Omnia Magazine: Fall/Winter 2020

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The Heart and Soul of America

FA L L / W I N T E R 2 0 2 0

FALL/WINTER The Art of2015 Translation

Prescribing Inequality How COVID-19 is bringing health inequality to the fore.

PAGE 16

34

Pivotal Books on Race

40

The Chem Life

48

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CONTENTS

FEATURES 16 Prescribing Inequality How COVID-19 is bringing health inequality to the fore.

By Blake Cole

24 Lost and Found Translation is an art that allows us to communicate across cultural difference.

16

By Lauren Rebecca Thacker

34 We, the People Rogers Smith, Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Political Science, is searching for the heart and soul of America.

By Jane Carroll

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34

40

48

40 Dialogue, Revisited OMNIA looks back on books from three faculty whose contributions to the conversation on race and social justice have stood the test of time.

By Susan Ahlborn, Blake Cole, Loraine Terrell, and Lauren Rebecca Thacker

48 Agent of Change Madeleine Joullié, Professor of Chemistry, makes molecules and waves, leaving her mark in her specialty, her institution, and the lives of her students.

By Susan Ahlborn

SECTIONS 1

DEAN’S MESSAGE

14 OMNIA 101

60 MOVERS & QUAKERS

2

EDITOR’S NOTE SCHOOL NEWS

32 THE POWER OF PENN ARTS & SCIENCES

62 PARTNERS & PROGRESS

3 8

FINDINGS

54 STUDENT SPOTLIGHT

12 FACULTY OPINION

58 IN THE CLASSROOM

64 INSOMNIA 65 LAST LOOK

DEAN’S MESSAGE

FALL/WINTER 2020

OMNIA is published by the School of Arts & Sciences Office of Advancement EDITORIAL OFFICES School of Arts & Sciences University of Pennsylvania 3600 Market Street, Suite 300 Philadelphia, PA 19104-3284 P: 215-746-1232 F: 215-573-2096 E: omnia-penn@sas.upenn.edu STEVEN J. FLUHARTY Dean, School of Arts & Sciences LORAINE TERRELL Executive Director of Communications LAUREN REBECCA THACKER Director of Advancement Communications BLAKE COLE Editor SUSAN AHLBORN Associate Editor LUSI KLIMENKO Art Director LUSI KLIMENKO ANDREW NEALIS Designers CHANGE OF ADDRESS Alumni: visit QuakerNet, Penn’s online community at quakernet. alumni.upenn.edu. Non-alumni: email 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: Adriana Bellet

In a Changing World

T

his year has been a powerful reminder of an enduring truth: some of the most important events and circumstances in life are beyond our control.

At the start of 2020, no one on campus imagined the disruption that was soon to come. When campus life went virtual in March, the School of Arts & Sciences had to quickly pivot to sustain our mission—beginning with our commitment to our students.

Faculty built on previous innovations and experiments in teaching, such as SAIL classes, where students view lectures online and in-class time is focused on discussion and problem-solving. Motivated by such experiences, an open mind—and of course, by necessity—we have been able to rise to the moment.

We all look forward to a future when our students and faculty are once again able to meet in classrooms, but by working collectively our community has created new ways to teach, learn, and explore in these drastically different times.

The events of the past year have deepened my appreciation of another enduring truth: to navigate a changing world, where we can’t predict what lies ahead, there is no better preparation than a liberal arts education. The focus on skills that can be applied to any situation—skills in thinking, analyzing, and communicating—remain relevant no matter how much the world around us transforms.

It’s an education that enables our graduates to follow not just their chosen path, but paths that they could not have imagined when they came to Penn, decided on their major, or landed their first job.

In my many years at Penn I have seen countless demonstrations of the power of the diverse combinations of skills, knowledge, and understanding that characterize Arts & Sciences undergraduates and alumni. Saachi Datta, C’21 (p. 57), whose path to medicine includes majors in biology and religious studies, has already co-authored a peer-reviewed paper examining how religious beliefs impact patients with neurodegenerative disease. And Glenn Singleton, C’86 (p. 60), has moved from his roots as a communications major to launching Courageous Conversations, a framework for interracial dialogue that he now uses with school districts, state governments, and corporations throughout the U.S. and around the world, to help address one of the defining issues of our time.

In times like this I’m also reminded that the impact of a liberal arts education extends beyond equipping individuals for productive lives. Engagement in music, art, and literature provides inspiration and insight, enriches our lives, and helps us make sense of our most difficult moments. And then there are the impacts on

our communities—local, national, and global. Citizens who are knowledgeable about the world and its complexities; who are attuned to moral, ethical, and social issues; and who are prepared to exercise intellectual leadership—all qualities that are cultivated through study in the liberal arts—offer what I think most of us can agree are essential ingredients for a healthy society. The understanding that comes from the liberal arts provides a context to address issues ranging from political polarization and the historical roots of racial injustice to working together as a society to cure disease and end pandemics.

This is the path that I believe will make us truly able to respond to the challenges of a changing world.

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

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EDITOR’S NOTE

Looking Back— and Moving Forward

A

s we near the end of a tumultuous 2020, we recognize students and faculty for all the new and creative ways they’ve adapted to virtual learning, teaching, research, and outreach. Whether it’s the 30-year-old Center for Africana Studies Summer Institute for Pre-Freshmen fostering a sense of community through online discussions and virtual game nights (p. 54), or an undergraduate working as a virtual camp counselor creating digital spaces for young community members to talk about civic engagement (p. 56), Arts & Sciences students and faculty have remained committed to making a difference.

Our faculty have long been leaders in research on racial injustice and inequality.

In “Prescribing Inequality” (p. 16), we speak with a collection of faculty experts about the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on racial minorities and low-income workers; the health effects of policy, race, and socioeconomic status on COVID-19 exposure and prognosis; and the historical roots of racialized medicine. And in “Dialogue, Revisited” (p. 40), we look back on books from three faculty whose contributions to the conversation on race and social justice have stood the test of time, on topics from governmental response to protests to reproductive justice to a critique of how racial statistics are used in the social sciences.

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It is also an election year, and to this end, we take a journey with a political volunteer turned teacher and scholar who is “searching for the heart of America” in “We, the People” (p. 34), and examine how political rhetoric informs civic participation (p. 10). Another career retrospective, “Agent of Change” (p. 48), highlights a chemist who has left an indelible mark on her specialty, her institution, and in the lives of her students, and in “Lost and Found” (p. 24), we explore translation as an art that allows us to communicate across cultural difference.

Our scholars continue to contribute to research and discourse on COVID-19. Hubs of critical thinking, like the Undergraduate Data Science Hangout, see faculty and students connecting on topics like using mathematical models to simulate the spread of COVID19 on college campuses (p. 58).

And research on how new social norms are developing (p. 9) fosters knowledge on how the pandemic is impacting society.

We recognize that the year ahead will bring more changes, but we are as confident as ever that Penn Arts & Sciences is well-positioned to advance understanding on the challenges of our time.

Blake Cole, Editor

As you read through the features, keep an eye out for the icons below. They represent the key priorities of the Power of Penn Arts & Sciences Campaign.

POWER.SAS.UPENN.EDU

Advancing Faculty Distinction

Realizing Student Potential

Driving Global Change

Creating a Sustainable Planet

Harnessing the Power of the Brain

Exploring the Human Experience

FALL/WINTER 2020

$40 Million Department of Energy Grant Funds Collaborative Research on Solar Technology The Center for Hybrid Approaches in Solar Energy to Liquid Fuels (CHASE) has been awarded a Department of Energy grant focused on the production of fuels from sunlight. The Vagelos Institute for Energy Science and Technology is one of the six partner institutions that comprise CHASE. The $40 million grant, over five years, will accelerate fundamental research on solar technology in order to meet the increasing needs for clean and renewable energy sources.

Led by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, other CHASE partner institutions include Brookhaven National Laboratory, Emory University, North Carolina State University, and Yale University. The aim of CHASE is to fill gaps in existing knowledge to allow for development of practical Eric Sucar, University Communications

Stephen Meloni, GR’20, in the physical chemistry lab of Jessica Anna, Assistant Professor of Chemistry.

Anna’s lab will be part of the Department of Energy’s recently funded Center for Hybrid Approaches in Solar Energy to Liquid Fuels.

BEN CONNECT

COLLEGE STUDENTS have questions about

career paths and life after Penn Arts & Sciences.

With our new mentorship platform, ALUMNI can be there with answers, advice, and guidance.

Learn more and grow your community at WWW.BENCONNECT.SAS.UPENN.EDU For more information, contact Kathe Archibald, Director of Global Alumni Engagement, at kathea@sas.upenn.edu.

SCHOOL NEWS

artificial photosynthetic systems. Building on previous accomplishments by the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis, the nation’s largest research program dedicated to the development of artificial solar fuels generation, the newly funded research will also blend experiment with theory to help establish new design principles for fuelsfrom-sunlight systems.

“What’s really exciting here is the goal to develop complete systems that take solar energy, CO2, and water all the way to liquid fuels,” says Karen Goldberg, the CHASE institutional coordinator for Penn. “That’s going to involve many different aspects—from materials to capture the light, to stable and reactive catalysts that can work together, to viable ways to attach these catalysts to semiconductor surfaces, and so much more. We will all work on different parts of the process; there are so many people with very different skill sets needed to make this effort successful.” Goldberg is Vagelos Professor in Energy Research and Director of the Vagelos Institute for Energy Science and Technology.

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SCHOOL NEWS

NIH Funds Biology and Medicine Collaboration Junhyong Kim, Chair and Patricia M. Williams Professor of Biology, and Kate O’Neill, Assistant Professor in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology in the Perelman School of Medicine, have been awarded a four-year, $4.5 million Human BioMolecular Atlas Program (HuBMAP) grant. The grant is supported by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the Common Fund of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Kim and O’Neill are leading a multi-disciplinary team to create a comprehensive resource for women’s health by documenting the molecular characteristics of individual cells in the female reproductive system.

Events Go Online As remote work and education continue for many, Penn Arts & Sciences has shifted some of its popular, long-running programs to a virtual format and created some new ones.

60-Second Lecture topics in the fall included a second round of 1.5-Minute Climate Lectures. This series, which seeks to sound the alarm about the climate emergency and share a vision of constructive 4

The pandemic also inspired a brandnew series: Big Ideas for Strange Times, featuring short talks on life’s bigger questions from Penn Arts & Sciences faculty and graduate students. The big ideas ranged from “Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?” to “Why Are We Drawn to the Morbid?”

All these talks—and all Penn Arts & Sciences programming— can be watched online at www.sas.upenn.edu/events.

This grant, along with support from Penn Arts & Sciences, Perelman School of Medicine, and the Center for Research on Reproduction and Women’s Health, will fund creation of the Penn Center for MultiScale Molecular Mapping of the Female Reproductive System.

Courtesy of the Human BioMolecular Atlas Program

In June, following the killing of George Floyd and other incidents of racist violence, a special series, What Happens to a Dream Deferred?

60-Second Lectures on Racial Injustice was launched. The series, whose title was inspired by Langston Hughes’ 1951 poem, “Harlem,” explored this difficult issue from a variety of perspectives. Faculty spotlighted the history and contemporary manifestations of racism in the U.S., Black lives and culture, and the range of factors that contributed to this moment.

and comprehensive response, debuted in September 2019. This year’s topics included the role and limits of the oceans and climate change in the curriculum. And in a second collection of 60-Second Lectures this fall, Social Institutions During Social Distancing, faculty shared their observations on the social institutions that hold us together. Talks touched on economics, disagreement, and life during COVID-19.

“This is a wonderful opportunity demonstrating the unique collaborative strength of Penn,” says Kim. “The project marries the biology department’s expertise in single cell genomics with the incredible clinical research of the OBGYN group, as well as the interdisciplinary expertise of our co-collaborators.”

SCHOOL NEWS

FALL/WINTER 2020

Sara Varney

Wolf Humanities Center 2020–2021 Programming The Wolf Humanities Center, a central hub for interdisciplinary humanities research and public programming, explores “Choice” as its topic for the 2020–2021 academic year.

“The choice to concentrate on choice has already produced a wonderful cohort of scholars with an incredible range of interests and backgrounds who meet weekly—albeit virtually at the moment—to share worksin-progress and discuss our common investment in thinking about how choice shapes our world,” says Sophia Rosenfeld, Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History and this year’s topic director.

The center’s upcoming public programming initiative complements the academic discussion, engaging artists, novelists, musicians, historians, computer scientists, legal scholars, and more in a range of events, all addressing some aspect of choice and its operation or effects.

Upcoming public events include “Parent Choices, Language Choice, and Deaf Flourishing,” “Choice in the Time of a Pandemic,” and “Freedom and Choice in Art and Literature.”

Rosenfeld says that choice is often more complex than it may seem. “In all cultures and societies, people make choices,” she explains. “But when, where, and how these choices are made, and who gets to make them, has varied considerably across time and space. Also, whether through informal or legal prohibition, some features of our lives have always been placed outside the realm of choice, and this makes the rules around choice and their implications ripe for analysis from multiple perspectives.”

with many areas of urgent inquiry, including in medicine, law, business, public life, and the sciences.

The Wolf Humanities Center’s goals are to demonstrate how vital the humanities are to the life of the mind and the health of society, and how fundamentally connected they are

To learn more about the center and its annual topics, visit: www.wolfhumanities.upenn.edu /annual-topics.

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SCHOOL NEWS

Faculty Honors

New Faculty Join Penn Arts & Sciences

(L–R) Joan DeJean, Trustee Professor of French; Charles Kane, Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Physics; Christopher Murray, Richard Perry University Professor in Chemistry and Materials Science and Engineering; Barbara Savage, Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought and Professor of Africana Studies; Deborah Thomas, R. Jean Brownlee Term Professor

The following are a few of the recent recognitions and awards received by our faculty.

Joan DeJean, Trustee Professor of French, was made a fellow of the prestigious British Academy for the humanities and social sciences. DeJean’s expertise is in 17th- and 18th-century French literature, with an emphasis on women’s writing, the history of sexuality, the development of the novel, and material culture. Each year, the British Academy elects to its fellowship up to 20 international scholars who have achieved distinction. Past fellows include Winston Churchill and C.S. Lewis.

Charles Kane, Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Physics, was one of three professors to share this year’s FudanZhongzhi Science Award. Kane was honored for his groundbreaking work on topological insulators, which has initiated a new field in condensed matter physics. The FudanZhongzhi Science Award recognizes scientists who make fundamental achievements in the fields of mathematics, physics, and biomedicine.

Christopher Murray, Richard Perry University Professor in Chemistry and Materials Science and Engineering, has been selected as a Citation Laureate for 2020 by Clarivate. This distinction goes to researchers whose work has been deemed “Nobel class” by being among the most influential in their fields. Murray and colleagues at MIT and Seoul National University 6

are being recognized for their research on the “synthesis of nanocrystals with precise attributes for a wide range of applications in physical, biological, and medical systems.”

The Queen’s College at University of Oxford recognized Barbara Savage, Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought and Professor of Africana Studies, with an undergraduate prize named in her honor. The Barbara Savage Prize will be awarded annually to the student with the best thesis in Black history.

Savage was Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at Queen’s in 2018–2019. She teaches 20th-century African American history, the history of American religious and social reform movements, the history of the relationship between media and politics, and Black women’s political and intellectual history.

Deborah Thomas, R. Jean Brownlee Term Professor, received the 2020 Gender Equity Award from the American Anthropological Association, the world’s largest scholarly and professional organization of anthropologists. In addition to honoring scholars who work against discrimination against women in anthropology, this award celebrates feminist scholars working to raise awareness of discrimination in anthropology on the grounds of gender presentation of any kind. Thomas’ research interests include transnationalism and diaspora, race and gender, performance and popular culture, and culture and political economy.

Penn Arts & Sciences appointed 20 new members of the faculty for the 2020–2021 academic year.

These include three at the rank of full professor: Jared Farmer, Professor of History; Yoichiro Mori, Calabi-Simons Professor of Mathematics and Biology; and Karen Tani, Seaman Family University Professor.

Other appointments to named professorships are Sonal Khullar, W. Norman Brown Associate Professor; Tyshawn Sorey, Presidential Assistant Professor of Music; and Tariq Thachil, Madan Lal Sobti Associate Professor for the Study of Contemporary India.

Thachil is also Director of the Center for the Advanced Study of India.

Other new faculty are: Michael Arcaro, Assistant Professor of Psychology Abdulhamit Arvas, Assistant Professor of English Martin Claassen, Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy Natacha Diels, Assistant Professor of Music Wayne Gao, Assistant Professor of Economics Joachim Hubmer, Assistant Professor of Economics

SCHOOL NEWS

FALL/WINTER 2020

Kevin He, Assistant Professor of Economics Nicole Holliday, Assistant Professor of Linguistics Arnold Mathijssen, Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy Yumeng Ou, Assistant Professor of Mathematics Xin Sun, Assistant Professor of Mathematics Elly Truit, Associate Professor of History and Sociology of Science Corlett Wood, Assistant Professor of Biology Chenshu Zhou, Assistant Professor of History of Art (January 2021)

Innovative Dual Degree with Penn Vet This fall, Penn Arts & Sciences and Penn Vet launched a new Doctor of Veterinary Medicine (VMD) – Master of Environmental Studies (MES) dualdegree program. This option is designed to prepare multidisciplinary veterinarians to assume leadership roles within the environmental and public health sectors.

The new VMD-MES program provides veterinary students with a deeper understanding of the environmental context of animal population health and reflects the growing recognition of the inextricable link between wildlife, food animal habitats,

and the environment. Contextual environmental factors are often a significant, contributing factor in animal-to-human disease transmission. Toxic minerals, chemicals, soil destruction, and climate change can negatively impact landscapes and animal populations.

Yvette Bordeaux, Director of the Professional Masters Programs in Earth and Environmental Science, notes the dual-degree program is the natural next step in the evolution of the OneHealth perspective at Penn. “Vet and Medicine have been working together for a while. Now we are bringing in

the environmental piece. I’m very excited about the program, and students are, too.”

Yvette Bordeaux, Director, Professional Masters Programs in Earth and Environmental Science

Bill Ray/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images

FINDINGS

Looking to Corporations to Learn About Religion Jolyon Thomas, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, investigates the interdependent roles of corporations and religion.

BY

KATELYN SILVA

n 2018, Jolyon Thomas and a colleague visited the Panasonic Museum in Osaka, Japan. Upon arrival, they were greeted by a larger-than-life statue of the founder of the company, Kōnosuke Matsushita, followed by a Japanese character in enormous font that read “michi,” which translates to “the way.”

“As scholars of religion, that character was really striking because that's pretty much the primary metaphor that's used for describing religious practices in English. For the longest time, Buddhism was described as the Buddhist path, and the Japanese tradition called Shinto is literally the ‘Way of the Gods,’” explains Thomas.

Inspired by this moment, Thomas, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, recently co-authored an article in 8

the Journal of the American Academy of Religion titled, “Why Scholars of Religion Must Investigate the Corporate Form.” The authors look to genealogies of Japanese corporations like that of Panasonic, a multinational electronics company with more than 100 years of history, to highlight how these companies generate missions, families, individuals, and publics— similar to religions. Alongside Thomas, the authors are Levi McLaughlin of North Carolina State University, Aike P. Rots of the University of Oslo, and Chika Watanabe of the University of Manchester.

The Panasonic Museum is set up with multiple stations that depict a moment in Matsushita’s life alongside a photo and a small piece of paper for visitors to take with them. In their article, Thomas and co-authors

describe the journey through the museum as “a pilgrimage” and the papers as “talismans.”

“The takeaway papers look almost exactly like talismans that you get at Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines. The papers have an aphorism on them, which is a quote from Matsushita’s writings,” says Thomas. “There is a functional similarity with religion where you're getting these words of wisdom from this profound figure who is clearly depicted as a leader who utterly changed the world.”

In fact, Matsushita’s guides on how people should engage in business etiquette, train new employees, and so forth have been borrowed and reproduced by other corporations.

Thomas adds, “It’s not an overstatement to say that his vision for what corporations do for society has become

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adopted and understood by Japanese as being normative.

Like this is what corporations are supposed to do.”

Like many religions, corporations demand a great deal from human bodies.

An extreme example of this in Japanese society is the phenomenon called karoshi, which is death from overwork.

“Any collective enterprise depends on multiple human bodies gathering together in pursuit of a shared agenda.

And usually when that happens, the collective ends up superseding the needs of the individuals,” says Thomas, who is working on a book on the topic of religion in public schooling in Japan and the U.S. Thomas says examples of how the collective is prioritized over the individual include sports teams, where people will exhaust or injure themselves so the team can do well, or armies, where individuals are trained to sacrifice themselves in devotion to abstract ideals, like the nation.

“If you slip up, then the corporation may disavow you,” Thomas adds. He mentions the recent news story of Jerry Falwell, Jr., a leading figure in the evangelical Christian movement, who was asked to resign as head of one of the largest Christian universities in the world due to a personal scandal. “Falwell is expendable from the perspective of the corporation.”

Pictured: Kōnosuke Matsushita, center, founder of Panasonic, in 1964.

FINDINGS

FALL/WINTER 2020

New Social Norms During the Pandemic Cristina Bicchieri, Sascha Jane Patterson Harvie Professor of Social Thought and Comparative Ethics, says expectations fuel behavior modification.

BY

MICHELE BERGER

s COVID-19 spread across the world, it became abundantly clear that different countries were responding differently to the virus. Cristina Bicchieri, Sascha Jane Patterson Harvie Professor of Social Thought and Comparative Ethics, who studies social norms and how they evolve, wanted to understand how a nation’s response had affected individual behaviors.

“We decided to do a study in nine different countries, which included Mexico, Colombia, China, South Korea, Italy, Spain, Germany, the U.K., and the U.S.,” says Bicchieri, also a professor of philosophy, psychology, and legal studies.

Bicchieri and Enrique Fatas, a distinguished fellow in Penn’s Master of Behavioral and Decision Sciences program, which Bicchieri runs, created a survey focused on how COVID-related norms like social distancing and mask-wearing have emerged.

Broadly, they found that changes come about under three conditions, two of which relate to expectations about the actions and beliefs

of relevant others. These “others” aren’t just family, friends, and neighbors, but also people who live in the same city or county, and generally people whose behavior matters to us.

“Public information and the media may change people’s expectations about what others do and what others believe is appropriate to do,” she says.

But new expectations alone aren’t enough; they need to cause people to want to change their behavior.

To test this in the context of COVID, Bicchieri and her team presented vignettes to subjects from all nine countries, varying the expectations of the vignette protagonist, then asked participants the likelihood that person would practice social distancing and stay home.

The researchers found that to motivate people to modify their behavior, it’s first necessary to change their expectations. “This is very important,” Bicchieri says.

“It’s not enough to say that sending a message about what others do or approve of will induce a behavioral change.

We want to be sure that these

social expectations actually push people to behave in a different way.”

But is changing expectations enough? In a public health crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic, Bicchieri adds it’s crucial not to underestimate the importance of trust in science. When people don’t trust the science, they may be tempted to free ride on the behavior of others because they believe their own risk to be low, she says.

safe for me,’” she says. “You have to consider tailoring different messages and changing how you send these messages to different groups.”

She offers several recommendations the research has shown can make normnudging successful: In circumstances like the pandemic, governments shouldn’t downplay science, nor should they send conflicting messages.

Beyond that, they should shape their message for the audience they want to reach.

That speaks to Bicchieri’s final point: In communication, showing what people actually do far outperforms telling what they approve of.

Describe a person who has accepted the lockdown and follows social distancing rules, for example, and most people will infer such a person approves of these behaviors.

That same inference doesn’t happen when someone is simply described as supporting the measures. “Words and deeds are different,” Bicchieri says. “We may approve of something and yet still be tempted not to do it. But if we do something, we tend to approve of it.”

Bicchieri gives the example of young people minimizing their risk of getting COVID19. “A common message in both Italy and the U.S. was, ‘Older people and people with pre-existing conditions are the most vulnerable.’ A lot of young people thought, ‘I’m not old, I don’t have a preexisting disease, therefore it’s

Future work in this realm will consider whether gender, income, or level of instruction matter in eliciting behavior change. “We live in a world so globalized that pandemics will happen more than once,” she says. “We have to be prepared to try to change people’s behaviors. There is a lot of work to be done.”

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FINDINGS

This civic resilience held true with both legal, permanent residents and undocumented residents. “There's a kind of doubling down, with people saying, ‘we're here and we're going to make our voices heard,’” says Jones-Correa.

Presidential Rhetoric and Civic Participation Michael Jones-Correa, President’s Distinguished Professor of Political Science, discusses his book, Holding Fast: Resilience and Civic Engagement Among Latino Immigrants.

BY

KRISTEN DE GROOT

resident Trump’s rhetoric and policy proposals on immigration were front and center in the 2016 presidential election. Michael Jones-Correa, President’s Distinguished Professor of Political Science, wanted to find out how they played into Latino immigrants’ civic behavior. He and James McCann of Purdue University launched a series of ambitious surveys of immigrants’ attitudes before, during, and after Trump’s election. Their findings are laid out in a new book, Holding Fast: Resilience and Civic Engagement Among Latino Immigrants. In it, they describe how, despite the hostile rhetoric, Latino immigrants demonstrated far more civic resilience than withdrawal from political life.

“We were interested in how Latino immigrants learn about politics, especially during a campaign when everyone is getting bombarded by ads and being contacted by campaigns,” 10

says Jones-Correa, also Director of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity, Race, and Immigration. “Immigrants are, too, and so it is a chance for them to learn about politics or to become involved in politics.”

What was distinctive about the 2016 election, according the researchers, is that a candidate was making an anti-immigrant component the center of his platform. “We thought it was going to be a big part of the debate in the campaign, but at that point, nobody really thought Trump would be the candidate or that he would win,” Jones-Correa says.

The researchers began the first wave of the survey in the early fall of 2016. By the time they completed it, Trump was the candidate for the Republican Party. “We still didn’t think he was going to win, but we went ahead and fielded a second survey,” Jones-Correa explains. “Then Trump won, and we knew it was absolutely critical to figure out how

immigrants were reacting to a Trump presidency with a third survey.”

One of the hypotheses in relation to the 2016 election was that immigrants were going underground. “One potential reaction to being threatened by this kind of xenophobic rhetoric is to pull back,” says Jones-Correa, “and the prevailing message in the media was that immigrants were afraid and they were going underground.”

This turned out to not be the case. “If you look at these surveys over this period of time, what we find is a theme of resilience among immigrants,” says Jones-Correa. “They stay engaged and they stay involved. In some respects, they become even more involved over this period of time, particularly when you look at non-electoral politics, things like volunteering and engaging in protests, those kinds of activities actually increased over this period.”

The surveys are particularly relevant now that we are in a new election year, the researchers say, because many of these new immigrants are now voters and, perhaps even more importantly, many of their children are voters.

Together immigrants and their children will make up slightly more than 20 percent of voters in 2020.

“One of the things that we found was, for instance, that if you knew of someone who had been deported or feared that someone you knew what was going to be deported, this made you more likely to be civically engaged,” says Jones-Correa. “We have a group of new political actors who are worried about themselves but are even more worried for people around them.”

Jones-Correa adds that polling data from the 2018 midterms showed that Latino voters turned out at higher-than-expected rates, something that might affect results in key battleground states.

“There's a tendency both among liberals and conservatives to treat immigrants as people who are acted on rather than actors in their own right. The message of this book is that immigrants are significant political actors in their own right, and are only going to be more so.”

FINDINGS

FALL/WINTER 2020

Plato Was Right.

Earth Is Made, on Average, of Cubes.

Earth and Environmental Science’s Douglas Jerolmack and colleagues have found that the ancient Greek philosopher was onto something.

BY

KATHERINE UNGER BAILLIE JORDAN KAY

ILLUSTRATION BY

lato, the Greek philosopher who lived in the 5th century B.C.E., believed that the universe was made of five types of matter: earth, air, fire, water, and cosmos. Each was described with a particular geometry, a “platonic shape.”

For earth, that shape was the cube.

Science has steadily moved beyond Plato’s conjectures, looking instead to the atom as the building block of the universe. Yet Plato seems to have been onto something, researchers have found.

In a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Douglas Jerolmack, Professor of Earth and Environmental Science, and colleagues from Budapest University of Technology and Economics and the University of Debrecen in Hungary use math, geology, and physics to demonstrate that the average shape of rocks on Earth is a cube.

The group’s finding began with geometric models developed by mathematician Gábor Domokos of the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, whose work predicted that natural rocks would fragment into cubic shapes. Domokos pulled two Hungarian theoretical

physicists into the loop: Ferenc Kun, an expert on fragmentation, and János Török, an expert on statistical and computational models. The researchers took their finding to Jerolmack to work together on the geophysical questions; in other words, “How does nature let this happen?”

Part of this understanding is that the components that break out of a formerly solid object must fit together without any gaps, like a dropped dish on the verge of breaking. As it turns out, the only one of the so-called platonic forms—polyhedra with sides of equal length—that fit together without gaps are cubes.

To test whether their mathematical models held true in nature, the team measured a wide variety of rocks, hundreds that they collected and thousands more from previously collected datasets.

No matter whether the rocks had naturally weathered from a large outcropping or been dynamited out by humans, the team found a good fit to the cubic average.

Identifying these patterns in rock may help in predicting phenomenon such as rock fall hazards or the likelihood and location of fluid flows, such as oil or water, in rocks.

Remarkably, they found that the core mathematical conjecture unites geological processes not only on Earth but around the solar system as well.

“Fragmentation is this ubiquitous process that is grinding down planetary materials,” Jerolmack says. “The solar system is littered with ice and rocks that are ceaselessly smashing apart. This work gives us a signature of that process that we’ve never seen before.”

Legend has it that the phrase “Let no one ignorant of geometry enter” was engraved at the door to Plato’s Academy.

For the researchers, finding what appears to be a fundamental rule of nature emerging from millennia-old insights has been an intense but satisfying experience.

“When you pick up a rock in nature, it’s not a perfect cube, but each one is a kind of statistical shadow of a cube,” adds Jerolmack. “It calls to mind Plato’s allegory of the cave. He posited an idealized form that was essential for understanding the universe, but all we see are distorted shadows of that perfect form.”

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FACULTY OPINION

OIL IS NOT FOREVER

By Nikhil Anand Associate Professor of Anthropology Illustration by Sam Chivers 12

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Inveniemus viam aut faciemus “We will find a way or we shall make one.”

- Inscription on the Class of 1893 Gate, University of Pennsylvania n his book, Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More, anthropologist Alexei Yurchak wrote about an interesting puzzle. How was it, he asked, that Soviet citizens could insist that communism was forever in the 1980s, and then, just a few years later, find its collapse totally unsurprising? Moments of transition are often experienced through such fundamental disorientation.

From Soviet communism to the British Empire, the rapid demise of crusty, aging political orders are often both unthinkable and expected.

Today, we may well be staring at the crumbling of a formidable political order that is built on oil.

Of course, for many, this is unthinkable. Over the last century, fossil fuel companies have shown that they are here forever. This is a story they want you to believe. Indeed, the story of their immense power, and the unthinkability of a transition to fossil free energy, are both key to the maintenance of a fossil fuel regime.

Yet, oil companies are more brittle than they appear. Their collapse will be ordinary and unsurprising. At Penn, in Philadelphia, and beyond, there are signs of revolution everywhere.

Fossil Free Penn has been demanding that Penn exercise its moral leadership to care for the futures of its students.

In its occupations of College Hall, and at meetings of the Board of Trustees, students have relentlessly insisted that Penn divest from fossil fuel industries and the willful and catastrophic effects of climate change they produce. Because, as Greta Thunberg points out, “Why should any young person be made to study for a future when no one is doing enough to save that future?”

FACULTY OPINION

The students at Penn are part of a youth movement rising nationally and globally to demand that grown ups act like grown ups to secure their future. Middle-school and high-school students have joined college students at the Sunrise Movement to effectively put climate change, green energy transitions, and climate justice at the center of the national conversation in ways they never have been before.

Students refuse the colonization of their future that fossil fuels present.

Not least because youth are the future consumers, citizens, and voters, others are slowly catching on. Institutional investors—both in universities and beyond—have only now begun to act on the knowledge that fossil fuel industries pose both a threat to the planet and also present significant financial risk (for of course the former entails the latter).

In January of this year, Blackrock Capital, the world’s biggest fund manager, announced it would reduce its exposure to fossil fuel industries.

In May, the University of California became the largest university system to announce that it had fully divested its $126 billion portfolio from fossil fuels, insisting that this was not just an environmental decision, but also a financial one.

In an article published by the Los Angeles Times, Richard Sherman, Chair of the UC Board of Regents’ investments committee, pointed out that “as long-term investors, we believe the university and its stakeholders are much better served by investing in promising opportunities in the alternative energy field rather than gambling on oil and gas.”

Their concerns around the ethical and financial futures of oil have since been validated amidst the hurricanes, pandemics, and fires of this summer. Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, oil futures turned negative for the first time in history.

More generally, stocks of fossil fuel energy companies have dropped by as much as 50 percent since the start of this year.

It is not just that we are beginning to see the end of oil as promising investment.

Oil is not forever also because its aging, toxic infrastructures are falling apart.

Refineries are leaky, dangerous and increasingly expensive to maintain. In Philadelphia, as in Houston, or in the Gulf of Mexico, they present significant dangers to citizens, ecologies, and employees alike.

In June 2019, the Philadelphia Energy Solutions Refining Complex—one of the world’s oldest, operating since 1870— exploded, “sending a bus-sized piece of debris across the Schuylkill river.”

Amidst the fires that burned for hours, the refinery released over 3,000 pounds of hydrogen fluoride, a powerful neurotoxin, that would have injured thousands in the city if the winds were simply blowing in a different direction. For Philadelphia residents and the Penn community it was “a close call,” in the words of a City of Philadelphia report assessing the event.

Both prior to and in the wake of the explosion, organizers at Philly Thrive, a grassroots, community-based organization, have worked around the refinery, insisting on the “Right to Breathe” in fenceline communities. Last year, they successfully demanded that the toxic refinery be permanently closed, and for this city that has built on oil to transition to a green economy.

These and many other examples show how students, activists, and marginalized residents of Philadelphia are working to build futures that challenge the certainties of oil these past decades, and with great effect.

Oil is not forever. Our future demands it be put to rest. And, as members of the Penn community—as its students, parents, teachers, administrators, and alumni—we must find and create ways to make climate justice central to the world that comes next.

Nikhil Anand is Associate Professor of Anthropology and an affiliated researcher at the Penn Program for Environmental Humanities.

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OMNIA 101

Coren Apicella, Associate Professor of Psychology

HUMAN COOPERATION Coren Apicella, Associate Professor of Psychology, discusses how individual and social behavior evolves.

By Blake Cole

Photography by Brooke Sietinsons

For most of us, it can be difficult to understand what is going on at the cutting edge of scholarship. OMNIA 101 offers readers a peek into what faculty do every day in their classrooms, and how they bring their expertise to the next generation.

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hy do we hold doors for strangers and not expect a favor in return? Why do philanthropists make anonymous donations that will impact the lives of strangers? Coren Apicella, Associate Professor of Psychology, says that in order to understand these types of scenarios, we need to examine the different phases of humankind’s unique brand of cooperation.

“Imagine a 100,000-page volume dedicated to the history of Earth—humans would only make their appearance on the very last page,” says Apicella, who has lived among and studied the Hadza in Tanzania, one of the last hunter-gatherer populations in the world.

“It would include a list of assaults that humanity has faced and overcome, and a spectacularly long list of unparalleled achievements and discoveries: the printing press, walking on the Moon, the internet, antibiotics, and more. But this story would not have been possible without cooperation. When we cooperate in the pursuit of shared goals, we can achieve remarkable things that no one individual could ever do on their own.”

Here, Apicella explains how human cooperation has evolved against the backdrop of an exponential rise in population growth and ever-changing social dynamics precipitated by variables like technology.

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What is unique about human cooperation?

Compared to other animals, human cooperation is unique because we cooperate in a diverse range of situations and with a diverse range of individuals. Our cooperation extends beyond our relatives and beyond our friends to include strangers— people that we will never meet and people who will never pay us back. Of course, other animals cooperate, but among social mammals, cooperation tends to be limited to one’s relatives and long-term reciprocating partners. While reciprocity and shared genes can account for many forms of cooperation in nature, they’re inadequate for explaining these unique qualities of human cooperation—that humans help non-kin.

Are there theories about humans’ attitudes towards reciprocity?

Research shows that humans help others without any expectation for repayment.

For a while, scholars evoked “mismatch” explanations to reconcile this human oddity. Mismatch explanations suggest that our psychology is adapted to what life was like for our ancestors, and, in particular, the long period of time that we lived as hunter-gatherers. Proponents of this idea suggest that our mind is adapted for living in small, stable groups of mostly relatives. But now we find ourselves interacting in much larger, more anonymous groups, a change that occurred very recently in evolutionary terms. Natural selection, they say, hasn’t had a chance to catch up. Hence the mismatch: we treat all our encounters as though they are kin or long-term reciprocating partners.

On the face of it, this mismatch explanation seems reasonable until you look at the data on hunter-gatherers. The data shows us that relatedness within hunter-gatherer groups is actually quite low. Individuals aren’t just living with their relatives. And furthermore, groups are not stable. What you find is that residence is remarkably fluid and groups are

OMNIA 101

continuously being reconstituted with new members. These findings suggest that the mismatch explanation is inadequate for explaining our unique psychology for cooperation.

much like a game of dominoes. If I behave generously to you, you are more likely to behave generously to others.

How does one investigate something as complex as the evolution of cooperation?

Over a six-year period, I found that levels of cooperation were similar within each group of Hadza, but varied across the wider population. In other words, there was assortment. Importantly, I found that individuals’ level of cooperativeness changed as they moved from group to group. How cooperative a person was in one year did not predict how cooperative they would be in a future year. Instead, how cooperative someone is was best predicted by how cooperative their current group was. These results support the norm transmission model for the evolution of cooperation.

While there is very little support for the mismatch explanation, it is beneficial to try to understand the evolution of human cooperation in the context in which it evolved. For this reason, my own research is with a population of hunter-gatherers—one of the last such groups in existence. They’re called the Hadza and they’re from Tanzania, and their lifeway more closely approximates the life of our hunter-gatherer ancestors.

In this way, the Hadza can teach us about the behavior of humans further back in time. I measured each individuals’ level of cooperation and I tracked their residence over a six-year period, documenting who they were living with. My goal was to test two additional explanations for the evolution of cooperation: norm transmission and partner choice.

How do the norm transmission and partner choice modes of cooperation differ?

Both solve the problem of cooperation in the same way: they lead to positive assortment, such that cooperators are interacting with other cooperators and thus not being taken advantage of by non-cooperators. In this way, cooperation becomes beneficial, rather than costly.

With partner choice, cooperation is fixed within individuals and cooperators choose to live with other cooperators, excluding those who are uncooperative. However, with norm transmission cooperation is not fixed—it’s changeable within individuals. Instead, cooperation happens because cooperative (or selfish) behavior spreads within groups. It is very

What conclusions have you reached working with the Hadza?

How have developments in technology continued to alter ideas of cooperation?

Cooperation allows us to do things and solve problems that no one individual could do on their own. However, the utility of our cooperative relationships increases dramatically when you factor in our capacity to learn from one another.

In this way, recent technological developments make cooperation much more powerful because we now have a larger and more diverse pool of humans to cooperative with. We can now very efficiently connect with greater numbers of people from all around the world to share information, ideas, tools, and innovations at an unprecedented pace.

For example, scientific research in response to COVID-19 took off. Not only can scientists more readily communicate with each other, but they can share data, protocols, genome sequences and so on, much more easily with online repositories and archives. Even just 10 years ago this type of exchange was not possible. Technology is there to assist us.

The harder part is getting people to cooperate.

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OMNIA

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PRE SCRI

B I N G INEQUALITY How COVID-19 is bringing health inequality to the fore.

By Blake Cole

Illustrations by Adriana Bellet

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ith over 10 million COVID-19 cases and more than 230,000 related deaths in the U.S. as of early November 2020, the pandemic has impacted every facet of daily life. It has also further exposed already dire health outcome inequalities, with rates of diagnoses and death disproportionately affecting racial minorities and low-income workers.

Social scientists at Penn Arts & Sciences who study health outcomes in the U.S. have ideas about what went wrong—and the problems do not start or end with the pandemic. We spoke with faculty who have unique perspectives on critical issues, including the effects of policy, race, and socioeconomic status on COVID-19 exposure and prognosis, mental and physical health in the carceral system, and the historical roots of racialized medicine.

DIFFERENTIAL RISK AND RECOVERY

REGINA BAKER Assistant Professor of Sociology

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hen unexpected dangers arise, how likely are you to come out relatively unscathed?

That is a question Regina Baker’s research on poverty risks and socioeconomic inequality can help to understand. The idea that people in different socioeconomic strata experience disparate outcomes is not a new one, she says, but COVID-19 has shined a light on the issue.

“Some of us have the ability to work remotely and order groceries. But who are the ones who are making that happen? If you’re poor and you lack income, you rely on low-wage jobs to provide for you and your family. That means you’re the one delivering these groceries—you’re the one putting yourself at risk,” says Baker, an assistant professor of sociology. Impoverished segments of the population also face challenges when it comes to precautionary measures, she adds. “If you’re poor and you live in public housing, highly concentrated with people, it’s going to make your ability to social distance a lot harder.”

Threats to wellbeing are compounded by daily stressors that may not seem obvious to those not facing them. “Many of us say we’re stressed because we have to worry about childcare or we have to be at home another day, but that’s very different from being stressed because you’re grieving the loss of somebody else in the neighborhood that 18

has died of COVID,” Baker says. “These stressors can have long-ranging effects on people’s mental health, which is tied to physical health.”

Scenarios like the pandemic, which further stretch resources, also cast a long shadow on future economic outcomes. “It’s already been projected that if the economic trends continue, minorities— particularly Blacks and Latinos—are going to suffer the highest unemployment rates,” says Baker. “As a result of that, poverty is most likely going to rise among those groups, and that is devastating to think about, because huge gaps in wealth exist already.”

Many of us say we’re stressed because we have to worry about childcare or we have to be at home another day, but that’s very different from being stressed because you’re grieving the loss of somebody else in the neighborhood that has died of COVID. These compounding effects are especially hard on future generations and result in what Baker refers to as cumulative disadvantage. “Not everyone can hire a private tutor, and some don’t even have access to reliable internet,” says Baker. “What do things like this do in terms of thinking about the achievement gaps that already exist? Or the disparities we see in testing scores and graduation rates?

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The idea that people of different races experience common diseases differently continues to profoundly and fundamentally shape medicine today.

And what does this mean long term? This means the greater likelihood to experience an accumulation of disadvantage over time, as these factors can impact the ability to secure adequate employment and to build wealth later on in life, and this has implications for inequality.”

COVID-19 outcomes also have regional differences. “It’s not surprising to see an influx of cases in areas in the South that are choosing not to have the same social distancing restrictions in place, and not requiring masks.” Baker says. “The South is worse off in terms of inequality and poverty and the pandemic just exacerbates this, so it makes it even more important for the federal government to step up and do what’s needed in terms of helping minimize these disparate outcomes.”

IT STARTS WITH POLICY

JULIA LYNCH Professor of Political Science

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ften, poor health outcomes are attributed to individual choice. But Julia Lynch, Professor of Political Science, says focusing on people’s health-related choices overlooks the root cause of disparities: inequality by way of government policy.

“What people eat, how much they exercise, whether they smoke or use illicit drugs— these can certainly affect health,” says Lynch, co-director of the Joseph H. Lauder Institute of Management and International

Studies and author of Regimes of Inequality: The Political Economy of Health and Wealth.

“But it’s important to remember that these behaviors are very often constrained by the circumstances that people live and work in, so they’re not really freely chosen.”

These circumstances are often precipitated by governmental policy, Lynch says. “Governments make choices that affect their population’s health, like providing safe drinking water, decent housing, or an adequate education,” she explains.

Lynch cites the regulation of the labor market and the economy—policies that impact labor rights, minimum wages, income taxation, and more— as one of the most important factors in health outcomes, especially during chaotic periods like the pandemic.

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“During the COVID-19 outbreak, we’ve seen that having to go to work when you’re sick is not good for population health,” says Lynch. “But for some, they risk losing their job if they call in sick, due to a lack of worker protections.”

Another policy-informed area of concern is the welfare state, which acts as a safety net for low-income workers. “Welfare is not merely cash transfers to the impoverished,” Lynch says.

“These policies have a direct impact on health because they free up financial resources for families to spend on things that keep them healthy.

If I have government-subsidized housing or childcare, it’s going to be a lot easier for me to afford to eat fresh vegetables and meat and fish, rather than empty calories.”

Focusing on health behaviors very often makes health disparities worse, because the people who are most able to receive counsel ... are the very same people who already have more resources.

Access to health care—often the most hotly debated topic when it comes to improving health outcomes—only accounts for about a quarter of health outcome disparities, Lynch says, but is especially critical for the already-sick. “When affordable, high-quality, timely health care is not available to everyone, people are likely to experience worse health, not because health care prevents illness, necessarily, but because when things in your living or working environment cause you to become sick, you’re going to experience even worse outcomes if you don’t have access to treatment.”

In order to make advances in the fight for equal health outcomes, Lynch stresses that the messaging needs to shift. “Focusing on health behaviors very often makes health disparities worse, because the people who are most able to receive counsel about things like improving diet, or the dangers of smoking, are the very same people who already have more resources,” she says.

“We need to reduce health inequalities by reducing

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social inequality more broadly, rather than by talking about it just in terms of ways to improve health among some population groups.”

HEALTH IN—AND AFTER—PRISON

JASON SCHNITTKER Professor of Sociology

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ccording to the COVID Prison Project, run by a group of interdisciplinary, public health scientists, as of October 30, 2020, there have been 164,096 COVID19 cases among people incarcerated in prisons, 1,297 of whom have died. In addition, 33,417 cases have been reported among staff working in prisons, resulting in 73 deaths.

“The COVID situation is new and different, but infectious disease in prisons has long been a concern, whether it’s tuberculosis or HIV,” says Jason Schnittker, Professor of Sociology, who studies health outcomes in prisons, including the impact of infectious disease, depression, and PTSD, during and after incarceration. “Part of the issue is overcrowding, but even in less-crowded prisons you have lots of vulnerable people living in close quarters with limited health care resources and lots of comorbidities.”

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Some prisons try to make sure inmates continue on their medications after they’re released.

But these are not national programs, so there’s really no uniform policy.

The dangers of contagions in prisons are twofold—not only are the inmates at high risk while incarcerated, but if released, the risk to themselves and others is heavily impacted by whether they receive any transitional services.

“With inmates who are HIV positive, some prisons try to make sure inmates continue on their medications after they're released,” says Schnittker. “But these are not national programs, so there's really no uniform policy.”

According to the Pew Research Center, the Black imprisonment rate at the end of 2018 was nearly twice the rate among Hispanics and more than five times the rate among whites.

This disproportionate rate of incarceration translates to a disproportionate exposure to risks, whether the culprit is an infectious disease like COVID19, or myriad mental health conditions, which can become chronic and affect inmates for the rest of their lives.

“Many inmates who suffer with mental health conditions find it very difficult to reintegrate into society,” says Schnittker.

“Carrying a record of incarceration can make their mental

health trajectories even worse.”

And once released from prison, ex-inmates are faced with a health care system he says still has a long way to go in regards to equality.

“There have been a lot of adjustments in recent years to eliminate treatment disparities, and to, for instance, educate physicians about implicit biases,” he says. “But the fact remains that Black patients receive lower-quality care than white patients for some types of treatments, and that a highincome person is going to have a different experience than a low-income person.”

BIASED SCIENCE

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

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hat does race mean, anyway?

It’s a question that has been central in the career of 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.

“The biological concept of race was invented as a way to support, justify, and manage racism as a way of governing society,” says Roberts, who is also the

director of the Penn Program on Race, Science, and Society and author of numerous books, including Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century and Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty [see p. 44]. “If we go back to the 1600s, we see the convergence of scientific concepts of race and the desire of Europeans to dominate other people.”

This outmoded framework continues to impact a host of health outcomes, including those related to COVID-19, Roberts says. “A recent article showed that Black patients in New Orleans suffering from the virus were more likely than white patients to be sent to die at home or in hospice care without adequate treatment at the hospital,” she says. Instead of addressing the structural racism that causes health disparities, many scientists and policy makers point to false concepts of innate racial differences, Roberts adds. “The idea that people of different races experience common diseases differently continues to profoundly and fundamentally shape medicine today. Doctors are still taught to notice right away the race of their patients.”

The historical impact of biased medicine can be linked to modern diagnostic instruments that use race as a key variable, Roberts says. She cites glomerular filtration rate, which measures kidney function: “The result of the blood test that determines how well the kidneys are filtering blood is reported differently depending on the patient’s race.

If the patient is Black, the number is automatically adjusted 21

OMNIA

upward. This translates to the Black patient being less likely to be referred to a specialist and less likely to be put on a kidney transplant waiting list.”

Lung-function assessments are similarly biased, Roberts says.

“We can trace this directly back to Samuel Cartwright (a physician trained at Penn’s medical school who was charged by the Medical Association of Louisiana to investigate “the diseases and physical peculiarities of the Negro race”) who held the view that Black people innately had weaker lungs, and therefore had to be forced to work by white people in order to be healthy. And today there are still some instruments that measure lung capacity that have an adjustment for race,” says Roberts.

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The idea that people of different races experience common diseases differently continues to profoundly and fundamentally shape medicine today.

Roberts also cites a report on the National Football League’s concussion settlement practices. “The Black players have to show greater damage to their brains than white players to qualify for dementia claims because the algorithm has a built-in assumption that the Black players entered football with lower-functioning brains,” she says.

Race-based medicine has also spilled over into the pharmaceutical industry, Roberts says. “Not only are many pharmaceuticals prescribed according to race, but the Food and Drug Administration has even approved a race-specific drug for heart failure that was labeled for African-American

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patients based on a theory that Black patients’ physiology is different from other patients.”

Roberts also says that one of the primary ways the U.S. continues to produce unequal health outcomes is by turning health problems into crimes. “One of the most striking examples of this is the government’s response to drug use during pregnancy at the end of the 1980s during the so-called crack epidemic,” she says. “Instead of treating it as an important public health problem that required public health measures, it was treated as a crime, and hundreds of Black women were arrested and incarcerated.”

Universal health care would go a long way toward improving COVID-19 and other health outcomes in the U.S., she says, but the nation needs to simultaneously deal with a host of other social justice issues—and one in particular. “We need to start by abolishing the idea that human beings are naturally divided into races.”

UNEQUAL FOOTING

COURTNEY BOEN Assistant Professor of Sociology

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ourtney Boen, Assistant Professor of Sociology, takes a comprehensive approach to researching health outcomes, breaking down a problem into its component parts. Take her research on inequality’s effect on aging. “Research has shown that institutions in the U.S., including the health care system, differentially treat people based on factors like race, ethnicity, immigration

status, and language. All of this serves to generate inequalities in the exposure to health risks, but also the severity of health conditions, and eventually, the differential risks of death and survival, as social inequalities lead to an acceleration in physiological aging among socially marginalized groups.”

There’s nothing natural or inevitable about these racial disparities. These are entirely socially determined.

Her research on aging provides a unique lens for examining COVID-19 outcomes. “Differential risk of exposure is stratified along key dimensions of inequality, including factors like who's an essential worker, who's able to stay home, who has caregiving responsibilities, and who lives in a multi-generational household,” says Boen, whose research has found that there is a higher prevalence of chronic disease and pre-existing health conditions among younger Black individuals compared to younger white individuals because of inequalities in social and economic conditions. And once someone has been infected with the virus, she says these same factors shape how severe the patient’s case is. “There's nothing natural or inevitable about these racial disparities. These are entirely socially determined.”

Centralized data and reporting are critical for developing effective, equitable interventions that can mitigate differential risks during a pandemic. “We've received a lot of mixed messages on behalf

of political leaders on the federal side, and you find governors and public health officials having to scramble to counteract them,” says Boen. “This is going to fracture the response at the state level and that is going to produce vastly different pandemic outcomes in ways that mirror many of the same infectious disease and chronic disease patterns that we've been documenting for decades.”

Looking toward the future when an eventual vaccine is developed, Boen is certain that the rollout will be complicated by social and economic factors. “There's been this widespread conversation happening about holding out for a vaccine, as if a vaccine is going to be some silver bullet that comes in and solves all these problems, but that’s just not the case,” she says. “There are decades of research showing the problems and challenges of widespread vaccine programs, both in terms of distribution and public buy-in.”

Boen says that in order to improve health outcomes, the U.S. needs to reexamine its strategy. “Many countries across the globe have managed to contain COVID using old-school public health practices, but we've made political decisions other countries have not,” she says.

“We have many of the answers in our back pocket. It's a question of whether or not politically we can make them happen.”

Hear directly from featured faculty on In These Times, a podcast that uses COVID-19 as a platform to explore the issues of 2020: www.sas.upenn.edu/in-these-times

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Translation is an art that allows us to communicate across cultural difference.

BY LAUREN REBECCA THACKER • ILLUSTRATIONS BY MARINA MUUN eci n’est pas une pipe. Or, in English: this is not a pipe. René Magritte caused a stir when he painted those words below a highly realistic oil rendering of a pipe in his 1929 painting, La Trahison des Images (The Treachery of Images). The words were meant to provoke. They pointed out a rift between a representation of a thing and the thing itself.

But for speakers of multiple languages, the idea that an object and its verbal representation are distinct from one another is no provocation. To extend Magritte’s point: this is not a pipe, nor ‫מקטרת‬, nor ቧንቧ, nor ‫ﻏلﯿﻮن‬. These words for pipe, in Hebrew, Amharic, and Arabic, respectively, are verbal and written representations of the same thing, but they are different sounds with different cultural connotations and traditions of use. And of course, in cultures without traditions of smoking, like Ancient Greece, there is simply no such word and no such thing.

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Multilingual speakers and writers hold these representations, connotations, traditions, and absences in their heads at once. Nili Gold says this ability is a double-edged sword.

“I think that for people who don’t know other languages, there is some sense of security. If a child only knows ‘table,’ they may think that the table was created as a table—that the word and the thing are the same,” Gold, Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, comments. “When you have more than one language, you know that the signified is disconnected from the signifier. And that it’s all arbitrary. Meaning is arbitrary. But at the same time, knowing multiple languages gives you some sense of empathy, because you know that there are other ways of saying things and of looking at things.”

Because of the varied, culturally dependent ways of signifying meaning, people who want to translate a text from one language recognize that they cannot create an exact analog of the original.

There can be a sense of loss in that recognition. Huda Fakhreddine, Associate Professor of Near Eastern Languages and

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Geordie Wood

OMNIA Civilizations, puts it like this: “Translation places you face-to-face with the feeling that what you really set out to say is not going to be said. You really inhabit the loss, and you have to reconcile with that and channel it into making the translation more urgent.”

Emily Wilson, College for Women Class of 1963 Term Professor in the Humanities, expands on the power and danger of loss, joking that, “There can be a tendency for translators of ancient texts to fall into thinking like, ‘I feel so intense in the sense of loss. I feel that English is somehow inferior. So, I’m going to write a weird kind of English that will somehow make me feel better about the fact that this isn’t Greek.’”

“I did a translation of Seneca’s tragedies in 2010, but nobody cared about that,” Wilson says with a laugh. She’s currently at work on a translation of Homer’s other epic, The Iliad.

Translation places you face-to-face with the feeling that what you really set out to say is not going to be said.

“I don’t want my translations to be guided only by my sense of loss,” she says. “I want to acknowledge that I’m doing something different with the tools that I have. I want to celebrate the English language.”

But the Odyssey had been translated into English many times before Wilson took it on. So why did she decide to spend five years translating 12,110 lines of Ancient Greek into English? Well, for starters, she was asked. An editor she’d worked with in the past expressed an interest in a new translation, and then Wilson had some thinking to do.

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Geordie Wood

Wilson’s 2017 translation of Homer’s Odyssey was celebrated for not being in weird English. The colloquial, modern version earned Wilson recognition as a 2019 MacArthur Fellow and a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow and has brought the ancient epic new attention.

“I don’t think we need endless retranslations,” she says. “So, I read over existing translations and then tried to meditate on what doesn’t get across. I asked myself, ‘Is there anything that I want to talk about when teaching the Odyssey that I have a hard time doing with the translations that are there?’ I decided that yes, there was something new to say.”

Wilson’s new approach resonated. When her translation was published in 2017, it was met with fanfare and acclaim from scholarly and popular publications alike, with The New York Times Magazine declaring in a feature, “The classicist Emily Wilson has given Homer’s epic a radically contemporary voice.” The Guardian called it a “cultural revelation” sure to “change how the poem is read in English.” Much ado was made about the fact that Wilson was the first woman to publish a complete English translation, but beyond that, critics celebrated her meter and structure: 12,110 lines of iambic pentameter for Homer’s 12,110 lines of dactylic hexameter. And then there are her spare, economical word choices, calling Odysseus “a complicated man” in the poem’s opener, while previous translations opted for descriptions like “the cunning hero” or “a man of twists and turns.” Later, she writes that “Athena, with her gray eyes glinting, gave / thoughtful Penelope a new idea,” while other translations are more fanciful, writing, “And now the Grey-eyed-One put into the heart / Of Penelope, Icarius’ wise daughter, / A notion.”

Emily Wilson, College for Women Class of 1963 Term Professor in the Humanities, and her notes on Homer’s Odyssey.

Courtesy of Dagmawi Woubshet

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Eric Sucar, University Communications

Ethiopian literary predecessors, Woubshet says, by using everyday Amharic and exploring queer sexuality, decolonization, and modernity. An English translation will bring attention to the book (once censored in Ethiopia), place the author in the context of international literary movements, and counter the false narratives about homosexuality as a Western import that Woubshet says are peddled by politicians and religious leaders. It also celebrates an author who made an impact on Woubshet’s own life.

Dagmawi Woubshet, Ahuja Family Presidential Associate Professor of English, and his notes on The Seventh Angel.

Wilson’s translation moves quickly and embraces the shifts in tone and narrative point of view that make the poem complex and enjoyable.

“It’s not just Odysseus’s story, but the stories of this whole rich tapestry of characters who live in a hierarchal social world,” she says. “I can show that, but at the same time, I think my translation is probably funnier than other best-selling ones.”

Dagmawi Woubshet, Ahuja Family Presidential Associate Professor of English, has a different set of considerations when he translates from Amharic to English, and vice versa. Woubshet, who emigrated from Ethiopia to the U.S. as a 13-year-old, isn’t

comparing his work to previous translations, because there aren’t any.

“For me, the act of translation is personal of course, but it’s also political and ethical given that it’s rare that we get African languages translated into a European lingua franca,” he says. “Our writers, talented as they are, have not assumed the world stage because they have not been translated into European languages.”

Woubshet’s current project, a translation of Sebhat Gebre Egziabher’s 1966 Amharic novel The Seventh Angel (ሰባተኛው መላክ), will introduce English readers to the work for the first time. The novel breaks away from its

For me, the act of translation is personal of course, but it’s also political and ethical given that it’s rare that we get African languages translated into a European lingua franca.

“I first read the novel in 2009.

It was a gift from a friend.

Reading it, it totally arrested my attention,” Woubshet remembers. “As a queer Ethiopian, I felt corroborated by finding an Amharic text, an African writer who was broaching this issue as early as 1966. I knew then that my first book-length translation would be this novel.”

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Courtesy of Huda Fakhreddine

OMNIA

became a necessary medium.

I took courses in translation studies and it pushed me to think about the politics of representation.”

“There’s this anxiety around representation when it comes to translations from Arabic,” she explains. “Compared to Greek, languages like Arabic and Amharic don’t have a long history of translation.

So, there is a worry about a culture being contorted or distorted in its representation.

This is something translators think about and contend with in our work.”

Courtesy of the Jewish Studies Program

Fakhreddine felt a similar sense of inevitability when it came to her area of study, but translation added a new wrinkle. She grew up in Lebanon, where, she says, a history of colonization means that children are often educated in English or French, with little attention paid to Arabic traditions. It was different for her, because both her father, Jawdat Fakhreddine, and grandfather, Fakhreddine Fakhreddine, were poets writing in Arabic.

Top: Huda Fakhreddine, Associate Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, and her notes on poetry; Bottom: Nili Gold, Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, at a reading for her book, Haifa: City of Steps.

Fahkreddine has introduced her father’s poetry to the English-speaking world.

With Jayson Iwen, she translated his collections Lighthouse for the Drowning (‫ )منارة للغريق‬and, with Roger Allen, The Sky That Denied Me (‫)السماء التي أنكرتني‬.

“Arabic poetry was never something I chose,” Fakhreddine says. “It was always my passion. But coming to this country for graduate school complicated things a little bit, because suddenly translation

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Readers of Arabic translations may be encountering the culture for the first time. In those cases, the translator is not only translating, Fakhreddine says, but inventing a literary tradition and creating a world for the audience.

That’s why she says, the more translations, the better. And if the English can retain an echo of the Arabic? Better still.

“When the English is disrupted, when it’s not as comfortable as it would be outside of the translation, that’s the ideal,” Fakhreddine says. “That’s very difficult to achieve. And we almost always fail at doing it. But the attempt is what makes the translation better.”

For Gold, disruption has been a career-long study.

Born in Israel, she grew up speaking Hebrew to her parents, to neighbors, and at school. But Hebrew was not her parents’ first language, and they maintained a connection to the German of their youth through books and newspapers.

The related Modern Hebrew and Israeli traditions were shaped by writers for whom

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Hebrew was not a first language. In their hands, Hebrew, once the language of scripture and prayers, became the language of novels and poetry. In the 20th century, many prominent Israeli writers grew up speaking other languages and were separated, often violently, from the language and the life they lived in it. But their mother tongue—the language of their parents and childhood —never really left them.

In studying Hebrew and Israeli literature, Gold found power in analyzing the relationship between a writer’s mother tongue and his or her output in an acquired

language. Aided by psychoanalytic theory, Gold shows the impact of the first language a writer spoke and heard—even, she says, in utero—on their eventual writing in another language, in this case, Hebrew.

With poetry, sound is just as essential as semantic meaning.

The novelist Aharon Appelfeld is one such writer.

In 2011, Gold organized a conference in his honor at Penn. Reflecting on his career and conversations with him, Gold says, “Applefeld was a Holocaust survivor. He only learned German until the age of eight, but he described parting from this mother tongue as having a limb cut off.

He said he was always afraid that he would wake up in the

morning having forgotten all the Hebrew that he learned with so much effort, because the language was not his.”

In her classes, Gold demonstrates the persistence of the mother tongue when she teaches Yehuda Amichai, a celebrated Israeli poet who left Germany at the age of twelve. “Amichai makes mistakes in Hebrew that come from his mother tongue,” she explains. “Or he uses syntactical structures that originate in German. And, when Amichai writes about the hard, wet, and cold earth of the spring, this is clearly European earth.

It does not fit the Israeli climate. So, the echoes of

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OMNIA

German are not only linguistic features, but also represent a perception of the world.”

before,” she says. “When I read, I pencil in comments on the page. I like using a pencil. The book is usually marked-up as I read and translate. Then, there’s a very rough draft that’s all over the place on the page.”

Translators must grapple with the fact the language is more than simply meaning.

Woubshet, who is also working on a translation of his friend and former colleague Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon’s English poems into Amharic, says that, “With poetry, sound is just as essential as semantic meaning.”

Attention to sound and layers of meaning results in a process that can be more physical than other types of scholarly writing. “Both the hand and the mouth are very important for me,” Wilson says. “I read the original out loud to myself and then I try to create a draft. I usually write by hand first because then I can cross things out and rewrite it more easily.”

Woubshet completed his draft of The Seventh Angel in a series of notebooks before typing it up. “There’s a lot of erasing, there’s some blank spots for words that I have to look up in a dictionary,” he says. “Academic writing is a different kind of labor.

I don’t want to minimize the hard work it took to translate this book. It was demanding, but it was also a leisurely activity for me.”

Translating Van CliefStefanon’s poems is proving to be more of a challenge, but a challenge that leads to moments of revelation.

“This translation is an act of friendship and love for her poetry,” Woubshet says. “But translating from Amharic into English is easier for me because of my training as a 30

On its journey from handwritten text to published book, a translation has many readers.

Wilson values reading aloud to herself and to colleagues and students to get a feel for the poem’s meter. Fakhreddine often shares drafts back and forth with co-translators, and Woubshet asks colleagues and family to weigh in on rough drafts and word choice. literary scholar. In my head, I have a library of literary texts in the English language.”

He continues, “It was in translating her work with fidelity to sound that I found out new things about Amharic. She has this line that uses the word, ‘whisper.’ If you translate it in the gossipy way, in Amharic it is ሹክሹክታ, shukshukta. It’s an everyday word I have used countless times, but in that translation what I discovered was it was onomatopoeia.

It had never dawned on me.

In that moment, how you revel in that discovery!”

Later this year, Fakhreddine will publish a translation of the work of Salim Barakat, a Kurdish-Syrian poet whose work has never been translated into English. Like Woubshet, Fakhreddine has a library of English-language poets in her head, and she considers how they relate to Barakat and share in a larger poetic tradition. “I ask myself, who do I invite into my process, and can I

create a community for him in English? It all goes back to the intimate process of reading both traditions and being sensitive about the power dynamic between them,” she explains.

Translation becomes a tradition of its own.

Fakhreddine is currently part of a project that aims to retranslate 10 pre-Islamic poems called the Muʻallaqāt, or Hung Poems (‫)المﻌلﻘات‬, so-named because they were supposedly hung on the walls of the Kaaba in Mecca. “I’ve been thinking about how best to create a space for them in English that’s different from the spaces created for them

“Translation,” Fakhreddine says, “becomes a tradition of its own. It’s always important to approach a translation as one attempt among many.”

Gold agrees, saying, “Whenever more than one translation of a poem exists, I use it as a teaching moment. I point out the places where the translators had difficulties or where their translations differ the most from each other. And I tell my students, very often this is where the meaning of the poem lies—in those untranslatable spots.”

Because some things simply cannot be translated.

Woubshet recalls Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s comment that translation is the language of languages.

“Which is to say,” Woubshet explains, “this is how we commune across differences.

Translation opens up an exchange and reveals and revels in the gaps. What is ineffable? Not everything has a one-to-one equivalent, right?

What is ineffable is, I think, just as rich and profound.”

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OMNIA PODCAST

Go beyond the shorthand with OMNIA’s new podcast series, In These Times. What started as a useful tag for the COVID-19 pandemic and shutdowns has expanded to describe worldwide protests and calls for racial justice. The series uses COVID-19 as a platform for a six-episode run in which Penn Arts & Sciences faculty explore the science, social science, and human experiences that have shaped events in 2020. In these times, knowledge is more important than ever.

EPISODE 1 EPISODE 2

Dimensions of the COVID-19 Crisis The COVID-19 pandemic is more than a respiratory illness. In this episode, we talk to experts about contagion, inequality, and science denial.

In Other Times We’ve been here before. In this episode, we talk to experts about past epidemics, how societies fought them, and how they changed life.

Visit WWW.SAS.UPENN.EDU/IN-THESE-TIMES

to learn more and listen.

OMNIA

We have also been pursuing a series of ambitious goals to transcend the frontiers of knowledge in areas that are of vital importance to our world, from Harnessing the Power of the Brain, to Exploring the Human Experience, and Driving Global Change. You can learn more about these areas on our campaign website, at power.sas.upenn.edu.

I want to shine a spotlight on another priority that has only increased in importance since our campaign began: Creating a Sustainable Planet. From my perspective as Dean of the School, in addition to my point of view as a scientist, concerned citizen, parent, grandparent, and Penn Arts & Sciences graduate, I believe that Creating a Sustainable Planet is key to our collective future. And I know that the talent and determination of Penn Arts & Sciences students and faculty will lead to real progress.

Lisa J. Godfrey

Since the launch of the Power of Penn Arts & Sciences Campaign, we have witnessed tremendous energy around our key priorities. This includes advancing the excellence of our faculty, as well as providing resources and programs to ensure that our students have access to a liberal arts education that will help them meet the challenges of the 21st century.

Advancing Faculty Distinction

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

In these pages, you’ll get a look at some important work across the disciplines that is focused on energy, sustainability, and the environment. I celebrate the work that is already being done and I look with anticipation toward the future we can build together.

Steven J. Fluharty

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Realizing Student Potential

Exploring the Human Experience

Creating a Sustainable Planet

Driving Global Change

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CREATING A SUSTAINABLE PLANET The urgent need to revolutionize our thinking about energy can no longer be disputed. Scientific advances, combined with deep understanding of human interactions with the natural world, form the path to sustainable solutions to society’s energy needs.

The Vagelos Laboratory for Energy Science and Technology

Vagelos Integrated Program in Energy Research (VIPER), an undergraduate dual-degree program.

Our plans call for a building that will provide state-of-the-art research space where physical scientists and engineers can work together to develop sustainable energy technologies. In 2019, P. Roy Vagelos, C’50, PAR’90, HON’99, and Diana T. Vagelos, PAR’90, made a $50 million gift to support the construction of the building, and they recently made an additional gift to add another floor for laboratory space, ensuring that our energy research has room to grow.

Penn Program in Environmental Humanities

The new building, a shared facility of Penn Arts & Sciences and Penn Engineering, will be an important space for faculty and students alike. It will provide state-of-the-art research space and homes for two other collaborations: the Vagelos Institute for Energy Science and Technology, a research institute, and the

Collaboration and connection have been part of the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities (PPEH) from the very start. Founded by students and faculty who recognized the power of combining humanistic and scientific knowledge and perspectives, PPEH pursues projects that engage deeply with the lived experiences and concerns of communities in Philadelphia and around the world.

When an oil refinery exploded in South Philadelphia, PPEH students worked with community leaders to collect oral histories from residents who could speak to living in the shadow of the refinery and their hopes for the future. Bethany Wiggin, PPEH Director and Associate

Brooke Sietinsons

South Philadelphia community members and graduate students affiliated with the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities collaborated on walking tours as part of the Futures Beyond Refining project (pre-pandemic photo).

Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures, was even called before the Philadelphia City Council to give expert testimony on the refinery’s history and environmental impact.

When the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic was becoming apparent, PPEH launched COVID x Climate, a collaborative public project concerned with the intersections of the coronavirus and climate change—intersections we are seeing in real time as already-strained communities respond to hurricanes and wildfires.

The Water Center Water is a human right. Penn’s Water Center begins there, and works to foster meaningful, real-world solutions to global water challenges.

Because water crises are inextricably tied to issues of climate change and social inequality, there is no single solution.

Instead, solutions for water systems must prioritize sustainable development and community involvement while engaging scientific and industry experts. The Water Center is unique in its combined focus on industry expertise, scholarly insight, and education. Through fellowships for both water professionals and faculty and student researchers, the center works toward actionable, evidence-based solutions, while a community engagement program promotes STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) education and creates dialogue between Penn and its neighbors in West Philadelphia.

To learn more about any of these initiatives or to support the Power of Penn Arts & Sciences Campaign, email Deb Rhebergen, Associate Vice Dean for Advancement, at drheberg@sas.upenn.edu or visit power.sas.upenn.edu.

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OMNIA

We, the People

Rogers Smith, Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Political Science, is searching for the heart and soul of America.

by Jane Carroll Illustrations by Gracia Lam

Photos courtesy of Rogers Smith, except where noted

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A

s a young man with political ambitions, Rogers Smith wanted to do big things. He never envisioned himself becoming an “academic scribbler.” But today, Smith is the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Political Science and—as the author of eight books and scores of major essays on American political ideology, civil rights, and constitutionalism—quite the scribbler.

He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and the American Philosophical Society.

As a scholar, Smith is perhaps best known for challenging the view that the U.S. is fundamentally, “in its heart and soul,” a liberal democracy. “Everyone accepts the universal principles of human rights and democracy as our true principles,” says Smith.

“Those are powerful American traditions, but I have stressed in my writing that they don’t constitute the essential nature of America. There isn’t an essential nature of America. America is a product of ongoing political contestation and struggle.”

This argument was central to Smith’s most cited work, his 1997 book, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History, which received six best book prizes and was a finalist for the 1998 Pulitzer Prize in History.

It is a somewhat guarded view for someone who calls himself an optimist, but it comes from decades spent examining the country’s policies, laws, and political movements against the backdrop of its founding doctrines.

A POLITICAL SCIENTIST IN THE MAKING Smith spent his teen years as an activist with the Republican party in his hometown of Springfield, Illinois, eventually rising to state chairman of the Illinois Teenage Republican Federation. Springfield is, of course, the birthplace of Abraham Lincoln and the state capital. Politics was in the air.

“Although no one in my family had been involved in politics, my family talked a lot about contemporary issues,” he says.

“My father was a conservative Republican businessman, and so I thought of myself as a conservative Republican, too.”

Smith attended the James Madison College at Michigan State University, which offered a small liberal-arts-college experience within the larger university and had a curriculum focused on political philosophy and history. The classes introduced Smith to a life of ideas. “I found that I actually liked scholarship better than politics,” he says.

Besides, Smith’s youthful foray into politics had left him profoundly disillusioned—both with the corruption that was then rampant in Illinois politics and with what he perceived as increasingly racist attitudes among his fellow GOP activists.

“I had thought of myself as an Abraham Lincoln Republican,” he says. “I thought we were the party of civil rights. I decided I couldn’t be part of the Republican Party anymore. I had to step back and ask myself: What do I really believe in?

What am I really for and why?”

Smith began to immerse himself in constitutional law as a graduate student at Harvard. His dissertation, Liberalism in American Constitutional Law, also the title of his first book, laid out the issues that would concern him throughout his career—questions of citizenship, identity, and political community. “I was interested in finding a way to connect political principle and purpose with American political controversies that were so motivating for me.”

QUESTIONS OF EQUITY AND BELONGING Among the controversies that have motivated Smith is the problem of systemic racism. While some see the election of Barack Obama as evidence that the U.S. has left its racial divisions behind, this summer’s civil unrest in response to the deaths of unarmed Black people at the hands of police has highlighted the fact that racial inequality remains a highly volatile issue in the political landscape.

There isn't an essential nature of America.

America is a product of ongoing political contestation and struggle.

Smith’s 2011 book, Still a House Divided: Race and Politics in Obama’s America (written with Desmond S. King, of the University of Oxford), explores Obama’s legacy. Smith calls Obama’s election a historic event, but perhaps not a world-changing one.

“He is the first and only person of modern African descent to be elected leader of a primarily European-descended country,” says Smith. “Given that the European imperial expansion is ultimately responsible for doctrines of race and racial inequality, his election was a world-historic event, a big breakthrough.”

Ultimately, though, Smith says the Obama administration did not explicitly address racial inequity in any significant way.

“He didn’t think he could afford, politically, to do that.”

Smith has long warned that racial conceptions of American identity could resurge. “A lot of people said that couldn’t happen,” he says. “Unfortunately, it has happened. I don’t take pleasure in that—I’m horrified by it. But I do think I contributed to an understanding of how it could happen and how to address it.”

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OMNIA The election of Donald Trump, W’68, in 2016 brought arguments over American racial identity to the fore. Smith explains, “There is a deep sense on the part of many white Americans, especially white older Americans, that they are losing their country. And they’re not wrong. They are—we are—losing a kind of privileged status that we’ve had through most of U.S. history, the privileged status in which your ideas and interests are considered first and foremost in the operations and policies of every American institution.”

It’s important to make people see that they’re included in, and can partner in, advancing those traditions that represent the better angels of our nature.

Smith argues that any new policy should be assessed in terms of its potential effect, positive or negative, on racial inequities. He and co-author Philip A. Klinkner, of Hamilton College, promoted this idea in their book, The Unsteady March: The Rise and Decline of Racial Equality in America.

Smith envisions this standard being adopted by a “racial reparations policy alliance,” but he is not referring to

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On the national level, a massive infrastructure initiative would be an example of this approach. “Infrastructure broadly defined,” Smith says. “Not just transportation or communication systems, but also energy production, education, health systems. We have deteriorating facilities in many parts of the country in all these areas. This is an enormous burden on the economic future of all Americans.” He says this kind of investment would provide immediate employment opportunities for workers with a range of skill levels.

“You can’t address the inequalities that are part of systemic racism unless you address big systems.”

Smith also stresses that addressing inequality does not mean simply condemning people as racist, but rather responding to the sense of grievance that sometimes drives people to embrace racist conceptions. “It’s important to make people see that they’re included in, and can partner in, advancing those traditions that represent the better angels of our nature,” he says.

IN THE CLASSROOM Smith came to Penn in 2001 after 20 years on the faculty of Yale, where he held a tenured position as the Alfred Cowles Professor of Government and was co-director of the Yale ISPS Center for the Study of Inequality.

At Penn, his favorite course to teach is an undergraduate class called Race, Ethnicity, and American Constitutional Politics. Smith says many students in the class—often reading primary sources for the first time—had not previously been aware of the ways U.S. policies have worked to preserve systems of white supremacy.

“When you read Stephen Douglas writing against Abraham Lincoln, saying, ‘I believe this nation was built by the

Lisa J. Godfrey

He says the fact that voices of underrepresented groups are gaining prominence is unsettling for many people, but he hopes that people can be brought to recognize that a more equitable country would benefit everyone. “If they are citizens of a thriving multiracial democracy with liberty and justice for all,” he says, “that’s better than being perched with a sense of insecurity atop a racial hierarchy that is in many ways unjustly constructed.”

payments to individuals. Instead, he points to innovative efforts to address systemic racism that also advance economic development.

Rogers Smith, Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Political Science

white man for the white man,’ then you begin to understand that these are deeply constitutive features of the American political system,” he says.

As a teacher, Smith is committed to making space in the classroom for varying political views.

“My personal history has made me believe strongly that there are decent, intelligent people all across the political spectrum,” he says. “I have always wanted my classes to be venues where people could speak honestly and comfortably about their views. This goal has become absolutely central to my teaching in recent years as the nation’s political polarization has grown.”

In fact, Smith stopped lecturing in the classroom several years ago to allow more time for discussion, posting lectures online. He wants students to think of his classes as “civic assemblies”

Penn Arts & Sciences

(Clockwise from top left) Smith delivering a 60-Second Lecture on the Penn campus in 2009; Ph.D. graduation from Harvard University, 1981; At Yale in 1985; Illinois State Science Fair, 1967; Marriage to Mary Summers, Senior Fellow, Fox Leadership Program.

in which all voices are welcome and students clarify differences as well as find common ground rather than scoring points against those with opposing views.

A few of Smith’s former students have gone into politics, but he is not looking to train political stars. He gets great satisfaction from the fact that many former students have become professors of law or political science.

Smith’s passion for teaching extends beyond the college campus. During his time at Yale, he worked with the YaleNew Haven Teachers Institute, a partnership with New Haven public schools designed to strengthen public-school teaching through enrichment courses for teachers.

Bringing the partnership model to Penn, Smith co-founded the Teachers Institute of Philadelphia (TIP) in

2006 and recruited Alan Lee, a veteran public-school teacher and social science scholar, as founding director. TIP offers semester-long seminars taught by Penn professors, Smith included, on topics chosen by participating teachers. Smith served as co-director of TIP’s Advisory Council until 2018 and helped to ensure that the Institute could move forward with a comfortable endowment.

PEOPLEHOOD DEFINED Three of Smith’s books contain the word “peoplehood” in the title. These include his most recent work, published in spring 2020, called That Is Not Who We Are: Populism and Peoplehood.

“It is about the competing conceptions of who Americans are and should be as a people,” he says, “and how we can

encourage people to embrace more inclusive, egalitarian conceptions of our common peoplehood.”

Peoplehood refers to a variety of political communities. “We live in an era where nations and nation-states are the dominant form of political community,” says Smith, “but it’s not the exclusive form of political community and it’s not the only historical form of political community.”

Smith’s work made him especially well equipped for one of his most significant achievements at Penn, his role as founder of the Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy—formerly the Penn Program on Democracy, Citizenship, and Constitutionalism.

“When you create a constitutional democracy, you transform the political identity of its members from subjects 37

OMNIA

to citizens,” Smith says. “I suggested the cumbersome name of Democracy, Citizenship, and Constitutionalism because I wanted to make sure that the citizenship themes would be a big part of the program.”

Smith wrote the original funding proposal and directed the program from 2006 to 2017. The Center was renamed in 2017 after a transformative gift from Andrea Mitchell, CW’67, HON’18, and Alan Greenspan, HON’98. The Mitchell Center offers workshops, lectures, guest speakers, fellowships, research grants, an undergraduate research conference, publications, and other activities. “It’s a Penn success story,” says Smith.

Smith also served as chair of the Department of Political Science from 2003 to 2006 and associate dean of Social Sciences from 2014 to 2018. Outside of Penn, he has held leadership positions with the American Political Science Association, including serving as its president, a platform he used to try to make political science more relevant to civic life through the APSA Task Force on New Partnerships. It aimed to bridge the gap between research- and teaching-focused institutions, as well as address ideological polarization, mistrust of civic institutions, and public skepticism of science and expertise.

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THE RIGHTS OF CITIZENS Smith has written extensively about U.S. citizenship law and historical restrictions on citizenship rights, which he says have often been based on race, ethnicity, or gender. As an advocate of less-restrictive immigration policies, he worries about the resurgence of xenophobic rhetoric around immigration and citizenship. His position on the American tradition of birthright citizenship has sparked controversy among his academic peers— he maintains that the Constitution does not address the birthright status of children of unauthorized immigrants, leaving it a matter for Congress to decide. But Smith has been distressed to see anti-immigrant activists use his theories to advance their policies. (His thinking on this issue was fully explored in the November/December 2018 issue of the Pennsylvania Gazette.)

I think human beings are moved by not just our material experiences of the world, but also by our understandings of the world.

And because I believe that, I’ve taken pleasure in both teaching and scholarship.

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There are many historical precedents for anti-immigrant policies such as those promoted by Trump, he points out, including the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, banning entry to Chinese laborers, and the National Origins Act of 1924, which set quotas on immigrants from southern and eastern Europe and excluded Asians. But the difference is mainly in the rhetoric.

“In those days,” says Smith, “people talked openly about the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race, and we don’t often see that kind of explicit language anymore. Other than that, the arguments today are exactly the same: ‘These new immigrants don’t work hard, they won’t assimilate, they are taking our jobs.’ These arguments were originally used by Benjamin Franklin against Germans and Swedes in the mid-1700s.”

Juxtaposed with rising anti-immigrant fervor, there is today an increased urgency toward addressing systemic racism, and Smith says these two forces represent stark differences over conceptions of civic identity. “Right now, the two [presidential] candidates are offering very different visions of American peoplehood, and it is a time of great division, but I want to think it’s also a time of great promise to move forward.”

One of the most basic rights conferred on American citizens—the right to vote—never universally shared, has been a source of conflict since the nation’s founding. Smith traces this to distrust of a distant, centralized government.

“Creating a strong national government in Philadelphia in 1787 was a highly risky thing to do,” he says, “and so the framers reassured the states by putting elections under state control.”

As a result, American voting systems vary from county to county, creating opportunities for disenfranchisement.

Smith calls such a decentralized system extraordinary from a global perspective.

In today’s highly partisan atmosphere, voting rights have become a flash point, with Democrats pushing

to expand participation and Republicans employing tactics such as purging voter rolls and passing restrictive voter-ID laws. With its Shelby County vs. Holder decision in 2013, the Supreme Court sanctioned these Republican efforts.

THINGS CAN GET BETTER As a constitutional scholar, Smith worries about what he sees as a breakdown in our system of checks and balances between co-equal branches of government.

“The most fundamental problem in my view is that Congress has not adjusted to the demands of the modern era for a variety of reasons,” he says. “Power is concentrated in the hands of very few leaders. Congress is in session much less than it used to be—they’re spending time fundraising and campaigning.”

Smith used his role as president of APSA to try to improve government, appointing a bipartisan task force of scholars and thinkers to address congressional reform. The task force included experts, both liberal and conservative, from inside and outside the academy, and delivered a report to Congress in 2019.

The recent rise of nationalism in the U.S. and in Europe has caused some political thinkers to question the future viability of liberal democracy. But here again, Smith is fundamentally an optimist.

“I do think there are prospects for building political movements that bring out the best potential of liberal democracy, and in fact extend it further to provide the benefits of our political, economic, and social institutions more broadly,” he says. “There is no certain outcome, but the pendulum is swinging back in that direction, and it’s an opportunity that people need to seize right now. I see some hope for things to get better, and I plan to keep trying to contribute to that in whatever ways I can.”

Smith’s contributions continue. He is at work on a sequel to Civic Ideals. It examined political struggles over American

Rogers Smith on the 2020 Election Rogers Smith, Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Political Science, was interviewed for this story prior to the presidential election on November 3. At press time, the results of the election were unknown.

For updated content, please visit: web.sas.upenn.edu/discourse. citizenship from the Colonial period through the Progressive era. The new work, Civic Horizons: Pursuing Democratic Citizenship in Modern America, will look at the Progressive era to the present. He and Desmond King are also beginning to formulate another book on racial politics.

Ultimately, Smith is pushing the social sciences to embrace the importance of ideas as opposed to only measuring the material factors that are widely seen as driving forces in political and social life.

“I think that while we clearly are material beings, the way we understand material needs and how they’re properly fulfilled are heavily shaped by our ideas,” he says.

“By minimizing ideas in favor of material interests, the social sciences have diminished our capacity to understand human life and human affairs and politics.

“In my own life,” he continues, “because the ideas I grew up with were challenged by real world experiences, I felt compelled to learn, and that led me to change my ideas. I don’t think I am unique in that regard. I think human beings are moved by not just our material experiences of the world, but also by our understandings of the world. And because I believe that, I’ve taken pleasure in both teaching and scholarship—trying to enrich all our understandings of the world, so far as I can. I feel very fortunate I’ve been able to do it.”

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OMNIA

, e u g o l d e t Dia i s i v Re OMNIA looks back on books from three faculty whose contributions to the conversation on race and social justice have stood the test of time.

SUSAN AHLBORN, BLAKE COLE, LORAINE TERRELL, AND LAUREN REBECCA THACKER ILLUSTRATIONS BY NOA DENMON BY

T

he impact of a book can be measured not only in the beauty of its words or the strength of its arguments, but in the legacy left behind—what it has, and continues, to teach its readers about the issues of the day and lessons for the future. The wave of protests in the U.S. following the killings of unarmed Black men and women, including George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, have put a spotlight on scholarship on race and inequality. As demonstrations in all 50 states and Washington, D.C. have called for action by governments and institutions, we take a look at three books by eminent faculty that have spurred movements and informed cohorts of future experts and activists.

Black Resistance/White Law: A History of Constitutional Racism in America, published in 1971 by Mary Frances Berry, Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought and Professor of History and Africana Studies, was inspired by the

40

protests that followed Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination. The book investigates the government’s power to employ federal forces to quell rebellions and protests.

Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty, published in 1988 by 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, coined the term “reproductive justice” and redefined reproductive rights as being not just about abortion, but the history of racism and the devaluation of Black women. And Thicker Than Blood: How Racial Statistics Lie, published in 2001 by Tukufu Zuberi, Lasry Family Professor of Race Relations and Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies, presents a critique of the concept of racial statistics and asks scholars to question the validity of their use in social science.

Join us for a journey that spans decades, in which we examine the unique context of each book—and its lasting impact.

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OMNIA

Black Resistance/White Law

BY MARY FRANCES BERRY

D

uring protests following the death of George Floyd and other Black Americans in encounters with the police, the government’s use of the National Guard has been a fiercely debated issue. The military clauses of the Constitution, in Article I, Section 8 and Article IV, Section 4 let the federal government suppress insurrections and intervene in domestic disturbances when asked by the states. In her book Black Resistance/White Law: A History of Constitutional Racism in America, Mary Frances Berry argues this power was originally created to crush rebellions by enslaved people and is still most often used to control protests by dissidents, minorities, and the poor.

of enslaved people was still most often used to control protests by minorities and the poor.

Berry, Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought and Professor of History and Africana Studies, was inspired to write Black Resistance by the protests that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968.

She was a Law student at the University of Michigan, and one of her professors asked her what ability the federal government and the President had “to call out the National Guard or do whatever the President wants to do.”

aside her thesis and instead wrote Black Resistance/White Law, her first book in a catalogue that now totals 13.

The book records how often the federal government invoked this power, for incidents ranging from slave rebellions to the Seminole Wars in Florida—where Blacks had joined the indigenous people—to protests in cities during the yellow fever epidemic. “As in every kind of disease,” says Berry, “it seemed to affect poor people and Black people more than other people who were more well off.”

“I realized that I didn’t know the exact answer to the question, and I decided I would find out,” Berry says. She put

She traced these uses of federal force up to the time she was writing, and found that a power created to quell rebellions

At the time, legal scholars didn’t consider the military clauses as among the pro-slavery compromises made by the writers of the Constitution to appease the Southern states. These concessions included the three-fifths compromise, which counted enslaved people as three-fifths of other persons for purposes of representation; the fugitive slave clause, which required enslaved people to be returned to their owners; and the Electoral College, designed to make sure that smaller and less-populous states continued to have power in presidential elections.

I was Black. And this was my first book. I was a voice crying in the wilderness saying, ‘Hey, you should look at this.’

Berry wanted to make the case with her book that suppression of domestic disturbances should be included among these. “The Southerners put it in there because they were concerned about slaves

Scholarship on race and policy is part of a tradition of excellence at Penn Arts & Sciences, where faculty are experts on subjects ranging from the political power of protest to the origins of democracy.

Scholarship by our faculty inform, investigate, and shape critical conversations across the liberal arts. The books, films, and lectures listed here are some of the works by Penn Arts & Sciences faculty that provide insight on the varied ways race influences all aspects of our lives.

Courtesy of Arts & Sciences Magazine; Cheriss May/NurPhoto via Getty Images

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(Above) Mary Frances Berry, Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought and Professor of History and Africana Studies, was arrested several times in 1984 and 1985 in the anti-apartheid cause; (inset) Berry at a speaking engagement in 2018

rebelling, and they thought they might need some help,” she says. “But it’s still there. It gets talked about in every kind of rebellion that takes place,” including this year’s protests in Portland and Seattle.

The book sold well and has influenced a generation of scholars. But it didn’t immediately cause legal scholars to change how they talked about the military clauses. “I was a very junior scholar,” says Berry. “I was Black.

And this was my first book. I was a voice crying in the wilderness saying, ‘Hey, you should look at this.’” They were recognized as pro-slavery compromises only after a white scholar, who already had an established reputation, made the same argument.

Berry went on to write other books and articles that were acknowledged as pioneering, including histories of the Equal Rights Amendment and the ex-slave pension movement. She revised and updated Black Resistance/White Law in 1994.

“When I wrote Black Resistance, I was very, very pessimistic, in part, because MLK had been assassinated and the way that affected me so deeply,” she recounts. “But then I saw that in the 1970s and 1980s and 1990s, in towns and cities and areas all across the country, there were communities who engaged in protests and activities demanding justice on local issues.”

Then, in 2014, she was named a distinguished fellow of the American Society for Legal History, the highest honor of

the society. At the ceremony, says Berry, “somebody got up and read all my stuff and they talked about how important Black Resistance/White Law was as a pioneering work. I thought, wow, I’m almost dead, but that’s okay.”

Asked if she thinks there needs to be a third edition of the book, she says she thought about it. But her most recent book, History Teaches Us to Resist: How Progressive Movements Have Succeeded in Challenging Times, talks about resistance to presidential administrations from Franklin Roosevelt to Donald Trump. And Black Resistance/White Law has seen a surge in sales this year. “People are still reading it and buying it,” she says, “and that means it probably still serves its purpose.”

If you want to learn about how race and policy affect lived experiences, read (and watch): “African American Literature’s Aberrant Weather” (2019), a 1.5 Minute Climate Lecture given

by Herman Beavers, Professor of English and Africana Studies [watch at www. sas.upenn.edu/ climate-1point5]

Won’t You Be My Neighbor: Race, Class and Residence in Los Angeles (2006), Camille Z. Charles, Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor in the Social Sciences and Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies

Harlemworld: Doing Race and Class in Contemporary Black America (2001), John L. Jackson, Richard Perry University Professor of Communication and Anthropology, Professor of Africana Studies, and Walter H. Annenberg Dean, Annenberg School for Communication

Help Me to Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery (2012), Heather Williams, Geraldine R. Segal Professor in American Social Thought in the Department of Africana Studies 43

OMNIA

Killing the Black Body

BY DOROTHY ROBERTS

D

orothy Roberts began her academic career in 1988 as a professor of law in Newark, New Jersey. She was particularly interested in doing research and advocacy around a topic that no one had named.

“The term ‘reproductive justice’ hadn’t been coined yet,” says 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. “Most Americans at the time thought that reproductive rights were just about abortion and centered on white women, but that left out the entire history of racism and the denial of Black women’s reproductive freedom.”

One of the issues Roberts was investigating was the prosecutions of women for using drugs while pregnant during the “war on drugs” campaign in the late 1980s. “I suspected that the women being arrested were Black and that racism was behind turning this public health problem into a crime,” she says. “The ACLU shared with me an internal memo on the prosecutions that included the names and contact information for the lawyers representing the defendants. I called all the lawyers and asked them for the race of their clients. Sure enough, the vast majority were Black women.”

This led Roberts to her very first scholarly project, “Punishing Drug Addicts Who Have Babies: Women of Color, Equality, and the Right of Privacy.” The article, which was published by Harvard Law Review in 1991, set her on a trajectory that would define the rest of her career and lead directly to her first book. “I remember having a eureka moment where I pulled over my car and began to write down all the ways in which government policies had devalued Black women’s bodies and reproductive decisions,” says Roberts.

Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty was published in 1997. The book combats media tropes of “welfare queens” and “crack babies” and exposes a broad range of historical abuses and policies that have devalued Black women’s reproductive autonomy, from enslavers’ ownership of fertility to the exclusion of Black women from mainstream feminist and civil rights agendas.

“One of my favorite aspects of Killing the Black Body is how prescient it was, and therefore how relevant it continues to be today,” says Roberts, who is also the director of the Penn Program on Race, Science, & Society. “The book’s challenge to criminalizing pregnancy predicted the unified right-wing strategy to punish women for pregnancy outcomes while also blocking access to abortion services, and its emphasis on racist birth control and sterilization policies presaged the recent revelations of coerced sterilizations in California prisons and hysterectomies in an ICE detention center in Georgia.” She adds that she is also honored by how her book helped to inspire the reproductive justice movement that was emerging at the time she wrote it.

Because so many of the policy issues Roberts tackled in the book were still so relevant decades later, she published an anniversary edition of Killing the Black Body in 2017 with a new preface that highlighted both her exhilaration and exasperation about what had transpired in the intervening years.

“Reproduction is still being criminalized,” says Roberts. “There have been cases of women who’ve had stillbirths being prosecuted for homicide, and these same fetal protection policies can be used to punish women for terminating a pregnancy.” And harmful welfare policies that were just being implemented when Roberts was

If you want to learn about race and democracy, read: The Loud Minority: Why Protests Matter in American Democracy (2020), Daniel Q. Gillion, Julie Beren Platt and Marc E. Platt Presidential Professor of Political Science 44

The Spectre of Race: How Discrimination Haunts Western Democracy (2018), Michael Hanchard, Chair and Gustave C. Kuemmerle Professor of Africana Studies

Southern Nation: Congress and White Supremacy after Reconstruction (2018), John Lapinski, Robert A. Fox Leadership Professor of Political Science, David A. Bateman (Cornell University), and Ira Katznelson (Columbia University)

Still A House Divided: Race and Politics in Obama’s America (2018), Rogers Smith, Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Political Science, and Desmond King (University of Oxford)

Southern Conference Educational Fund

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(Above) 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; (right) Scenes from a 1971 protest

writing about them in the book are now firmly in place, she says. “States have passed child exclusion policies that deny increases in benefits to deter people receiving welfare from having more children.”

There has been progress in some areas, Roberts notes.

“The term ‘reproductive justice’ has gained a lot of traction—the framework that replaces choice as the dominant paradigm and expands reproductive freedom to take into account the social, economic, and sociopolitical conditions that determine what kinds of decisions people are able to make.”

I remember having a eureka moment where I pulled over my car and began to write down all the ways in which government policies had devalued Black women’s bodies.

Killing the Black Body continues to make its impact on academia and the wider public. It is used in college courses across the country to explain the ways in which racism and sexism intersect in unjust policies and how movements can address them, and the book is consistently a best seller under the topic of abortion and birth control.

Roberts has since published two additional highly influential books: Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare, in 2002, and Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-Create Race in the Twenty-First Century, in

2011. And she is back in high gear with a forthcoming book planned for publication in 2021, which calls for dismantling the foster care system.

“This book marks the 20th anniversary of Shattered Bonds and is much more hard-hitting,” says Roberts.

“It shows how the so-called child welfare system is like the prison system. Instead of providing support to families living in poor and marginalized communities, it polices them by threatening to take their children away.”

If you want to learn about how race and religion intertwine, read: Women in the Church of God in Christ: Making a Sanctified World (2007), Anthea Butler, Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Africana Studies

Your Spirits Walk Beside Us: The Politics of Black Religion (2008), Barbara Savage, Geraldine R. Segal Professor in American Social Thought in the Department of Africana Studies

Birth Control Battles: How Race and Class Divided American Religion (2019), Melissa Wilde, Professor of Sociology

OMNIA

Thicker Than Blood

BY TUKUFU ZUBERI

I

n 2001, Tukufu Zuberi had been on the Penn Sociology faculty for 12 years, having arrived fresh from completion of his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago.

His scholarly roots were in demography—a quantitative discipline, focused on the numbers behind population change through processes like mortality, reproduction, and migration. He had spent the years since his arrival at Penn working on funded research projects, including the African Census Project, Mortality in Africa Before and During the HIV/AIDS Era, and African American Immigration and Mortality in Liberia.

But that year, Zuberi published Thicker Than Blood, a slim volume with a provocative subtitle, “How Racial Statistics Lie,” that challenged the tools of his trade.

The publication of this book marked a juncture in his academic journey—and as he tells it, he’s still traveling that path today.

In Thicker Than Blood, Zuberi, who is now the Lasry Family Professor of Race Relations and Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies, presents a critique of the concept of racial statistics and asks colleagues to question the validity of their use in social science. He begins with an overview of the historical events that fed the development of the idea of race, starting in the 15th century with European colonialism and enslavement of Africans. The second section of the book examines how the methods of social statistics evolved, and traces the connection of

these methods to promoters of eugenic theories. The concluding section of the book considers how social scientists might approach race more correctly, and honestly, in their theories and analysis.

While the book offers technical detail for the quantitative social scientist, on its most fundamental level, Zuberi’s argument is that racial statistics are misused in social science to imply causality between race and a range of outcomes, where there is none. Race, as Zuberi points out in the book’s introduction, “is a socially constructed process that produces

If you want an international perspective on race, politics, and history, read: Racial Politics in Contemporary Brazil (1999), edited

by Michael Hanchard, Chair and Gustave C. Kuemmerle Professor of Africana Studies 46

A Different Shade of Colonialism: Egypt, Great Britain, and the Mastery of the Sudan (2003), Eve Troutt Powell, Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of History and Africana Studies

Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transnational Jamaica (2011), Deborah Thomas, R. Jean Brownlee Term Professor in the Department of Anthropology

subordinate and superordinate groups … the meaning of race depends on the social conditions in which it exists.”

Simply put, as Zuberi explains it today, “race doesn’t cause anything … Blackness doesn’t cause prostate cancer—the active agent is the social construction. You don’t have a higher likelihood to not get a college degree because you are Black—it’s because of all that goes along with being Black in this culture.”

On its most fundamental level, Zuberi’s argument is that racial statistics are misused in social science to imply causality between race and a range of outcomes, where there is none.

If you want a philosophical perspective on race, read: What Is Race? Four Philosophical Views (2019), Quayshawn Spencer, Robert S. Blank Presidential Associate Professor of Philosophy, Joshua Glasgow (Sonoma State University), Sally Haslanger (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), and Chike Jeffers (Dalhousie University)

Courtesy of African Independence; Eric Sucar, University Communications

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(Above) Tukufu Zuberi, Lasry Family Professor of Race Relations and Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies, at a memorial for Ghanaian World War II veterans who fought for the British Colonial government; (inset) Zuberi at a speaking engagement

Zuberi contends that the objectivity of the methodology is compromised by the fact that the logic of statistical methods was shaped by racial concepts. “In essence,” he says, “social scientists had already established their biases about the subject matter before they learned the method.” The result is a circular reasoning, where conclusions that confirm biases are arrived at using a quantitative statistical analysis that was itself developed to support assumptions regarding racial hierarchies.

The publication of Thicker Than Blood, Zuberi recalls, “opened a can of worms.” He continued to engage with his academic community on the issues surrounding racial

statistics in the social sciences in conferences around the world. These conversations led to his next book, White Logic, White Methods: Racism and Methodology, a collection of critical essays by a range of authors that Zuberi and his co-editor, Eduardo BonillaSilva, published in 2008.

That book was recognized with the American Sociological Association’s Oliver Cromwell Cox Book Award.

Zuberi continues to speak regularly on racial statistics and the demography of race, and he is currently working on a book on that topic. But his perspective has evolved, as his work in the social sciences converges with engagement in the humanities. Nearly 20 years after the release of

Thicker Than Blood, Zuberi’s resume includes directing an award-winning documentary, African Independence; hosting the long-running PBS series History Detectives; and curating Penn Museum’s new Africa wing. His path reflects his passionate belief that humanists and social scientists each critically need the perspectives of the other.

Looking back, Zuberi explains, “I wrote this book as a fire to ignite more creative analysis in the social sciences.” In the concluding section of Thicker Than Blood, he issues a challenge to the scholarly community to embrace reflection on the “political and theoretical ideas that motivate different interpretations of social science

results. We must recognize that the researcher is part of what he or she observes. We do not passively or objectively observe the statistical universe as scientific outsiders.”

“Social scientists,” as he elaborates now, “are not innocent— you are not objective. And I know because I am that social scientist. I did that statistical analysis. So, I’m not far from that practice, but I also do the other [humanistic] thing, and I see how profound its impact is—going to a museum as a child, entering one as an adult, leaving with a perception of a narrative about humanity and their place in it. I’m here to disrupt that narrative and give birth to a creative skepticism which allows us all to be better human beings.”

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OMNIA

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Agent of

Change Madeleine Joullié makes molecules and waves, leaving her mark in her specialty, her institution, and the lives of her students.

By Susan Ahlborn Photography by Eric Sucar, University Communications

A

lmost 90 years ago, Madeleine Joullié decided she wanted to be a chemist, and she hasn’t let up.

The professor of chemistry has authored or coauthored 300 papers and three textbooks (one in Portuguese), synthesized dozens of compounds used in medical treatments and fingerprint analysis, and received more than 30 honors and awards. She was the first female organic chemist to be appointed to a tenure-track position in a major American university.

She became a member of the Board of Directors of the American Chemical Society, where she helped develop professional guidelines for chemists and pressed for equal opportunity. And there are the thousands of students, undergraduate and graduate, whom she’s mentored, and all they’ve done in turn.

The numbers are impressive, but they don’t give the full picture. “My favorite story about Madeleine is about one of her professorial colleagues swearing at her,” says David Christianson, Roy and Diana Vagelos Professor in Chemistry and Chemical Biology 49

OMNIA and Department Chair. “They were having an argument and bad words were used by the male colleague, and Madeleine said, ‘Don’t swear at me because I can swear right back at you in three different languages.’”

She demands much from herself and from those around her, and it has brought her respect and devotion. Christianson calls her a dear colleague and friend, and “one of the jewels in the crown of the Ivy League.” “I absolutely love her. I would do anything for her,” says former graduate advisee Catherine Faler, GR’07, a staff chemist at ExxonMobil Chemical. “She’s one of my favorite people in the world,” states James Tarver, GR’03, another Joullié alum, now Chief Research Administrator for the Department of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

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“It’s sort of a game, how you go about it,” she continues. “Some things work, some simple reactions that should work sometimes refuse to work. In chemistry you are going to find more failures than success. I’m basically an optimist. If everything was too easy, it would be boring.”

When I get up, I want to go do chemistry.

“I was always interested in chemistry,” says Joullié. “I wanted to know ‘What’s going to happen if I do that?’ I still find the same thing interesting. When I get up, I want to go do chemistry.”

In the early 1970s Joullié successfully synthesized tilorone, which helps protect cells and is used as an antiviral drug, work that earned her the 1972 ACS Philadelphia Section Award. In 1980 she was the first to report an asymmetric total synthesis of the antibiotic (+)-furanomycin and the first to use a particular type of chemical reaction to synthesize an artificial amino acid. She helped develop methods for aromatic substitution, in which a chemical bond is broken and replaced, and introduced the term “chirality transfer,” the transfer of properties through a chemical bond.

Born in France and raised in Rio de Janeiro, Joullié attended Simmons College in Boston, then came to Penn in 1949, the only woman among the chemistry graduate students in a building that didn’t even have a women’s bathroom. But she’s not one to be deterred, and her curiosity is voracious. She looked at false smut disease on rice plants and saw opportunity. She’s investigated a fungus found in Roquefort cheese and had her undergraduates learn how to grow more of it. And she wants to know more about the chemistry going on in electronic cigarettes.

In the late ‘80s, Joullié worked with Judah Folkman of Harvard Medical School and Paul B. Weisz in Penn Engineering to help synthesize betacyclodextrin sulfate, a sugar molecule that attaches to the walls of growing blood vessels and decreases the growth of new capillaries. This can cut the blood supply to malignant tumors and restrict their growth. Her compounds made Folkman’s treatments 100 to 1,000 times more potent, and also helps limit restenosis—the growth of cells on artery walls that can lead to blockages at the site of surgical procedures.

As a synthetic chemist, Joullié examines products and materials to learn what they do and how to make them artificially and create new structures. “The challenge of making new compounds was always very interesting to me,” she says.

“You wonder, what are these compounds

She then turned her gaze on sea squirts, or tunicates, marine invertebrate animals, and investigated a chemical they use to protect their larvae. Her total synthesis of didemnin B in 1990 was a landmark event that led to fundamental contributions to understanding the chemistry and

“It’s sort of a game.”

(From top) Madeleine Joullié, Professor of Chemistry, in 1949; James Tarver, GR’03, (L) and Joullié at the 1999 American Chemical Society Meeting; Catherine Faler, GR’07 (L) and Charli Long, GR’06 (R) with Joullié at the 2019 Empowering Women in Organic Chemistry conference; a Joullié Group pool party

doing? Why are they there and what is their function? I think there’s no end to what you can do.”

Courtesy of University Communications

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How to Make a Molecule

Madeleine Joullié, Professor of Chemistry, with James Robinson, Director of the University’s Office of Equal Opportunity, in September 1979.

biology of this class of natural products.

It became the first marine product to enter clinical trials addressing cancer, and has led to compounds with antitumor, antiviral, and immunosuppressive activities.

Then there was the day in the mid-’90s when the Secret Service made a surprise visit to her office. The agency asked Joullié to find a better way of developing fingerprints at crime scenes. Her lab identified a compound that is less damaging to evidence and more sensitive for law enforcement agencies.

“So you never know, chemistry can be applied to anything, and sometimes I think chemists do a disservice to themselves by just trying to focus in certain areas,” she says. “I think people have preconceived ideas of what research is going to be important and what research is not.”

For this reason, Joullié would like to see scientists have more freedom to pursue promising new things. But, she says, “Science is overloaded with bureaucracy.”

Passion and Roadblocks Joullié is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a fellow of the Royal Chemistry Society, and was a member of the editorial board for Chemical and Engineering News. The ACS has also given her its Garvan Award, Henry

Hill Award, ACS Award for Encouraging Women into Careers in the Chemical Sciences, and the A.C. Cope Senior Scholar Award. She’s received the Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching, Penn’s highest teaching honor, and has held lectureships around the country. In 2015 she received the John Scott Medal and Prize from the City of Philadelphia for her research work.

It’s a record that refutes the disrespect she received from some of her professors and classmates in graduate school. Her fellow students used to tell her that certain professors would “never give a girl an A,” she remembers. “I don’t know if they were right on this. I didn’t get an A, but that’s okay. I wasn’t that concerned about grades.”

Joullié says she was there to do work and that’s all she cared about. “Whatever people used to say, I just would dismiss it and forget about it.” Once they realized how good her class notes were, though, some of the male students did start to borrow them.

After she earned her Ph.D., Joullié was turned down for a job at DuPont, which didn’t hire women scientists at the time.

Instead, she became the first woman to teach in Penn’s chemistry department. No graduate students would work with her, so she conducted research with undergraduates for years. When she finally got graduate students, they were women. “It took me a while to get male graduate students,” she says, and adds, “I don’t pay much attention to the gender of the students. I think that everybody is a different human being.”

To synthesize a natural product means to recreate it artificially.

By doing so, the chemist learns about that compound and how to modify it. Then she can look for ways to artificially create a lot of it or to make it more useful. Organic synthesis has produced medicines, dyes, fuels, vitamins, perfumes, fabrics, rubber, cosmetics, agricultural chemicals, and high-tech materials used in computers, mobile phones, and spaceships.

To synthesize a compound, chemists put together atoms of elements like carbon and hydrogen.

This usually involves breaking or creating chemical bonds between the elements, in a reaction chamber that can be as simple as a flask or as complex as a cooled vessel for reactions that are especially fast and violent. Synthesis can be carried out using heat or radiation or electric current.

A complex synthesis may take many steps; the chemist usually tries to deal with one bond at a time. She has to consider variables including the cost and availability of materials, the amount of energy needed for the reactions, the time it takes, the effectiveness of the reaction, how much it produces (the yield) and how cost-effective it was. Joullié had one synthesis that took 25 steps and had an overall yield of just 0.48 percent; in contrast, another took just seven steps and has a 21 percent overall yield. Often catalysts— things that speed up or slow down a reaction—are used. She also needs to factor in the cost of separating and purifying the products at the end.

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OMNIA

Madeleine Joullié, Professor of Chemistry, in her lab with Jisun Lee, GR’14, and Abby Solit, C’20.

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“I think her sense of humor has allowed her to survive all the challenges,” says Tarver, her former student. “She’s extremely resilient. She doesn’t wear it, but she is happy to share when there were situations that were challenging in her career and how she managed to overcome them.”

In the 1970s, Joullié was made Penn’s first affirmative action officer, which she considers the best thing, besides chemistry, she’s done in her life—though she says it made her the most unpopular person on campus for seven years.

“It wasn’t easy. It was totally a man’s world,” she reflects. “It took a lot of persuasion. I know that changing things is not that easy and it’s a slow process, but you can do it. I think today people are also starting to change things, and I can see the same things happening.” She has remained a proactive advocate of equal opportunity at Penn and in the larger world of chemistry.

If everything was too easy, it would be boring.

“We have more female faculty members in our department than any of our Ivy League peers,” says Christianson. “It’s because of the culture that Madeleine helped nucleate.”

When asked what Joullié means to her as a female scientist, Faler says, “One of the things that irks me, as a woman in the sciences, is that usually our gender speaks louder than our accomplishments. But it is incredibly relevant because even today, women face a lot of barriers.

And she faced so many more. But it annoys me how relevant it is.”

Faler continues, “I look at her as another woman who is an amazing chemist, and it doesn’t matter that she’s a woman. I also like to point out that she’s a great role model for men as well. All of my chemical brothers have also looked up to her and then they go out in the world and are also champions for women in science.”

An Indelible Mark As a young scientist, Joullié was so focused on research that she wasn’t interested in teaching. Her advisor Allan Day persuaded her to try.

Now she’s taught so many pre-med students that she can’t go to the hospital without running into one, and she’s still contributing to discussions about curriculum changes.

Joullié would tell her students she was training them for the real world and the real world was going to be hard on them, so she would be as well. She asked them to do better every day. Faler, who still calls Joullié “Boss,” says, “Best compliment she ever gave me was, ‘You are no worse than anyone else.’”

“Madeleine, for me, was sort of a breath of fresh air,” says Tarver.

“She was one of the most well-read faculty members in the department, just in terms of awareness and exposure to science. It was great, because I found myself with lots of ideas, and she was a wealth of knowledge.”

He says she also gave her graduate students a lot of freedom to follow their own interests and ideas. “In some cases, it allowed people to spin their wheels a little bit, but they found their way out of it, and gained a reliance on their peers as well as their own ingenuity to drive things forward.”

Joullié fostered her students’ overall professional development, too, asking them to write grants and papers and give polished presentations. “No one’s going to care what you’ve discovered or what you made if you can’t communicate it and communicate it well,” says Faler. Joullié would also make sure her students got to professional conferences to present their research, sponsoring them herself.

Joullié feels she had good teachers and an inspirational advisor, but no real role models in her own youth, and has determined to be one. Faler says she set an example for others with her work ethic, her availability, and her service to the chemical community.

“I am a Joullié chemist and I have a reputation to uphold,” says Faler. “I still feel the responsibility to make her proud of me and to do good.”

“Across generations, Madeleine has made an indelible mark on students, trainees, and faculty,” says Tarver.

“Her influence in my life reinforced these core values: respect for ideas and the people who generated them, requirement for adaptation and continuous growth, excellence as the minimum acceptable standard, and the need for diversity of thought and approach.”

Though she’s no longer teaching, Joullié continues doing research at 93. She sees fewer distinctions now between different types of chemistry, saying, “In the old days we had analytical chemistry, biochemistry, organic chemistry and we have now computer chemistry.

But I think today you need all of these to solve problems.”

“I have seen the beginning of chemistry pretty much, in a way,” she reflects. “We’ve come a long way.

The way things are done changes every day. I think that’s what’s important, to be able to understand the changes and go with them.”

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OMNIA

STUDENT SPOTLIGHT

A (Remote) Place of Belonging Conducted online for the first time, the Center for Africana Studies Summer Institute for Pre-Freshmen continues to cultivate human connection.

Fostering community is a top goal of the Center for Africana Studies Summer Institute for PreFreshmen, which hosts incoming first-year students for a tuition-free, week-long deep dive into intellectual and cultural themes in African and Africandiaspora studies. Held July 18-24, the program’s 34th rendition faced first-time challenges as the COVID-19 pandemic forced intimate, interactive activities to move onscreen.

of “Black Cool,” a course taught by Margo Natalie Crawford, Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Professor for Faculty Excellence, Professor of English, and Director of the Center for Africana Studies.

As rigorous as their courses were, students were able to enjoy themselves.

Aspiring architecture major Jayla Rhodes, C’24, recalls analyzing the Netflix show “Dear White People,” which depicts Black students’ experiences at an Ivy League institution. The exercise took place in the course “Young, Gifted and Diverse,” which was taught by Camille Z. Charles, Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor in the Social Sciences and Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies, who also directed the summer institute.

“This is an important part of what we, as faculty, do in the summer institute,” says Charles. “We create spaces for students to have conversations about racism, race relations, inequality, and other topics in our courses, and we do this in a way that engages everyone. We participate in an active, vibrant learning experience, one that is impactful and transformative for both students and faculty.”

Jasmine E. Johnson, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies, taught an institute class on Black popular culture. During a year of multiple pandemics, “one of them being anti-Blackness,” she says, candid conversations are essential.

Courtesy of Eduardo Mejia-Garcia

Eduardo Mejia-Garcia, C’24

The institute matches undergraduates with a graduate fellow who provides support both academically and personally; undergraduate Africana studies students and summer institute alumni also served as mentors to prepare this year’s cohort for the college experience and course work as well as to build community.

“Instead of just looking at the literary aspects of a novel, we got a deeper cultural understanding through ideas of the African diaspora and colonialism and intersectionality, which were completely new to me,” he says 54

Eyes on the Sky Ashley Baker, GR’20, loves sharing the excitement of experimental astronomy.

Ashley Baker wants to find new planets.

Her doctoral research focused on designing and building instrumentation for astronomical telescopes and earned her a 51 Pegasi b Fellowship in Planetary Astronomy from the HeisingSimons Foundation.

“One of the instruments I built was a prototype designed to make measurements of the atmospheres of exoplanets, which are planets orbiting a star outside our solar system, more efficient

Courtesy of Heising-Simons Foundation

Eduardo Mejia-Garcia, C’24, who plans to major in neuroscience, connected with his new peers through class discussions, as well as virtual game nights.

“Everybody was so welcoming, it felt like a small community I really belonged in,” he says, noting that he grew especially close with “his” graduate fellow, Joseph Thomas, a Ph.D. student in English.

“Students appreciated the opportunity to talk explicitly and develop ways to make sense of what’s going on,” she says. “From the start of their undergraduate careers, these students know there is no way to understand global history without understanding Black people—not just their extraordinary contributions, but the embeddedness of race and power in our world.” — KAREN BROOKS

Ashley Baker, GR’20

STUDENT SPOTLIGHT

FALL/WINTER 2020

for ground-based telescopes,” says Baker, who completed a Ph.D. in physics and astronomy in May. Her three-year fellowship began in summer 2020 at the California Institute of Technology.

Planetary astronomers like Baker look for molecules found in Earth’s atmosphere, such as oxygen, with the goal of finding habitable, Earth-like planets.

Ground-based telescopes are just one of the methods used to find them. “With the special filter that I’m using, you can split light into different colors to learn about the actual molecules in an exoplanet’s atmosphere,” Baker says.

Throughout her involvement with physics and astronomy, Baker has been committed to sharing the excitement of discovery with others. At Penn, she was part of the physics and astronomy department’s outreach group, which partners with science institutions in Philadelphia. While her future career plans are uncertain, she is sure that public engagement will be part of her life as a scientist.

“I enjoy seeing how excited people get about planetary research,” she says. “It provides context for us about our existence—it’s directly relatable on a personal level.

And it feels good to help people reach that ‘aha’ moment.” — JANE CARROLL

The memoir’s title comes from “Fate/Stay Night,” a 24-episode Japanese anime series. “There is a character in the series who, as a child using emotional reasoning, is able to overcome an adult version of himself that is cast as hard-reasoning and nefarious,” says Thomas. “It seemed like a good representation of what I’m trying to do in the memoir.”

Penn appealed to Thomas for two reasons when he decided to pursue a Ph.D. “The faculty at Penn offered a mix of a traditional theoretical approach as well as an interest in creative writing,” he says.

“It was also a chance to come back to the city where I grew up and be close to my family.”

— JANE CARROLL

Greeking Out Breyasia Scott, C’20, discovered a new passion after taking Intro to Ancient Greece.

Constructing a Child’s Reality

When Breyasia Scott, C’20, came to Penn, her love of theater came with her. She’d gone to the Academy for Performing Arts in Scotch Plains, New Jersey, and knew she wanted to continue nurturing her artistic passion by minoring in theatre arts. A decision to take Intro to Ancient Greece to fulfill a requirement pointed her to her major and led to an award-winning thesis.

Joseph Earl Thomas, a Ph.D. student in English, explores childhood and family in an award-winning memoir inspired by fantasy fiction.

He came to reading and writing thanks in part to video games. “These were sprawling fantasy/adventure games that required you to read a lot of materials and make decisions based on characters’ personalities,” Thomas says.

Courtesy of Notre Dame University

“Most of my life was filtered through ideals of masculinity in which physical prowess was the only kind of knowledge that was acceptable or would be tolerated,” says Thomas, a Ph.D. student in English.

Courtesy of Breyasia Scott, C’20

Joseph Earl Thomas was not much of a reader as a child growing up in Northeast Philadelphia.

Joseph Earl Thomas, Ph.D. student in English

Thomas explores his childhood in a memoir-in-progress called Reality Marble.

An excerpt from the book won the 2020 Chautauqua Janus Prize, which recognizes an emerging writer’s single work of short fiction or nonfiction.

Breyasia Scott, C’20 55

OMNIA

STUDENT SPOTLIGHT

“I fell in love with mythology and decided to really go for it and declare an ancient history major,” she explains. But Scott wasn’t done exploring. After taking American Sign Language (ASL) to fulfill another requirement, she added that as a minor. When she studied abroad at University College London, she realized she wanted to learn about more recent history, so she added a history minor to her studies.

“My junior year, I realized I had a major and three minors. At that point, it was too late to go back,” she laughs.

Scott’s play, Medea’s Symposium, draws on her experiences as a woman of color studying Ancient History at Penn, Euripides’ 431 BCE play, Medea, and Plato’s Dialogues.

“It’s both creative and critical,” Scott explains. “I explore issues of exclusivity in the classics and reframe Medea’s story to consider the experience of the ‘other,’ giving voice to the otherwise silent: women, slaves, and Medea herself.”

In the spring semester, Scott planned to put on a performance of the play with guidance from Rosemary Malague, Senior Lecturer and Program Director of Theatre Arts.

She cast actors, booked performance space at Penn Museum, and began directing rehearsals. But the COVID19 pandemic changed her plans.

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For her work, Scott won the Rose Award, which honors outstanding student research in the College. — LAUREN REBECCA THACKER

A Passion for Political Data and Public Service Joelle Gross, C ’21, talks about her “life-changing” experience with the Penn Program on Opinion Research and Election Studies.

This past summer, on a dozen Zoom boxes, young girls dressed as superheroes listened to Joelle Gross, C ’21, talk about reading arcs, comic books, and female heroes. Gross was a virtual camp counselor for girls ages five to 12 at Girls Inc. of Greater Philadelphia and Southern New Jersey, a nonprofit that delivers programs and experiences that “equip girls to overcome serious barriers to grow up strong, smart, and bold.” Her counselor position was part of her Robert A. Fox Leadership Fellowship, a paid, eight- to 10-week summer fellowship opportunity for service-oriented Penn students.

“Right now, we are all missing out on things because of the pandemic,” says Gross. “If I could help kids who are maybe scared and stuck at home to have some bright spots in their days, that’s what matters and, honestly, it helped me to get through this as well.”

Courtesy of Joelle Gross

Scott’s senior thesis allowed her to combine her love for ancient history and theater. The first semester of her senior year, she wrote a play under the supervision of her advisor, Emily Wilson. Wilson, College for Women Class of 1963 Term Professor in the Humanities, received wide acclaim for her 2017 translation of Homer’s Odyssey.

Scott wasn’t able to direct a full performance, but she had an opportunity to see an audience reaction when, at the Classics Department senior colloquium, Scott’s classmates read a scene for the rest of the group.

Joelle Gross, C ’21

STUDENT SPOTLIGHT

FALL/WINTER 2020

Another part of Gross’s fellowship was to help Girls Inc. research and plan a fall summit on civic engagement and the election. The event featured virtual breakout discussions and activities for the girls to learn about topics like voting, the electoral college, and, for the older group, voter suppression.

The summit isn’t the first time Gross has taken on politics. In summer 2019, she had a fellowship through the Penn Program on Opinion Research and Election Studies (PORES), an undergraduate program that takes a data-driven approach to social science issues.

She worked with John Lapinksi, Robert A. Fox Professor of Political Science, who directs both PORES and the Fox Leadership Program. She also worked closely with Stephen Pettigrew, PORES Director of Data Sciences and the Deputy Executive Director of the Fox Leadership Program. She helped to clean over a decade’s worth of election data.

This year, she worked behind the scenes again, doing data collection that informed the PORES professors’ analysis at the NBC decision desk on election night.

“I’m passionate about theater and originally thought I’d would work in that area over my summer, but my sophomore year, I took two data classes with Professors Daniel Hopkins and John Lapinksi that I really loved. That experience introduced me to a new passion, data science, and applying it to politics, and that led me to PORES and to declare a minor in the subject,” says Gross who is a major in the politics, philosophy, and economics program. — KATELYN SILVA

Saachi Datta, C’21, is combining her passion for religion and science on her path to becoming a physician.

Courtesy of Saachi Datta, C’21

This Is Your Brain On Religion

“Science and religion are just trying to explain the world,” Saachi Datta says. “People need different devices to live, grapple with bigger questions, and try to explain the phenomena of existence.”

Datta, C’21, wants to be a physician.

Her religious studies and biology majors prepare her for that, while also deepening lifelong passions.

Recently, she co-authored a peer-reviewed article that combined her interests and found that in patients with neurodegenerative diseases, positive religious coping behaviors correlate with better health outcomes than those experienced by patients with coping behaviors negatively influenced by religion (e.g. holding a punitive view of religion) and those with nonreligious coping behaviors.

Saachi Datta, C’21

“Majoring in religious studies was never even a question, but then I’ve also always been fascinated with science and the human body,” Datta explains. “I think it’s the most intricate machine out there. Every single class I’ve taken has expanded my knowledge and made me even more interested.”

Her first religious studies course was Science and Religion, taught by Donovan Schaefer, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies. “We looked at all the ancient religions in the past and how religion and science were just different applications of the mind,” she remembers. “They weren’t a dichotomy at all.”

Datta researched alongside Andrew Newberg, M’92, a physician and the pioneer of the field of neurotheology, the science of the brain and mind in conjunction with religion and spirituality. Their article, “The Relationship Between the Brain and Spirituality with Respect to Aging and Neurodegenerative Diseases: Clinical and Research Implications,” appeared in the Journal of Religion, Spirituality & Aging.

Explaining the study, Datta says, “We reviewed over 50 studies and concluded that the progression of diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s could be slowed down by having a strong spiritual or religious practice. Something interesting and unexpected was that some studies indicate that when religious coping mechanisms are focused on a god that is punishing versus one that is supporting, it creates reports of a negative quality of life or increased depression.”

As the American population ages, simple interventions in the progression of neurodegenerative diseases are potentially powerful. And in the midst of a global pandemic, Datta believes attention to the human mind and how coping mechanisms can improve quality of life is more important than ever.

— LAUREN REBECCA THACKER 57

OMNIA

IN THE CLASSROOM

OUTSIDE THEIR BUBBLES The Undergraduate Data Science Hangout connects students and faculty across seemingly disparate disciplines.

By Karen Brooks Courtesy of Sarah Kane; Courtesy of Katelyn Boese

part was seeing the linkages between a statistician in Wharton and a historian in Penn Arts & Sciences,” says Bhuvnesh Jain, Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor in the Natural Sciences, who coordinated the Hangout. “What makes data science so appealing to me is that shared methodologies connect students and faculty across disciplines.”

(l–R) Sarah Kane, C’23; Katelyn Boese, C’23

rent Cebul and Shane Jensen share a research interest in urban planning—but that’s where their professional overlap ends.

Or does it?

Cebul, Assistant Professor of History, examines how urban planning policies have reinforced economic and racial segregation over time—while Jensen, Professor of Statistics at Wharton, 58

analyzes modern data like Census demographics and land use zoning information in relation to a city’s crime rates. But however different, both researchers’ work provided perfect fodder for discussion in this year’s Undergraduate Data Science Hangout, held every Thursday over eight weeks this summer.

“Brent and Shane each addressed how to establish causation in their own datasets, which were fascinating—but the best

Data science is the study of data and how to extract knowledge from it. Any Penn student whose summer research involved the quantitative analysis of data—in the humanities, social sciences, or natural sciences—could join the Data Science Hangout (remotely). Introduced in summer 2019 as an informal classroom experience during which students could share their work, learn about analytics tools, listen to faculty talks, and collaborate on projects, the event was more structured this time around, with two online faculty presentations followed by a data science tutorial every week.

This year, researchers from 10 departments covered 22 topics ranging from virus tracking to electoral politics to the universe’s expansion. The eclectic mix surprised physics major Sarah Kane, C’23, whose research project involved searching for new planets.

“The hangouts really let you see outside your own little bubble of data analysis,” she says. “Especially in the hard sciences,

IN THE CLASSROOM

FALL/WINTER 2020

Brent Cebul, Assistant Professor of History; Bhuvnesh Jain, Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor in the Natural Sciences; and Philip Gressman, Professor of Mathematics, during this summer’s Data Hangout.

like physics and chemistry and biology, it is easy to think of data as just numbers and points on a graph. But there were data scientists from so many other fields—linguistics, psychology, criminology—that I realized data can be words, or really almost anything.

That is a valuable lesson, especially for an undergrad.”

Although she’s majoring in biology, Katelyn Boese, C’23, found herself most enthralled with a presentation by Phil Gressman, Professor of Mathematics, who used mathematical models to simulate the spread of COVID-19 on college campuses.

“We got to learn how building a simulation requires synthesis of a lot of real-world

information—in this case facts and statistics about how the virus transmits,” she says.

“And, of course, it was very relatable to all of us.”

What makes data science so appealing to me is that shared methodologies connect students and faculty across disciplines.

Jain developed the 2020 program with David Brainard, RRL Professor of Psychology and Associate Dean for the Natural Sciences, and Ann Vernon-Grey, Senior Associate Director for

Undergraduate Research.

Sara Casella, a doctoral student in economics, helped organize the activities and taught some of the tutorials.

Undergraduate students are often wrangling large datasets for the first time, and the group sought to expose them not only to different data analysis techniques, but also to peers whose research looked nothing like their own.

“When I entered academia, I thought a variety of disciplines would be within easy reach. But, in fact, it is very hard to step out of one’s narrow—even sub-disciplinary—boundaries,” Jain says. “One of my motivations for the Hangout was to interact across disciplines while also showing

students that they can expand their horizons, one week posing a question in sociology and the next week posing a question in astronomy.”

And the questions kept coming, he says; almost every week, no matter what the subject, Q&A sessions ran so long that eventually he had to intervene.

“Students were really engaged with the talks. The Hangout was a way to fulfill their needs and also give us ideas for how to build something bigger around data science programming in the future,” Jain says.

“It’s nice to have ways to bring students from across the university together to learn the same set of analytics tools they all need to use.”

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Glenn Singleton, C’86, at The Summit on Race in America at the LBJ Presidential Library on Tuesday, April 9, 2019.

COURAGEOUS CONVERSATION Glenn Singleton, C’86, is on a mission to achieve racial equity through honest dialogue.

By Katelyn Silva lenn Singleton, C’86, started his career mere steps from Locust Walk as an admissions officer in College Hall, a position he describes as “exciting and nourishing.” That experience inspired him to pursue graduate study at the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University. While doing his graduate fieldwork, he witnessed 60

educational and social inequities that led him away from higher education administration and policy and toward work to directly impact students, particularly low-income students of color.

Singleton launched Pacific Educational Group—a consulting firm committed to achieving racial equity in the U.S. and

beyond—along with two non-profit foundations. He also created a protocol for deepening interracial dialogues called Courageous Conversations.

Today, he works with school districts, state governments, and corporations in various sectors throughout the U.S. and around the world.

Jay Godwin

OMNIA

MOVERS & QUAKERS

MOVERS & QUAKERS

FALL/WINTER 2020

Q: Were you always someone who had courageous conversation in your own life?

In my graduate work, the inequities I saw didn’t match my own educational experience as a Black student attending a private school in Baltimore. However, at Park School, I was always one of the only Black students in the classroom. Then, I needed to learn how to effectively communicate with my peers and teachers, who rarely understood and often diminished my racial struggles. As I moved on to Penn, that phenomenon continued in many similar and some new ways. For example, as a senior, I was the only Black cast member in the Mask and Wig Club and one of a handful in my fraternity.

Talking about race in this country is difficult; in the ’90s, it was even more so.

Q: How did Pacific Educational Group evolve?

I founded Pacific Educational Group in 1992 to help under-resourced students understand the process of high school course selection and how to navigate the college admissions process, so that they could access more opportunities in college and beyond. That mission grew into a deeper exploration of transforming high schools into places that are meaningful, rigorous, and exciting for students who were otherwise disengaged. That work prompted invitations from the state departments and local districts to lead conversations about developing more diverse school leaders and championing educational and racial equity. Talking about race in this country is difficult; in the ’90s, it was even more so. I asked

PreK-12 educators to have courageous conversation about why schools are not structured, systemically, to meet the needs of children, families, and communities of color.

Q: How did Penn impact you?

Attending Penn is an amazing aspect of my life and my family’s experience. I recognize that I received an extraordinarily elite, prestigious and well-resourced education. I appreciate every moment of my education– my coursework in the Annenberg School, traveling the country with Mask and Wig and working in the admissions office are highlights. It was impactful to be surrounded by the handful of dedicated faculty and administrators of color who nurtured me, either in-person or simply by being present in my environment, like English Professor Houston Baker, the late A. Leon Higginbotham Jr. at the law and education school or our dean, the late Harold “Hask” Haskins. At the time, Penn’s president was Sheldon Hackney who I got to know because of my work in admissions. I appreciated his commitment to battling a conservative national constituency determined to negatively redefine his championing of multiculturalism as “political correctness.” Dr. Hackney rightly recognized the institutional responsibility to include all peoples’ narratives and understand why some in this country are resistant to do so.

Q: Your company partners with some of the largest school districts in the country. What has been one of your proudest achievements?

Our work is about systemic racial equity transformation in education as well as in the private sector. This means looking at the whole system and engaging everyone—from top to bottom—in a process of transformation. We currently work in many school districts including Oakland,

San Francisco, New York City, Fort Worth, Chicago, and Miami-Dade County, but my proudest partnership was with Portland Public Schools in Oregon. When our partnership began, there were few educators of color in the district. The graduation rate for Black students was below 45 percent. Through our partnership, the district learned to lead with racial equity, most significantly in the hiring process. Within five years, they increased the number of teachers of color by 25 percent and nearly one-third of their administrators were individuals of color. They also increased the high school graduation rate to 80 percent at Jefferson HS Middle College of Advanced Studies, an increase of 25 percent for this school known for its disproportionately high number of Black, Brown and Indigenous students.

Q: What’s the most important conversation we need to have as a nation, and, are you hopeful for the future?

Our most important conversation is situated in establishing a national value for racial equity, diversity and inclusion. Unfortunately, we exist in a state of turmoil because many leaders in positions of power have never actually lived a racially diverse experience. Especially during these times, their faintly voiced support for racial justice rings hollow and inauthentic. It is this hypocrisy that we must each examine and address. We only continue to do ourselves and our children a tremendous disservice by acting like we’re not in conflict around the issue of race. Let’s lean into our racial conflicts using the courageous conversation tools.

I remain hopeful. I am the legacy of resilient, determined, and hopeful people. If we weren’t hopeful, we would have perished more than four centuries ago.

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OMNIA

PARTNERS & PROGRESS

PWA Elevate Yourself Leadership Series The Professional Women’s Alliance (PWA) launched its leadership series with a virtual panel on Disrupting Implicit Bias and Promoting Inclusion. An audience of 161 tuned in for a discussion of the effects of implicit bias on an organization’s ability to pursue and promote a diverse and inclusive community and how biases impact perceptions. Trang Do, C’06, moderated and panelists were diversity and inclusion experts Jennifer Cleveland Nichols, C’07, GSE’10; Mana Nakagawa, C’07; and Glenn Singleton, C’86.

FOR MORE INFORMATION, VISIT WWW.SAS.UPENN.EDU/PWA.

(Clockwise from top left) Trang Do, C’06; Jennifer Cleveland Nichols, C’07, GSE’10; Mana Nakagawa, C’07; Glenn Singleton, C’86

Eric Sucar, University Communications

Become a Mentor With Ben Connect This fall, Ben Connect matched alumni and students for a semester-long formal mentorship program.

Mentors provide insight based on personal experience in career and academic pursuits, and students ask questions about career development, goals-setting, and career-related decision making. If you are interested in being a mentor for the spring cohort, contact Kathe Archibald at kathea@sas.upenn.edu.

Ben Connect is a platform where College alumni and students can share their stories and form longor short-term virtual mentorships.

LEARN MORE AT BENCONNECT.SAS.UPENN.EDU.

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PARTNERS & PROGRESS

FALL/WINTER 2020

Penn Arts & Sciences at Work Penn Arts & Sciences at Work is a photoblog series that highlights College alumni in their workplaces and encourages reflection on how and why their careers took shape.

TAKE A LOOK AT WWW.SAS.UPENN.EDU/AT-WORK. Brooke Sietinsons

“Ministry means getting into the mud with people, and inevitably, some of that mud gets on you. So, I think of ongoing selfcare—therapy, exercising, being with my kids, and reading my comic books.”

- CHARLES “CHAZ” HOWARD, C’00 Chaplain and Vice President for Social Equity & Community, University of Pennsylvania URBAN STUDIES MAJOR, AFRO-AMERICAN STUDIES MINOR PHILADELPHIA, PA

Courtesy of Anil Chitrapu

“I wish when I started at Penn I had someone tell me, ‘You will get through this and you will achieve incredible things because you’re around some of the brightest minds.’”

-ANIL CHITRAPU, C’16 Senior Manager of Podcast Growth, Condé Nast BIOLOGY MAJOR NEW YORK, NY

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INSOMNIA

Home Office Artifacts: Jamal J. Elias Discover the stories behind the Professor of Religious Studies’ home office items—in his own words.

2 4

5

1

3

LAMENCO F GUITAR I love flamenco music and dance, and have played flamenco guitar for years and studied it in Granada and Jerez de la Frontera. I’m still terrible at it! When I’m working on something that requires a lot of thought, I find it very helpful to take a break and practice a difficult falseta (short melody) or some scales.

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RABAB This is a kind of lute that is very popular in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan.

I acquired this one while traveling in a remote part of northern Pakistan. At this time when travel is not an easy option, it brings back fond memories of sitting among towering mountains under a glowing Milky Way, playing this rabab while close friends sang.

PAINTED BOX

PHOTOGRAPH

The flowered box was painted for me by an artist specializing in vehicle decoration while I was conducting research for a book on Pakistani truck decoration roughly two decades ago. I use it to store microfilm copies of manuscripts.

This is a photograph of my partner and Penn alumna, Mehrin (“Mir”) Masud-Elias, which I took when we were visiting a Muslim shrine in the Atlas Mountains while I was leading a Penn Alumni tour to Morocco. A former student of mine downloaded the picture from social media and had it printed and framed as a gift.

MANUSCRIPTS This shelf houses handwritten Islamic manuscripts and old lithographically printed books. The first one I acquired was while I was a Ph.D. student and was important for my dissertation, and the most recent one is connected to my current book project on the followers of the famous Persian poet, Rumi.

University Archives

FALL/WINTER 2020

LAST LOOK

adie Tanner Mossell Alexander, ED’18, GR’21, L’27, HON’74, poses in front of an automobile in 1920, when she was a graduate student in Penn Arts & Sciences. Alexander became the first Black woman in the nation to earn a Ph.D. in economics, the first to earn a law degree at Penn, to pass the bar and practice law in Pennsylvania, and to serve as assistant city solicitor of Philadelphia and as secretary of the National Bar Association. She was also appointed to the President’s Committee on Civil Rights by Harry S. Truman and named Chairperson of the White House Conference on Aging

by Jimmy Carter.

Alexander’s lifetime of service is honored at Penn in ways including the Penn Alexander School, which serves Philadelphia children, and the endowed Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights chair currently held by Dorothy Roberts, who is also George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology and Professor of Africana Studies.

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Non-Profit U.S. Postage

PA ID

University of Pennsylvania

University of Pennsylvania School of Arts & Sciences 3600 Market Street, Suite 300 Philadelphia, PA 19104-3284 COLLEGE OF ARTS & SCIENCES GRADUATE DIVISION COLLEGE OF LIBERAL & PROFESSIONAL STUDIES Ben Connect matches College alums and students for conversation and mentoring: BENCONNECT.SAS.UPENN.EDU

Working for environmental justice

POWERS

IN TIMES OF CRISIS, THIS IS EDUCATION THAT MATTERS.

THIS IS EDUCATION POWERED BY THE

A commitment to science

POWERS

M A K E YO U R GI FT ONLI NE

WWW.SAS.UPENN.EDU/GIFTS/ANNUAL FOR MORE INFORMATION, contact Robbie Brennan Hain,

C’79, GEd’79, at mhain@sas.upenn.edu or 215-746-8208.