Y-chromosomes in native South American populations, and a possible link between susceptibility to human papillomavirus and mtDNA in Argentinean populations. That doesn’t count the four additional papers he thinks will come in

the near future, and another dozen or so in some stage of development. His methods have also made their way into clinical settings, by way of people like his former graduate student Matthew Dulik, now a director in the clinical diagnostics lab at CHOP. In Schurr’s lab they worked on the genetic diversity of southern Siberia’s Altai-Sayan region. Dulik sequenced and analyzed mtDNA and Y-chromosomal DNA samples from indigenous Altaians, and he says he became familiar with techniques and equipment that he still uses today. “You’re always going to learn something but it’s also an enjoyable time,” Dulik says, of working with Schurr. “In his lab, there is a structure but he also gives you enough free rein to explore ideas and really lets you develop as a researcher.” It’s this combination of structure and freedom, of tying together DNA analysis and genetics with anthropological practices, that has allowed Schurr to make true scientific headway. Wallace calls him a leader in the field. “He’s been extraordinarily successful. He’s done a great job,” Wallace says. “He’s doing a lot of really beautiful work.” Work that will, with any luck, continue to unlock the mysteries of how people became who they are in some of the farthest reaches of the world.

HAS POLLING LOST ITS REPUTATION? A Q&A WITH PORES DIRECTOR JOHN LAPINSKI By Susan Ahlborn

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Alex Schein

“A world without public opinion polls is a world where government isn't really accountable or responsive to its citizens.”

John Lapinski, Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the Penn Program on Opinion Research and Election Studies (PORES), at the decision desk of NBC News, where he is Elections Unit Director.

he morning of November 9, 2016, dawned on a lot of surprised people. Almost all of the polling data reported ahead of the November 8 presidential election, including several state polls in critical battlegrounds, had shown Hilary Clinton leading rival Donald Trump. Associate Professor of Political Science John Lapinski is the direc-

tor of the Penn Program on Opinion Research and Election Studies (PORES). His position as elections unit director at NBC News gave him and his students a close-up view of the successes and failures of polling in 2016. Now they’re trying to understand some of the most important problems of polling, and how it can get better.

OMNIA Were the polls really that bad? John Lapinski: There's been a lot of criticism, obviously, that the polling didn't get it right in the 2016 election. After the election, the first thing I wanted to do was to evaluate empirically whether the polls really were much worse in 2016 than in past elections. I’ve been working with colleagues to analyze all public opinion polls at the national and state level from the 2016, 2012, and 2008 elections, including the partisan primary elections. I think it’s about 2,900 polls in total, all done within two weeks of the primary and general elections. What we’ve found was that the polls were not systematically worse in 2016 than 2012 or 2008. Once all the votes were counted, Hillary Clinton ended up with a two percent popular vote margin over Donald Trump. Most national election polls were not too far off, and within that margin of error. The 2016 state general election polls were slightly less accurate than state polls in 2008 and 2012, but they were a little bit better in the 2016 primaries compared to other presidential years. So there are some areas pollsters need to focus on, but ultimately, there wasn’t a systematic failure in 2016. This does not mean that there are not problems with polling. But the polls were not markedly worse in 2016 than in previous presidential elections. Some are calling into question whether or not polling will work at all. That's very troubling for me because a world without public opinion polls is a world where government isn't really accountable or responsive to its citizens. They’re how you know what people want. It's my opinion that public opinion polls are pretty important for American democracy. We should always look for ways to improve them and make them better.

Why did people think the polls were so far off? Lapinski: There’s room for growth in conveying what an estimate is or how much uncertainty might exist. There’s been an increase in the number of polls themselves in recent years, as well as poll aggregators and prediction-based forecasting. And there seems to be a lot of work that needs to be done as pollsters to correctly talk about an estimate or a probability. There is some

misunderstanding about what a poll result is actually saying. For example, one thing many people don’t understand is what the margin of error is. Each candidate has a margin of error, but to estimate a likely winner, you need to determine the margin of error for the difference between the candidates. The number that is often reported by the media is not the margin of error on the difference, which is considerably larger than the margin of error people see in the TV or print media. This is because usually we are not interested in the difference when we look at polling numbers. This is a tricky concept for some people. And it is really hard to convey to viewers in a simple way. The bottom line is that the plus and minus we usually see in public opinion polls is really too small.

“When I started my academic career, response rates were well over 50 percent. Now, they’re in the single digits.” We have to be careful when we report on these things to not give people a false sense of confidence. They’re estimates. In 2008 and 2012, it didn't matter because the polls got the direction right both times. This is an issue we are grappling with at PORES. I don't want to give the sense that the polls are useless. It's just that they're not as precise as people think they are. We have to be careful about this when we're interpreting them.

Some people talk about how many Democrats versus Republicans are polled, and blame that. Lapinski: When looking at polling aggregator sites, it’s easy to see that there was a lot of variability in how many Republicans and Democrats were taking polls, even after controlling for demographics. That's troubling because political science research suggests that partisanship is very stable. One hypothesis we are testing after this election is that when things were going well for Democrats, Democrats were more likely to take the polls, and the same for Republicans.

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The question then is if, for example, Republicans aren’t taking polls, does that also mean they’re not going to vote, or are they just reacting to something temporary? The other thing that we're looking at is potential non-response bias, which basically means the types of people who don’t answer polls are systematically different than those who do answer polls. Pollsters are really now digging into how different polling modes affect responses among Republicans and Democrats.

Are there other issues polls are facing today? Lapinski: It's just becoming more difficult to do polling. When I started my academic career, response rates were well over 50 percent. Now, they're in the single digits. When you get rates that low, the question becomes whether the people who are taking your polls are fundamentally different from the people who aren’t taking them. If they're not, then you're fine. But as you start getting into smaller and smaller numbers of people, it’s more likely that we are going to have problems.

How do you think polling can be improved? Lapinski: We are very interested in using what's called registration-based sampling (RBS) techniques, where you actually draw your sample from the voter file, instead of RDD, which is random digit dialing. Voter files are updated lists of all registered voters. When you draw off that sample, you know exactly who is taking

We could begin to examine whether there were certain types of people—Republicans or rural residents, for example—who are just not taking our poll and how they may differ from the people who are. We think that we can get some traction there to correct for potential problems. Obviously, the idea of the credibility of polling, whether or not the results were worse or not worse, is in the conversation right now. If it's in the public conversation, then I think we need to address it. We’re putting out articles through NBC and PORES, and trying to engage people. We’re working to educate journalists in best practices in reporting poll results. As scholars, if we can help do something better, and it's important for the public conversation, we should do that.

What have your students thought about all of this? Lapinski: The students are highly engaged in it. You would think the interest and engagement in American politics would taper down after an election. In fact, I think it's increased. They have varying opinions on whether they like what's happening right now or don't like what's happening, but everybody seems to be highly engaged.

Alex Schein

Lapinski with PORES students at NBC.

your surveys, but you also know who is not taking your surveys. This helps you understand whether you might have problems with nonresponse. You can also see if people voted in the primary but not the general election, or who voted in 2008 and 2012 but didn’t vote this time. We can also explore this idea of who the likely voters are and if 2016 was different.

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Illustration by John Megahan

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Paleobiologist Probes Fossil Record for Perspective on Today By Katherine Unger Baillie

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Lauren Sallan does not shy away from a challenge. Since arriving at Penn in 2014, Sallan, a paleobiologist and Assistant Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science, has questioned, and in some cases overturned, closely held tenets of paleontology. Using big data analytics and new approaches to the study of fossils informed by living biology, her findings are reshaping our understanding of how global events, environmental change, and ecological interactions shaped evolution and modern biodiversity. Sallan’s unique take on her field recently earned her a spot in the 2017 class of TED Fellows, a group of 15 young innovators from the around the world. She delivered a talk on the TED stage this April in Vancouver. “The TED Talk was an amazing opportunity to share what fossil data tells us about the rules of biodiversity with a global audience,” Sallan says. Sallan’s interest in fossils, specifically in fish, began in childhood, growing up just outside Chicago with its world-famous Field Museum and Shedd Aquarium. In her doctoral work at the University of Chicago and a fellowship position at the University of Michigan, she developed a macroevolutionary approach to her studies, examining ecological and morphological changes that occurred over long time periods. To do so, she’s plumbed the depths of fossil collections worldwide to compile massive databases, from which she has deciphered telling patterns.

The Rise of the Tiny One of Sallan’s biggest splashes came in the fall of 2015. She mentored Andrew K. Galimberti, then an undergraduate at Kalamazoo University and now a graduate student at the University of Maine, in order to amass a huge dataset

of the body sizes of 1,120 fish fossils spanning the period from 419 to 323 million years ago. They were interested in finding out how body sizes changed following a mass extinction 359 million years ago known as the Hangenberg event, which decimated life on the planet. More than 97 percent of vertebrate species— which at that time were all water-dwelling—were wiped out. Paleontologists and evolutionary biologists have long debated the reasons behind changes in animal body sizes. One of the main theories is known as Cope’s rule, named after 19th century Penn professor and alumnus Edward Drinker Cope, most famous for his participation in the “Bone Wars,” a scientific rivalry over dinosaur specimens. Cope’s rule states that the body size of a particular group of species tends to increase over time because of the evolutionary advantages of being larger, such as avoiding predation and being better able to catch prey. Other theories suggest that animals tend to be larger in the presence of increased oxygen, or in colder climates. Still another idea, known as the Lilliput Effect, holds that after mass extinctions, there is a temporary trend toward small body size. But this theory has only been supported with a limited number of species and is highly debated. Sallan and Galimberti’s analysis of these fossils revealed that, in line with Cope’s rule, vertebrates gradually increased in size during the environmentally stable Devonian Period, from 419 to 359 million years ago. By the end of the Devonian, “there were fish called arthrodire placoderms with large slashing jaws that were the size of school buses, and there were relatives of living tetrapods, or land-dwelling vertebrates, that were almost as large,” Sallan says.

“ The TED Talk was an amazing opportunity to share what fossil data tells us about the rules of biodiversity with a global audience.”

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Courtesy of Lauren Sallan

Lauren Sallan, Assistant Professor of Earth and Environmental Science

Then came the mass extinction. Reporting their findings in the journal Science, the researchers showed that the Hangenberg event triggered a drastic and lasting transformation of Earth’s vertebrate community. For at least 40 million years following the die-off, the oceans were dominated by markedly smaller fish. “Rather than having this thriving ecosystem of large things, you may have one gigantic relict, but otherwise everything is the size of a sardine,” says Sallan. The findings, which suggest that small, fast-reproducing fish possessed an evolutionary advantage over larger animals in the disturbed, post-extinction environment, mirrors what ecologists can observe in opportunistic plants following short-term disasters, such as forest fires. Thus, life histories and survival strategies linked to size, rather than the benefits of being large or climate change, are the key to long-term evolutionary size trends like Cope’s rule. This may have implications for the future of modern species, such as fish populations, many of which are crashing due to overfishing.

“It doesn’t matter what is eliminating large fishes or what is making ecosystems unstable,” she says. “These disturbances are shifting natural selection so that smaller, faster-reproducing fish are more likely to keep going, and it could take a really long time to get those bigger fish back in any sizable way.”

New Perspectives Other recent studies out of Sallan’s lab have similarly challenged textbook ideas of evolutionary biology and paleontology, leading to new perspectives on modern diversity. In a publication in the journal Current Biology in 2016, for example, Sallan examined an unusual set of 350-million-year-old fish hatchling fossils from the genus Aetheretmon. Experts from Thomas Huxley (known as Darwin’s bulldog) to Stephen Jay Gould had proposed that an ancient, scaly tail appeared in embryos of living teleosts, a group of ray-finned fish that make up more than 95 percent of living fish species, and then became locked within the flexible fins of adults. This became the textbook example of evolution repeated in Bob Nicholls

OMNIA

“Disturbances are shifting natural selection so that smaller, faster-reproducing fish are more likely to keep going, and it could take a really long time to get those bigger fish back in any sizable way.” development, or recapitulation. But fossil data were lacking. Sallan showed that ancient juvenile fish had both a scaly, fleshy tail and a modern, flexible fin, one sitting atop the other. A similar dual-tail structure is seen in the embryos of modern teleosts. Over evolutionary time, to adapt to their environments, Sallan realized, adult teleosts kept their fins and lost their tails, while tetrapods did the opposite. “All vertebrate tail diversity might be explained by the relative growth and loss of these two tails, with the remaining fleshy tail stunted in humans as in fishes," Sallan says. Unlike many paleontology findings, Sallan says this one might be proved in a modern molecular biology laboratory, as it’s likely that the two outgrowths are governed by two groups of genes. A developmental biologist might be able to determine the actual molecular pathways that generate tail growth or fin placement.

John Megahan

Earlier this year, Sallan engaged in a “settled” paleontological debate, challenging two studies that were published last year in Nature about the odd, ancient “Tully monster,” Tullimonstrum gregarium, which

lived more than 300 million years ago. Those studies had claimed to have resolved a decades-old paleontological mystery about the identity of the Tully monster. Rather than it being a worm or a mollusk, as previous studies had suggested, the Tully monster was, according to the new studies, a vertebrate, probably related to a type of jawless fish called a lamprey. But that claim rubbed Sallan the wrong way. “This animal doesn't fit easy classification because it’s so weird,” says Sallan “It has these eyes that are on stalks and it has this pincer at the end of a long proboscis and there's even disagreement about which way is up. But the last thing that the Tully monster could be is a fish.” Together with colleagues, Sallan dove into the Tully monster debate with a publication in the journal Palaeontology. While the authors of one of the earlier studies determined that they could identify internal organs characteristic of vertebrates from Tully monster fossils, Sallan and colleagues noted that these conclusions are based on a misunderstanding of how fossils in the region are preserved.

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Carnegie Museum

Two fish from the Mississippian, post-extinction, immortalized in a fighting pose.

“In the marine rocks [where the Tully monster specimens were found], you just see soft tissues; you don’t see much internal structure preserved,” Sallan says. The other previously published study examined the organisms’ eyes with a scanning electron microscope, reporting the presence of complex structures akin to those of vertebrates. Yet species besides vertebrates, such as arthropods and cephalopods like octopuses, also have complex eyes, Sallan says. What’s more, the team noted that none of the more than 1,000 Tully specimens examined appeared to possess structures that are believed to be universal in aquatic vertebrates, notably otic capsules, components of the ear that allow animals to balance, and a lateral line, a sensory structure that enables fishes to orient themselves in space. “You would expect at least a handful of the specimens to have preserved these structures,” Sallan says. “Not only does this creature have things that should not be preserved in vertebrates, it doesn’t have things that absolutely should be preserved.” The researchers said that an improper classification of such an unusual species has ripple effects on the larger field of evolution.

“Having this kind of misassignment really affects our understanding of vertebrate evolution and vertebrate diversity at this given time,” Sallan says. “If you’re going to make extraordinary claims, you need extraordinary evidence.”

Past Is Prologue Sallan is hoping to continue unearthing her own extraordinary evidence, both by looking closely at individual fossils, and also by assessing global and long-term trends with large sets of fossil data. She says it’s not a huge leap to draw conclusions about how creatures may respond to ecosystem changes, from overfishing to habitat destruction to climate change to invasive species, based on how they responded to similar changes multiple times over the last hundreds of millions of years. “Of course today we have a lot of anthropomorphic pressures that creatures didn’t face in prehistoric times,” Sallan says. “But what we learn from the fossil record may help us predict what biodiversity will look like in the future.”

OMNIA

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The Past, Present, and Future of Human Migration By Abigail Meisel Illustrations by Chris Gash

OMNIA

isplacement. Poverty. Persecution. Economic opportunity. These are some of the many reasons that people migrate to countries thousands of miles from their ancestral homelands. In modern history, major demographic transitions have included the influx of immigrants to the U.S. from the mid-1800s to the early 20th century; the flow of humanity at the end of World War II, when tens of millions of people, particularly in Europe, were sundered from their native countries by years of violent conflict; and the movement of more than 17 million Africans within their continent in the 21st century. Today, more than 200 million people—most from Latin America, South Asia, and Africa—are migrants both within and across continents.

Unwelcoming Neighbors

“Migration is now a big part of the global economy and of global society,” says Hans-Peter Kohler, Frederick J. Warren Professor of Demography and a Research Associate in the Population Studies Center.

hen Zuberi studied the response of largely white Washington, D.C. neighborhoods to an influx of migrants, the results surprised him.

“When there is more diversity, whites are less tolerant of those of other races,” Zuberi said. “We used to think exactly the opposite. It made sense that the more diverse a city was, the less segregated it would be. That turns out not to be true.” Zuberi, a demographer whose primary interest is in the African diaspora, published his findings in Sociology of Race and Ethnicity in 2015. Putting the rise of segregation in D.C. into global context, Zuberi

Although migration is a complex story, many Americans and Europeans see it in simplistic terms, according to Tukufu Zuberi, Lasry Family Professor of Race Relations and Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies: There are “natives,” who belong, and “foreigners,” who do not. New cultures, languages, and economic demands of immigrants have roiled Western societies in the past decade, making migration a new locus of international concern. To better understand the mass movement of populations across the globe, Penn social science faculty are interpreting data, analyzing the effect of immigration on sending and receiving countries, and untangling the many complexities of immigration today. Their work offers new perspectives on how mass migration shapes our world.

looks at larger social changes afoot in the U.S. and in Western Europe. On a worldwide level, he explains, dramatic immigration shifts are going to create radical changes in the identity of populations. The influx of nonwhite groups into the U.S. and Europe—particularly the U.S., France, the U.K., and Germany—has whites there “singing an anti-immigrant note.” “Whites have regarded themselves as a nation’s ‘first-class’ citizens, but immigration is increasingly challenging this view as nonwhite communities continue to grow,” Zuberi says. Demographic studies show that the U.S. will become a “minority majority” population in the 21st

century, meaning that nonwhites will comprise the majority of the U.S. population. According to Zuberi, this is just the latest chapter in a long, and often violent, history of demographic shifts on the North American continent. “White Europeans displaced the indigenous peoples here and also brought in a large group of enslaved individuals. And now whites are being displaced,” he said. He sees the recent presidential election as “the reaction of white people to their own demographic demise,” and added, “Race is the problem in America and in the Western world now.”

Melding Into Society

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ichael Jones-Correa, Professor of Political Science, examines the opinions, behavior and policy preferences of Latino immigrants to the U.S. He served as co-principal investigator of the 2006 Latino National Survey, a national state-stratified survey of Latinos in the U.S.

Jones-Correa sees our era as the “end of consensus, both in the U.S. and Europe, that immigration is necessarily a good thing.” Immigration, he feels, was a central value to Western society, and it was a given that letting immigrants in was beneficial for the society and the economy—and that it enabled displaced families to reunify and rebuild their lives. “I think all those principles are, at the very least, being questioned,” Jones-Correa says. He adds that in the U.S. and Europe, “[we] are seeing the rise of these openly anti-immigrant parties that are willing to pay fairly high costs—in the case of the U.K., actually pulling back out of the EU—in order to, as they would put it, regain control of their borders.” More recently, he has been looking at “immigrants in the suburbs, specifically how suburban native-born Americans respond to immigration,” he says, and at

relations among immigrants and the U.S.-born in Philadelphia and Atlanta. Looking at individual communities can give a bigger picture of the relationships among white and African Americans and migrant groups. A lack of contact among individuals in neighborhoods and workplaces, for example, can lower U.S.-born residents’ tolerance for migrants and lead to support for policies like those hardening the border, restricting immigration into the U.S. Yet, most Americans do not realize that there has been a net-zero flow of undocumented migration across the U.S. border from Mexico since 2008. And half of all those who are in the U.S. illegally are here because of visa overstays, not because they cross the border without papers. “A lot of what building a physical wall would do is already accomplished,” says Jones-Correa. He adds that much of the border is already heavily fenced, except in the desert and mountains. This is where people cross over—and where the building of a wall would be, architecturally, a near impossibility.

“Addressing the situation of undocumented workers in ways other than deportation is a policy imperative not just for the undocumented workers themselves, but also for the United States, and the workers’ receiving communities.”

“Crimmigation”

he path to deportation can begin with a minor legal infraction. This is because Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) relies on criminal justice agencies, such police and sheriff’s departments, to identify immigrants for deportation, no matter how minor the crime.

tion enforcement system although they do not technically enforce immigration laws.

“Mundane violations, such as fishing without a license, running a stop sign while riding a bike, and driving with a broken taillight, have all resulted in undocumented immigrants’ arrest by local police and subsequent removal by federal authorities,” says Amada Armenta, Assistant Professor of Sociology.

In her book, she focuses on the immigrant community in Nashville, Tennessee’s Davidson County. Between 2007 and 2012, the Davidson County Sheriff’s Office participated in an experimental immigration enforcement program called 287(g), which empowered the agency to enforce immigration laws. The sheriff’s employees became de facto immigration officers, screening arrestees for immigration violations. The result? Over 10,000 immigrants were identified for deportation by local

In her forthcoming book, Protect, Serve, and Deport: The Rise of Policing as Immigration Enforcement, Armenta analyzes how local police are pivotal actors in the immigra-

“We call this the ‘crimmigration system’ because it’s a blurring of the line between law enforcement and immigration enforcement,” Armenta says.

authorities. The U.S. government scaled back the program in 2012 because it was deemed ineffective in identifying dangerous criminals for deportation. “President Trump wants this program not only reinstated but expanded,” Armenta says. The problem, in her view, is that the broadening of police powers to include deportation erodes the trust between police and the community they serve. “I study how Latino immigrants perceive safety, and if they feel comfortable reporting crimes of victimization,” she says. “It’s important for the community to feel that they trust the police and vice versa.”

A Bimodal Trend

The Other One Percent

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he image of the immigrant as a poor person from Mexico who lacks education stands in direct contrast to the reality of the second-largest group of immigrants to the U.S.: Asian Indians. The most educated and highest-income immigrants to the U.S., they began entering the country in number following the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act (also known as the Hart-Celler Act).

“Seventy percent of Indian immigrants to the U.S. have professional degrees, in comparison to 20 percent of the American population,” says Devesh Kapur, Professor of Political Science, who is the Madan Lal Sobti Professor for the Study of Contemporary India and serves as Director of the Center for the Advanced Study of India.

immigrants as well as Americans of Indian descent. The book, co-authored with two of Kapur’s colleagues in the field, has been reviewed in such prestigious periodicals as The Economist and The Financial Times. “If the U.S. is going to put a cap on migration into the country, what is the optimal mix of legal immigrants in terms of public policy? Those who are young and skilled and ‘fiscally attractive’? Those who are fleeing persecution and come in seeking asylum or as refugees fleeing wars and conflict? Those who are coming in as family reunification or family sponsorship?” Kapur asks. “These are contentious choices and pose difficult trade-offs—and those won’t be easy conversations,” he says.

In his new book, The Other One Percent: Indians in America, he examines the migratory journey of Indian

milio Parrado, Dorothy Swaine Thomas Professor of Sociology, describes immigration to the U.S. as a “bimodal history.” Immigration was high at the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries, declined during the interwar period, and increased again in recent decades. The bimodal trend presents two different images of the U.S.

Chair of the Department of Sociology, Parrado does research focusing on migration, both within and across countries, as a significant life-course event with diverse implications for the migrants themselves, for their families, and for the sending and receiving areas and countries. “What is it that we look at when we evaluate immigration today?” he asks. “Is it really high, out of control immigration, or is it just back to a more normal level after a decline that ended primarily in the 1980s?” He added, “If we were so successful at incorporating immigrants before, why is Mexican immigration perceived as a burgeoning threat?” There are two critical issues to consider when discussing immigration from Latin America to the U.S., he explains. The first is the flow of immigrants, the number of people coming in and out of the U.S.; the second is what is called the immigrant “stock,” the foreign-born population residing in the U.S. We make a “rigid distinction between immigrants and Americans, and between immigrants and U.S. residents, and that distinction is not as clear as one might think,” Parrado explains.

For example, what is the rightful status of children brought into the U.S. as infants, the “DREAMers,” children who have little connection with Mexico as their homeland? The only difference that separates them from U.S. citizens is place of birth, Parrado says. Moreover, as a group they have been very successful at completing high school, attending college, and securing employment. Deporting them would be not only a terrible outcome for the immigrants themselves, but also a loss of significant human capital for the U.S., Parrado argues. But the problem is not only for DREAMers. “Addressing the situation of undocumented workers in ways other than deportation is a policy imperative not just for the undocumented workers themselves, but also for the U.S. and the workers’ receiving communities,” he says. Parrado claims that the revitalization of local areas and cities depends on a dynamic immigrant population. He calls it “disheartening” to see what is happening to the children of immigrants in the U.S. when they and their families are threatened with deportation. He points out that many of those being forced out of the country are the spouses, parents, and children of U.S. citizens. “Do we really want to tear apart the families of U.S. citizens because we don’t want to regularize the situation of foreign-born workers?” he asks.

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Summer Like No Other Past RealArts@Penn interns share their experiences as the program celebrates its 10th year. By Blake Cole Infographic by Brooke Sietinsons

nternships have become synonymous with today’s education system, whether it’s high schoolers looking to bolster their applications for college or undergraduates hoping to strengthen their post-graduation resumes. Kirby Dixon, for instance, can cite super soaker wars under team-building, while Joe Pinsker can discuss meeting pop stars when it comes to networking. When asked about problem solving, Kevin McMullin can talk about that time he survived an earthquake with Robert De Niro. These are but a few of the experiences of past RealArts@Penn interns, who, after a stringent selection process, dedicate their summers to immersing themselves in their craft. It’s not all fun and games, though; their often rigorous tenures at unique companies provide them the experience they need to launch their careers. “There’s an awful epidemic of exploitative unpaid internships ‘offered’ to our talented students in the arts and culture fields,” says Al Filreis, Kelly Family Professor of English, Director of Kelly Writers House, and Director of the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing. “RealArts is our way of providing an alternative model. We match the right student with the right organization and then, through the generosity of Penn donors, make it a remunerative experience.”

The RealArts team believes that learning the arts will depend on whatever connections a university can help students make to the world beyond the university, helping them to learn where people work in the realm of practice, where business is relevant, and why businesspeople don't always know how to talk to the creative people. “RealArts has provided access to many students over our 10 years in existence,” says R.J. Bernocco, Associate Director for RealArts@Penn. “For many students, this is their first entry into professional arts fields. The program provides an invaluable access to students, helping them understand the inner workings of the industry.” Mingo Reynolds, RealArts@Penn Director, says the program’s vision is to try to help creative kids feel supported and important. “It has grown robust, but it is still a boutique program with a lot of personal attention being paid to making sure that each student and company has an exceptional experience. I have heard from several interns that this was a life-changing experience for them,” she says. We spoke with a handful of past interns about the difference the RealArts internship made in their lives. Learn more about their journeys here.

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Courtesy of Joe Pinsker

Joe Pinsker, C’13, posing alongside Ali Jaffe, C'14, (second from right) and Canadian pop star Carly Rae Jepsen (middle).

The Music Man Joe Pinsker, C’13, had been dreaming of being a music writer for quite a while before he started at Rolling Stone. “Walking into the office on my first day was a treat,” he says. “The best part early on was matching the faces I saw at the desks near mine to the names I knew from the magazine's masthead. That those people would work alongside me, let alone ask for my help with something, was a thrill.” Pinsker first heard about the RealArts internship program in Anthony DeCurtis' nonfiction-writing class. “Even taking Anthony's class and writing music reviews as ‘homework assignments’ felt like an honor,” says Pinsker, who, in high school, founded a music-review website with some of his friends Most of Pinsker’s time at the mag-

azine, he says, was spent doing behind-the-scenes work: transcribing reporters' interviews, doing research on features, fact-checking, and compiling news packets for editors.

“My write-ups were well received, and I ended up having a good freelancing relationship with that editor that I kept up after the internship,” he says.

“I think that most magazine editors are more than happy to outsource this legwork to interns, and these tasks generally get a bad rap,” Pinsker says. “But I found that even the duller-seeming tasks had upsides. The interviews I was transcribing, for instance, were conversations between experienced, skilled journalists and interesting cultural personalities, and eavesdropping on those exchanges definitely taught me things about interviewing that I still use in my current job.”

One of the most memorable experiences, Pinsker says, was the long hallway in the Rolling Stone offices that is plastered with every magazine cover since the late 1960s. “I loved strolling down and looking at cultural icons of the past few decades.”

As part of the job, Pinsker also was able to attend music festivals, and he even convinced an editor to let him cover them for the website.

Reflecting on his time at Rolling Stone, Pinsker adds, “Experiencing what it's like to work at a national publication was a huge deal for me personally, and helped me to land a job as an editor at The Atlantic. RealArts is a great program because it puts Penn's fabulous resources behind showing that there are more creative ways to make a living.”

OMNIA Courtesy of Kirby Dixon

"I had never been to California nor worked at an entertainment network prior to my internship. At the end of the summer, I came back a much more independent woman."

Kirby Dixon, C’13, (middle) and fellow interns visit Laguna Beach.

The Animator As soon as Kirby Dixon, C’13, arrived at Nickelodeon Animation Studios, she knew that she was exactly where she needed to be for an incredible summer of learning and personal exploration. “It is exactly how you would imagine: fun, colorful, and full of life,” she says. “I mean, where else can you walk into a building adorned with ping pong tables, whiffle ball courts, SpongeBob statues, and slime?” Dixon first learned about the RealArts internship program from a friend. She had multiple phone conversations with the studio to gauge her fit. “After applying to and accepting the internship, I had to fly myself out to Los Angeles and find my own housing,” Dixon says. “It was quite a summer of firsts for me. I had never been to California nor worked at an entertainment network prior to my internship. At the end of the summer, I came back a much more independent woman.” Soon, Dixon was at work on properties like Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness, where she helped organize early

versions of the movie. “One of my most memorable experiences during the internship was being able to present an idea that a friend of mine and I had to the then-president of animation and pre-school programming regarding the importance of interactivity in children's programming,” Dixon says. “It was an incredible experience to be able to have that sort of access and open conversation with individuals who were so well-respected at Nickelodeon and within the industry.” Dixon says the internship gave her the confidence to navigate the industry post-internship. “By the end of the summer I found myself becoming much more familiar with how the industry works, the terminologies used within production and entertainment, and how to effectively network within the media landscape. After that summer, I felt significantly more equipped to start a career within the industry post-graduation.”

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The Filmmaker When Kevin McMullin, C’09, first saw an article in The Daily Pennsylvanian announcing the inaugural RealArts program, there was one opportunity that caught his eye: director Jon Avnet's Brooklyn Films.

assisting the film's line producer in organizing the reshoots,” McMullin says. “I helped book actors' travel accommodations, secure props, and got to see first-hand how a real movie is prepped. Jon even invited me on set as a production assistant during the reshoot days, where I ran around helping to ‘lock down’ the set, stopping traffic and relaying to crew when the camera was rolling. It was an absolute blast!”

was alone in my professional pursuit of the arts with only a vague sense of how to form a career path,” he says. “My internship at Brooklyn Films was a true emotional epoch in my life, because it was not only a positive experience that re affirmed my desire to work in entertainment, but it also provided the opportunity to engage with professionals in the industry. I left that summer knowing that it was possible.”

Avnet, C’71, who has directed, written, and produced more than 70 motion pictures, including Black Swan and Fried Green Tomatoes, wasted no time in putting McMullin to work. Principal photography on the film Righteous Kill, starring actors Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, had just wrapped.

McMullin’s interactions with the actors didn’t end there. “I was showing Mr. De Niro to the screening room when the wall started shaking,” he says. “I had yet to see the film, but knew it was a thriller, so assumed the movie just hit a big action sequence with loud sound effects and heavy bass. But the wall kept moving and then someone yelled ‘earthquake!’ So we gathered in the hallway—Robert De Niro and I—and waited out the tremor together. It was surreal.”

McMullin credits the internship and the contacts he made with launching the next stage of his life. After watching a short film McMullin made, Avnet's producer Marsha Oglesby wrote a recommendation letter for McMullin’s application to Columbia University's MFA Film program, from which he graduated in 2013. McMullin now directs television commercials and is prepping his first feature film for production this summer.

“My second day at the internship, it was announced that Jon needed to reshoot a couple scenes, so I began

Before working with Brooklyn Films, McMullin hadn’t known a single person who made a living in the arts. “I

“I had been making films since I was a kid growing up in New Jersey and had actually considered going to film school,” McMullin says. “I ultimately decided to attend Penn instead but was still anxious to find a way into the industry. The problem was I had absolutely no connections and had never even left the East Coast.”

Courtesy of Kevin McMullin

Kevin McMullin, C’09, (middle) behind the camera during filming for his recent short film for HBO, called First Prize.

OMNIA

The Journalist As she was studying for finals one semester, Clare Menzel, C’15, received the RealArts internship announcement email. The first thing that caught her attention was one of the locations: “Whoa. Montana.” The summer before, Menzel, who grew up in a mountain town, had been an intern at POWDER, a ski magazine, and the return to the familiar setting fit well. When she first arrived at the Flathead Beacon, it was already deadline time. “I arrived on a Monday and it was just crazy,” she says. “Everyone was running around, sending jobs back and forth in this robust newsroom. It was exactly what I wanted, so I was really, really excited right from the beginning.” Things moved fast for Menzel, who was soon working on her first cover story. “I wrote a profile on a guy who been an animator for Disney for decades,” Menzel says. “His job had included, as he put it, maintaining the spirit of Walt Disney's true work through the company’s commercial products. So I did a profile on his career.”

After her internship was completed, Menzel stayed on as a staff reporter and also worked a contributor to Flathead Living Magazine. “Being a newspaper reporter in a small town was a great experience,” she says. “Going to town hall meetings, listening to what the people there had to say, all these really basic things are the nuts and bolts of reporting. Even though I’m a magazine writer now, my experience with the newspaper is still incredibly helpful. Any time I need to investigate something or go through legal or government documents, I use all of those fine skills I learned at the internship.” The most important take away from that summer? Finding a new home. “When I first moved here, I didn't know anybody, but now I have a whole lovely community. I built a new life here that started with the internship,” Menzel says.

Clare Menzel, C’15, on assignment, sports a safety uniform at a wildland fire camp outside Glacier National Park.

"When I first moved here, I didn't know anybody, but now I have a whole lovely

new life here that started with the internship."

Greg Lindstrom, Flathead Beacon Media Director

community. I built a

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10 BY THE NUMBERS # OF INTERNSHIPS

YEARS OF ReaLARTS@PENN

26 24 22 20 18 16 14 12 10 8 6 4 2 2008

2009

2010

2011

2012

2013

2014

2015

2016

2017

YEARS

122 37

INTERNSHIpS

ORGANIZATIONS •

= # OF YEARS OF PARTICIPATION

LOS ANGELES, CA Broadway Video • Disney Television Animation • Focus Features • Marc Platt Productions • Management 360 •• Nickelodeon Animation Studio •• Original Film •• Di Novi Pictures ••• Grandview ••• 20th Century Fox ••• Tremolo Productions ••• David Stern and Stuart Gibbs ••••••••• Brooklyn Films ••••••••••

5 5

INDustries LOCATIONS

New York, NY The Brain Music • Double Take • Granary Books • The Morgan Library and Museum •• Principato-Young Entertainment • Grand Central Publishing •• Penguin Random House • Women Make Movies •• Downtown Bookworks ••• Pitchfork Media ••• The Jewish Museum ••••• Rolling Stone ••••••• Shore Fire Media ••••••••• MTV Networks •••• Viacom Creative Services ••••••

THEATRE 3% MUSEUMS 11% MUSIC 11% JOURNALISM & PUBLISHING 31% FILM & TELEVISION 44% % OF INTERNSHIPS BY INDUSTRY

PHILADELPHIA, PA Philadelphia Museum of Art ••• Settlement Music School • 1812 Productions ••• Philadelphia Magazine •••••• Philadelphia Inquirer •••••••••

San FRANCISCO, CA McSweeney's •••• San Francisco Museum of Modern Art ••• Small Press Distribution •

KaliSpell, MT Flathead Beacon •••

IN THE CLASSROOM

OMNIA

Brooke Sietinsons

Jed Esty, Vartan Gregorian Professor of English and Department Chair

A MEETING OF MINDS A new course brings together students from divergent disciplines with the hope of finding common ground. By Blake Cole

What's the first thing that comes to mind when you think of a CEO of a Fortune 500 company? How about when you think of a Poet Laureate? Chances are, based on past experience, you hold contrasting views of the two. It’s these types of preconceptions a new course helped dispel. Literature and Business, taught by Vartan Gregorian Professor of English and Department Chair Jed Esty, brought together students from the College of Arts and Sciences and the Wharton School. The course was designed to examine the ways in which the humanities and business intersect in our world today. Through a careful examination of literature that explores representations of corporate and entrepreneurial life from the early-mid-1800s to the present, as well as thoughtful discussions on the emotional, moral, and social life of women and men working in business, students were given the opportunity to expand their definitions of the two divergent academic worlds and career paths. “I taught some specialized seminars— one called Victorian Action Heroes and another called Literature and Dictatorship—and they were starting to draw in students from pre-med, Wharton, engineering, and nursing,” says Esty, whose department has also introduced courses in Literature and Law and Literature and Medicine. “Students were enthusiastic about our developing more courses in English organized around other professions.” Esty—whose brother, a finance professor, has long been a source for kitchen table discussion about the different worlds of the humanities and business education—says the dynamic extends to the social interactions of students on campus. “There's

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a friendly rivalry that exists between Wharton and the College—they mix socially, but there’s a persistent feeling that they're driving towards different goals,” he says. “The cartoon versions of what it means to be an English major or a finance student are exacerbated sometimes by the business versus liberal arts tension at Penn.” English major Mariah Macias, C’17, says it surprised her just how many Wharton students signed up for the class. “We were responsible for reading the first 150 pages of a Dickens novel prior to the first class—which would, in normal circumstances, dissuade non-English majors from continuing with the course,” she says. “But the Wharton students contributed just as much, and with as much insight, as senior English majors.” Esty worked to expose preconceptions early on. “We had a very funny conversation at the outset listing stereotypes about businessmen,” he says. “The very first thing someone brought up was this American Psycho movie version of the businessman, which suggests that there's something depraved happening on Wall Street. In reality, I find that Wharton students often have a very strong sense of social mission, not just associated with their volunteer life, but associated with the idea that being businesspeople is a way of producing social value.”

When the reading arrived at representations of the mid-20th century business person, things got more complicated, Esty says. “Arthur Miller's protagonist in Death of a Salesman—the figure of an aged and frustrated nylon merchant—has evolved in the age of Google, where you have creative young people riding slides down into their pods and lounges. The clichéd, pinstriped American corporate man stereotype is increasingly a part of history.”

Students from the class say its unique dynamic extended to social interactions on campus.

Isaac Nilsson, W’18, says that hearing the English majors’ in-depth analysis of the writings proved valuable. “The Wharton students contributed with a more hands-on perspective,” he says. “Professor Esty is really good at finding a balance between abstract and focused discussions.” The literature and class discussions often led to poignant philosophical debates. “We explored the notion of professional virtue and what it means to be inauthentic in the workplace in order to get what you want,” says Esty. “The Dickensian story of Scrooge, for instance, highlights a prototypical myth of the businessman, which is that money eats away at your soul and that love of money displaces love of humanity.” Macias says that she and her classmates were aware of each other’s biases and acknowledge that they all approached discussions and materials based on their own experiences and external influences. “My favorite moments in this class were when the majority agreed on one point or belief about the text, and then someone else contradicted them entirely,” she says. Sarah Samuels, C’17, says the dynamic created a unique camaraderie. “By the second week, one of my classmates had even created a class Facebook page,” she says, “where people posted supportive messages, funny memes, or articles related to our reading.” Esty says in the future that he’d like to find new ways to explore the intersection of academic tracks. “We’re now thinking of trying yet another new class, Literature and Code, which might bring computer science and engineering students to our curriculum and into the mix with our majors and other liberal arts types.” Brooke Sietinsons

The literary curriculum for the course followed a narrative journey through the stages in the life of the corporation—from family business to Fortune 500 company—and investigated what it means to be either a part of them, or affected by them. Students started with Dickens’ Dombey and Son, from the mid-19th century, which examines the risks of eroding trust in family business. The class also read Howards End, which represents an early history of the competitive relationship between the professional and managerial classes.

IN THE CLASSROOM

MOVERS & QUAKERS

OMNIA

Alex Schein

Joshua Bennett, Câ&#x20AC;&#x2122;10

JOSHUA BENNETT: THE SOBBING SCHOOL By Alex Schein In October 2016, poet and scholar Joshua Bennett, Câ&#x20AC;&#x2122;10 visited Penn for a poetry reading of his debut collection, The Sobbing School. The collection was a 2015 selection of the National Poetry Series, a literary award program that has identified and supported emerging talent since 1978. While an undergraduate in 2009, Bennett was invited to perform for President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama at the White House Poetry Jam. As a graduating senior, he delivered the student graduation address for the College. Bennett went on to receive a Ph.D. in English from Princeton University in 2015 and is currently a member of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. Here, Bennett shares his thoughts on his craft, as well as his Penn experience.

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Q: You’ve returned to Penn for a reading of your debut poetry collection, The Sobbing School. How does it feel to be back on campus? Part of what excites me about being back is that Penn is, in many ways, where my trajectory as a writer began. It began in English classes with Dr. Salamishah Tillet [Associate Professor of English]. It began with an open mic at the Kelly Writers House. It began as part of The Excelano Project, a spoken-word collective here at Penn. I helped start an undergraduate journal called The Esu Review. And so much of my work, not just as an academic, but as someone that is really committed to organizing around the literary arts, that's committed to a rigorous arts pedagogy and arts education more broadly, comes from my lived experience here at Penn. Q: As a writer, why were you interested in going further into academia? I wanted to go into an English program to study African American literature in part because I found a world there. I found the tools and the critical vocabulary with which I could imagine a radically different world. Before I got to Penn, I went to a predominantly white elite private school in New York called Rye Country Day School. It took me two hours to get to school every day. I would wake up at 5 a.m., take two buses—the 1 bus to the 7 bus to the Metro-North. My whole senior year, every day, I would read Cornel West's Race Matters. That was the first time I had ever even heard the term African American studies, that I heard Black studies, and it made me want to become a professor when I was 17 years old. I knew that Black culture was valuable, beautiful, robust, but I didn't know that there was actually a meta-discipline out there in which I could study this. That I could not just get a degree in it, but could spend years in the archive of people that look like me and people that were trying to build a freer world for me—my folks. Much of this first collection I wrote while I was a grad student. I'm really thankful for Black feminist mentors like Dr. Imani Perry [Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University] who helped make space for me to do whatever made me feel electrified and alive. Being a poet and a scholar were not presented to me as warring ideas. It was important to attend to the sentences in the dissertation in the same way I was

MOVERS & QUAKERS

attending the lines of poetry, and that beauty in a certain kind of aesthetic was actually part of the tradition. Q: What experiences at Penn inspired your trajectory as both an artist and academic? The Spike Lee class my junior year with John Jackson [Richard Perry University Professor of Communication and Anthropology and Dean of the School of Social Policy and Practice] and Salamishah Tillet. Seeing their lively collaboration taught me a lot about collegiality, generosity, and Black sociality in the Academy. Seeing that kind of practice was a way for me to think about collaboration and performance, which I was already very used to from being in a spoken-word collective. I was like, ‘Okay, so there's a way you can bring this into academia as well.’ Also, both Professor Tillet and Professor Jackson are artists. Dr. Jackson's a filmmaker and Dr. Tillet's an organizer and also writes quite beautifully in terms of her non-fiction prose. For me, I realized in my training at Penn that I didn't have to separate the two. That the Africana studies archive I was being exposed to in my classes really fed the poetry. Q: What is the difference between spoken versus and written poetry in terms of the way you approach your writing? Having stakes, whenever I approach the page—that comes from spoken word. In a poetry slam you have three minutes. Why would you get up and say something nobody cares about? I think I really tried to carry that sensibility to the book and to everything I write. I'm using people's time. I know folks have things to do. They have kids to take care of, jobs, or even just have something else they could be giving their mental energies to. So I think the stakes always have to be there for me when I approach the page. Even if it is meant to be read in silence in some ways I want it to sound beautiful when it's given to the air, when it's read aloud. There are poems in the book in particular that are more experimental and sort of live primarily on the page. But I think I could read them and, hopefully, everyone wouldn't fall asleep. That's a spoken-word sensibility through and through. The Sobbing School, by Joshua Bennett, is published by Penguin Books.

STUDENT SPOTLIGHT

OMNIA Courtesy of Jessie Lu

Jessie Lu, C'17, (R) with Grace Kutosi, a health assistant at the clinic in Uganda.

A SUMMER IN UGANDA Jessie Lu, C’17, held a summer 2016 internship working at the Philadelphia-based headquarters of the Foundation for the International Medical Relief of Children (FIMRC). She was assigned to the Bududa district in rural eastern Uganda, where she worked at a non-profit primary care clinic that offers wound care, a lab, a pharmacy, and a maternal and child health ward. The clinic also provides community health educators and runs programs for orphan and vulnerable children and for adults who have tested positive for HIV. Along with her work at the clinic, Lu conducted research for her thesis, supported by a grant from the Penn Program for Democracy, Citizenship, and Constitutionalism. Because the district was rural, she focused on how individuals there understood their relationship with the state through the government-provided health care system.

EMOTIONAL BLUNTING In her senior year, Isabella Auchus, C’17, has already presented research at the annual conference of the Association of Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies (ABCT) that

may help us better understand and differentiate anxiety and depression. Auchus, a psychology major, is a 2017 Penn Arts and Sciences Dean’s Scholar, an honor presented to students who exhibit exceptional academic performance and intellectual promise. Auchus, Olga Oretsky, C’17, and Julia Spandorfer, C’17, worked in Associate Professor Ayelet Ruscio’s lab for a year. Auchus focused on emotional blunting, also known as reduced affect display, a common characteristic of depression. Blunting can show in verbal and non-verbal ways, including hunched shoulders and a soft or monotone voice.

She took an unusual approach: looking at behavioral responses to stress rather than the customary self-reporting. Working in Ruscio’s lab, the students were able to use video recordings of study participants going through the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST). Auchus rated both nonverbal and verbal blunting on a scale of one to five, with one being the most severe and five being little or no blunting. She found that participants who were depressed did show significant verbal blunting during the stressful task, compared to a conservative comparison group of nondepressed participants, which included both anxious individuals and healthy controls. The team, with Auchus as first author, presented the research at the 2016 ABCT conference, a premier conference for clinician scientists.

RAUCOUS IRON-AGE MUSIC HAD A MELLOW SIDE Samuel Holzman, a doctoral student in Art and Archaeology of the Mediterranean World, has discovered that Phrygian artifacts contradict descriptions found in Greek and Roman writing. The Phrygians (“Phryg” is pronounced as in refrigerator) lived in central Turkey from about 1000 B.C. through the Roman period. Plato and Aristotle, among others, wrote of Phrygian music as loud and percussive. The Phrygian capital of Gordion has been extensively excavated by Penn and other schools since 1950. Over the years, they found a number of tortoise shells with holes drilled

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in them. The team believed that the shells were musical instruments, delicately worked and similar to some found in Greece and Italy. Holzman realized that the strings for the instrument didn’t go through the holes in the shells. Instead, the holes were used to attach the shell to a wood frame that functioned similarly to a harp, while the shell acted as the sounding box, creating a lyre. The discovery of lyres suggests a more lyrical, harmonious music than Greek and Roman writers allowed. Holzman has published his findings in the American Journal of Archaeology and, though he’s working on his dissertation on Greek temple architecture, he plans to continue exploring the Phrygian music scene.

WRITING IN DARK TIMES During the spring semester, Writing in Dark Times—a first-time class taught by Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures Simon Richter—caused students to consider why we look back to understand our own times, and how to do it responsibly.

STUDENT SPOTLIGHT Taught entirely in German, the class examined the literary marketplace in Germany from 1933 to 1945, to see how writers allied with the Nazis and those in exile, concentration camps, or hiding behaved and wrote. As part of their studies, students worked with a Penn Libraries special collection of about 1,500 Nazi-era books that were spared destruction after the war through an effort of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, the forerunner to the CIA) and the Library of Congress. This was the first time the collection was focused on as a whole. The class chose books that were displayed in the library on March 16, as part of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures’ series Inglorious Comparisons, which has been designed to look at the merits of comparisons of the U.S. today to the rise of European fascism. Ultimately, the class is studied how these historical comparisons help people to formulate their views and ideas about how to interact with the new government.

Simon Richter, Professor of German, and the students of Writing in Dark Times presented the exhibit “The German Historical Novel of the 1930s” at the Henry C. Lea Library.

Brooke Sietinsons

STUDENT SPOTLIGHT

HOW WE FEED OUR FOOD Nicole Welk-Joerger, a Ph.D. student in the Department of the History and Sociology of Science, was named a 2017 Penn Arts and Sciences Dean’s Scholar for her exceptional academic performance and intellectual promise. Welk-Joerger found that feeding animals started to change at the turn into the 20th century with the advent of agricultural schools and journals, along with federal regulations and funding. Researchers used calorimeters to try to measure what the cows’ bodies were getting out of the feed. She’s now considering intricacies of food production. “One of the things I'm really interested in is these notions of different “healths”—like the health of the environment versus health of the animal versus health of the human versus economic welfare—and how they start to combat one another when new problems arise,” says Welk-Joerger. “I'm interested in mapping this and telling stories about these challenges that people have, these decisions that are made on a daily basis.”

OMNIA

GRAD BEN TALKS HIGHLIGHT STUDENTS’ RESEARCH In March, 21 Penn Arts and Sciences graduate students introduced their research to an audience of undergraduates, faculty, staff, and fellow graduate students in the inaugural edition of the Grad Ben Talks. Students, representing the Humanities, Social Sciences, Natural Sciences, or Professional Master’s and Other Programs, gave 10-minute, TED Talk-style presentations. A panel of judges selected a winner in each category, and audience members used an online polling service to pick an Audience Choice winner. Each winner was awarded $500. The Grad Ben Talks emerged out of a twofold desire: to give these scholars the opportunity to practice describing their specialization to lay audiences in an engaging, comprehensive way, and to remind the larger community about the role such researchers play in the University’s intellectual life. Haley Pilgrim, a Ph.D. candidate in sociology, won both the Social Sciences category and the Audience Choice award with her presentation “Accidentally Passing: The Identity Choices of Phenotypically White Black-White Multiracials.” Pilgrim, who completed 30 interviews with second-generation black-white multiracials, found that “although most of my respondents 'accidentally pass' as white in their daily lives, they reject the identification as white, an identification that scholars suggest would be assumed if given the option.” Courtesy of Nicole Welk-Joerger

Ph.D. student Nicole Welk-Joerger at her parents' dairy farm in Pennsylvania.

To see her and the other Grad Ben Talks presenters, please see OMNIA bonus content on p. 11.

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STUDENT SPOTLIGHT

Lisa Godfrey

2017 DEAN'S SCHOLARS

Penn Arts and Sciences’ 2017 Dean’s Scholars with Eve M. Troutt Powell, Associate Dean for Graduate Studies and Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of History and Africana Studies; Andrew Binns, Interim Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Biology; Steven J. Fluharty, Dean and Thomas S. Gates, Jr. Professor of Psychology, Pharmacology, and Neuroscience; and Nora Lewis, Vice Dean for Professional and Liberal Education (first row; second, third, fourth, and fifth from left).

PARTNERS & PROGRESS

OMNIA

BEN TALKS: IMMIGRATION AND GLOBAL INEQUALITY William Rittenhouse

Penn alumni, friends, and parents gathered at Williams-Sonoma headquarters in San Francisco for the Penn Arts and Sciences Ben Talks program, generously hosted by Penn Arts and Sciences Overseer Laura Alber, C’90, PAR’20 and her husband, Ned Klingelhofer, PAR’20. This year’s program featured three esteemed faculty members, each giving a 10-minute talk exploring the facts behind immigration today, how we got to where we are now, and what may lie ahead.

William Rittenhouse

Tukufu Zuberi, Lasry Family Professor of Race Relations, Sociology, and Africana Studies, delivers his talk The Final Demographic Racial Transition.

< (L-R) Adrienne Tuch, C'89; Bayley Tuch, C'21; and Neil Tuch, C'88.

William Rittenhouse

< (L-R) Ned Klingelhofer, PAR’20; Michael Jones-Correa, Professor of Political Science; Laura Alber, C’90, PAR’20; Steven J. Fluharty, Dean of Penn Arts and Sciences; Tukufu Zuberi, Lasry Family Professor of Race Relations, Sociology, and Africana Studies; and Emilio Parrado, Dorothy Swaine Thomas Professor and Chair of Sociology.

PARTNERS & PROGRESS

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PENN ARTS AND SCIENCES PROFESSIONAL WOMEN’S ALLIANCE: NAVIGATING THE CAREER LABYRINTH Ben Asen

The Penn Arts and Sciences Professional Women’s Alliance (PWA) is led by a group of College alumnae who are distinguished leaders in their professional fields and strong advocates of a liberal arts education. PWA hosts a variety of programs that provide mentorship and career advice for young alumnae and current students. Alumnae gathered at HBO in New York City to hear a dynamic panel discussion exploring the complexity of managing one’s career, rich with diverse perspectives and actionable strategies. < Panelists (L-R) Toan Huynh, C’97; Julie Solomon, C’99; Olivia Gold, C’13; Jean Chatzky, C’86; Amanda Sherwin, C’00; and Sofia Chang, C’91; with PWA Chair Jamie Handwerker, C’83, PAR’19 (third from the right) Ben Asen

Ben Asen

The panel discussion was bookended with time for young alumnae to network with the PWA members. >

60–SECOND SLAM: ALUMNI EDITION College alumni took the stage for a special edition of Penn Arts and Sciences’ 60-Second Slam, sharing how their liberal arts degree has influenced their careers, and the advice they would give their younger selves.

Interested in sharing your minute of advice during Homecoming Weekend? Contact Erinn Carey at erinnc@sas.upenn.edu for more information.

Gates Rhodes

Ariela Cohen, C’13, presents her talk The Intentional but Unplanned Road Ahead. < <

Jeff Solomon, C’88, PAR’17, PAR’20, presents his talk You Were Going to Be an Actor.

INSOMNIA

OMNIA

OFFICE ARTIFACTS DIANA MUTZ

Samuel A. Stouffer Professor of Political Science and Communication

5 4 Brooke Sietinsons

1) ELVIS ALBUM My first book was about how people are influenced by their perceptions of others’ opinions and beliefs. I mentioned this Elvis album in the book, so a friend found a copy of the album for me. Elvis is riffing on “Fifty-Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong,” a 1920s song alluding to the comparatively free and easy social mores in France relative to the U.S. However, I’ve since learned that although there weren’t actually 50 million Frenchmen in the 1920s, there were easily more than 50 million Elvis fans.

INSOMNIA

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2) PIPPIN

3) NEWSPRINT

Pippin is a yellow-naped Amazon parrot. I have had many pets over the years, but never a bird, and never such an intelligent animal. He talks, flies, and shoots baskets. The problem with intelligent animals is that they become bored easily, so Pippin needs to be out and about. My office is perfect. He’s more interesting than I am, so he definitely causes more people to stop by and say hello.

I found this at a garage sale when I was still in graduate school and the price was right. Plus I thought it would look good in the office of a wannabe-scholar studying media and politics. The newsprint is from the 70s, but the block print over it is ironic because if you look carefully it’s really all bad news—unemployment, oil shortages, the same old same old. News has probably always been about problems.

4) ALBUM OF CARDS

5) PENGUIN AND BEAR

The best thing about being a professor is the relationships you develop with students over the years. I realized that I had been at the job long enough that I might lose track of some of these wonderful people if I didn’t do something more systematic, so I started an album of cards and notes. On bad days I re-read them and remember what I love about my job.

The oversized stuffed animals in my office are gifts from my father. The bear was always in his office and I inherited it when he retired. The penguin came later, when I became Director at the Institute for the Study of Citizens and Politics at Penn. Their outfits change depending on the season.

INSOMNIA

OMNIA

THREE QUESTIONS: JUDGING THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FEATURING JAMES ENGLISH John Welsh Centennial Professor of English

James English, John Welsh Centennial Professor of English and Director of the Penn Humanities Forum, chaired the committee that selected the National Book Award winner in fiction last November.

YOU WROTE A BOOK ABOUT BOOK AWARDS. WHY DO THEY MATTER?

Courtesy of James English

Prizes often seem a crude and corrupting gimmick, unworthy of great literature and demeaning of the true literary artist. But for that very reason they make an ideal stage for disputes or scandals about pure versus impure aesthetic values; the relationship between popularity and artistic merit; the proper role of national, religious, sexual, or racial factors in the construction of a literary canon; and so on. I think the most fundamental purpose of prizes is to conjure, through their own scandalous impurity, the vision of a transcendent and impeccable form of literary worth. Of course, as instruments of commerce, promotion, and celebrity, they have also become simply indispensable to the book trade.

WHAT WENT ON IN THE AWARD DELIBERATIONS—HOW DID YOU REACH A DECISION? We were confronted with more than 400 contending books. That was the hardest part, just reading so much so fast and having to make so many high-stakes decisions. Once we arrived at a focused cluster of about 25 contenders, things proceeded surprisingly easily. There were disagreements, but we all understood no book could move forward without consensus support, so we were looking for shared enthusiasms. When it came time to announce a short list, we reached almost

immediate agreement on four of the five, but choosing the last one took a long, long while. I think by that point, however, we were already sensing a convergence on Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad as the eventual winner. It would have been tremendously frustrating without such a talented, thoughtful, and congenial group of judges to work with.

DID THE EXPERIENCE GIVE YOU NEW INSIGHTS ON LITERATURE OR LITERARY PEOPLE? Our panel of five judges included three women. We were all very conscious of the fact that literary awards have long favored male authors. Of the 112 Nobel laureates in literature, only 13 have been women. The National Book Award is less extreme, but women have won only 16 times in its 67-year history—three out of the last 10. It is a very persistent pattern, where women write most of the literary fiction in the country and constitute the vast majority of its readers, but somehow the works of men are consistently judged to be weightier, more important. It was disconcerting to me, and I think to the other judges, to find ourselves duplicating this tendency. The authors on both our long list and our short list were majority male, and in the end we chose a male winner. I’m not saying we chose the wrong book. But the experience made me realize how difficult it is when you judge a prize not to fall into patterns laid down by other judges in previous years. It made me feel the formidable inertia of the literary value system.

LAST LOOK

Brooke Sietinsons

Physics and Astronomy’s Demo Lab Coordinator Bill Berner demonstrates the effects of a Van de Graaff electrostatic generator to 250 Philadelphia-area high school students during the 20th Annual Physics Demonstration Show at Penn. Each year, Berner—a former high school

physics teacher—cycles through demonstrations of topics including mechanics, light, and waves. This year’s event focused on electricity and magnetism and welcomed almost 1,000 students.

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