Omnia Magazine: Fall/Winter 2021

FA L L / W I N T E R 2 0 21

FALL/WINTER 2015 Discovering the 24 Largest Comet on Record

The Future

of History Three historians weigh in on how we can understand our past. PAGE 14

A Career Built 34 on Activism

40 The Problem and Promise of Chemistry

46 A Life in Writing

OMNIA

CONTENTS

FEATURES 14 The Future of History Three historians weigh in on how we can understand our past.

By Susan Ahlborn

24 Connecting the Celestial Dots Pedro Bernardinelli, then-doctoral candidate in physics and astronomy, and Gary Bernstein, Reese W. Flower Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics, discover the largest comet on record.

14

24

34

40

44

46

By Blake Cole

34 Política, Activismo, y Academia The career of Tulia Falleti, Class of 1965 Endowed Term Professor of Political Science, grew from her activism as a student in a newly democratic Argentina.

By Lauren Rebecca Thacker

40 Better Living ...

Through Chemistry?

Eric Schelter, Professor of Chemistry, offers his thoughts on chemistry’s continuing promise, and its public relations problem.

By Loraine Terrell

44 Back to Campus (For the First Time) First- and second-year College students talk campus living and saying goodbye to virtual classes.

By Alex Schein

46 Dwelling in Possibility Celebrating poetry and literature at Penn since 1985, Al Filreis, Kelly Family Professor of English, continues to create community at the home for writers he founded in a Locust Walk house a quarter-century ago.

By Louisa Shepard

SECTIONS 1

DEAN’S MESSAGE

52

STUDENT SPOTLIGHT

2

EDITOR’S NOTE

56

IN THE CLASSROOM

3

SCHOOL NEWS

58

MOVERS & QUAKERS

8

FINDINGS

60

INSPIRING COMMUNITY

12

OMNIA 101

62

INSOMNIA

30

INSPIRING IMPACT

65

LAST LOOK

DEAN’S MESSAGE

FALL /WINTER 2021

OMNIA is published by the School of Arts & Sciences Office of Advancement

Back to School Lisa J. Godfrey

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 MyPenn, the Penn alumni community, at mypenn.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: Vanessa Lovegrove

I

’ve been at Penn a long time—as a student, faculty member, and dean. The start of the fall semester and the phrase “back to school” has always had a little magic to it, conjuring new beginnings and a sense of excitement and possibility. That has never been more true than in fall 2021. It’s certainly the case that the pandemic is not behind us. But the willingness of so many in our community to observe protocols, including wearing masks and undergoing frequent testing, is a powerful testament to their commitment to each other, and to the important work taking place on our campus. I’m tremendously proud of our students, faculty, and staff, and grateful that our campus has remained safe and healthy. And when I’m meeting with colleagues in person, or I see students walking to class, I feel a sense of gratitude and renewed energy for the future.

That future is undoubtably brighter thanks to the Power of Penn Arts & Sciences Campaign, which concluded in June 2021.

The support of alumni and friends is already having an impact in areas including student financial aid, faculty recruitment, and academic programs. Growing our faculty with scholars like Anthony Braga, a criminologist whose specialties include justice and public policy, and So-Rim Lee, a scholar of the

politics of representation in visual cultures in South Korea and the Korean diaspora, means that our intellectual inquiry and teaching can be richer and more rigorous (p. 7). We’ve been able to move forward with a range of exciting endeavors, including the launch of the Center for Latin American and Latinx Studies (p. 38) and a new class of Making a Difference in Global Communities and Klein Family Social Justice grant recipients (p. 3). And over the course of the campaign, we’ve created new ways for alums to engage with our faculty and each other, with lectures and mentoring opportunities available in person and virtually (p. 60).

I’m thrilled to share more on the campaign’s impact (p. 30) and the return to on-campus research and learning. As you read about the incredible things our students and faculty are doing, I hope you feel a little of that back-to-school magic.

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

OMNIA

EDITOR’S NOTE

Celebrating Connectedness

A

s the fall semester concludes, we are reminded of how vibrant the Penn Arts & Sciences community is—a shining example of how scholars come together to produce pioneering research and thoughtful perspectives on important issues. In our cover story, “The Future of History” (p. 14), we speak with three historians with differing areas of expertise to get their nuanced take on how we can understand our past through the lens of the present—whether we are exploring culture, or navigating the politics of the day. And “Connecting the Celestial Dots” (p. 24) details the exciting process of how a doctoral candidate in physics and astronomy and his academic mentor discovered the largest comet on record.

Many academic leaders in Penn Arts & Sciences have committed their careers to acting as a beacon for their fellow students and scholars. In “Dwelling in Possibility” (p. 46), we trace one such career of a teacher and writer who has brought the gift of poetry and literature to a dedicated on-campus community, as well as to tens of thousands around

the world. And “Política, Activismo, y Academia” (p. 34) tells the story of how a professor’s career in political science grew from activism as a student in a newly democratic Argentina, and how her role as the Director of the newly established Center for Latin American and Latinx Studies will allow her to continue building community.

Scholars in all disciplines are exploring complex issues, and in this season of the OMNIA podcast, “In These Times: Fear and Loathing and Science,” we’re drilling down on the challenges of helping people understand complex science, which is even more difficult due to problems of politicization and misrepresentation of scientific information. In this vein, “Better Living … Through Chemistry?” (p. 40), an adaptation of one of the episodes, delves into chemistry’s public relations problem in contrast to its potential to solve big problems.

a doctoral candidate in the history of art reflects on monuments of trauma in Africa, the Caribbean, and the Black Atlantic. In the realm of student discovery, “Unconscious Memory” (p. 54) relays how a College of Liberal & Professional Studies student may have discovered a new type of memory, and “A Fieldwork Experience, No Travel Required” (p. 56) tells the story of a two-week, in-person bootcamp at Penn Museum, during which undergrads learned basic archaeological skills in subjects from ceramics and sample-taking to archaeobotany.

And if you’re in a mood to stream an informative hit show, “Explained, Explained” (p. 64) features a physicist reflecting on his involvement in an episode about the nature of time.

In fostering a space for discourse, our students’ perspectives are essential.

In “Forgetting Doesn’t Heal” (p. 53),

College students have questions about their career paths and lives after Penn. Alumni can be there with answers, advice, and guidance, through our online platform. Join this growing community today!

www.benconnect.sas.upenn.edu For more information, contact Kathe Archibald, Director of Global Alumni Engagement, at kathea@sas.upenn.edu.

Much more awaits in the pages ahead.

Thanks, as always, for reading, and stay safe.

Blake Cole, Editor

FALL /WINTER 2021

Vice Dean Appointments Announced for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion; Advancement

SCHOOL NEWS

Gary Nevitt Photography; Courtesy of Deborah Rhebergen

She joined Penn as Associate Vice Dean for Advancement in Arts & Sciences in November 2019. In that role she led the Arts & Sciences major gifts team to the successful conclusion of the Power of Penn Arts & Sciences Campaign. Prior to coming to Penn, she was Assistant Dean of Development and External Relations at the University of Maryland College of Behavioral and Social Sciences, where she oversaw fundraising and outreach efforts for over 80,000 alumni and other constituents, as well as marketing and communication.

Rhebergen holds a master’s degree in education leadership and policy studies from the University of Maryland. She began her career managing political campaigns before returning to work in development at her undergraduate alma mater, Lafayette College.

(L–R) Brighid Dwyer, Vice Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion; Deborah Rhebergen, Vice Dean for Advancement

Steven J. Fluharty, Dean and Thomas S. Gates, Jr. Professor of Psychology, Pharmacology, and Neuroscience, recently announced two new appointments to the Penn Arts & Sciences Office of the Dean. Dr. Brighid Dwyer was named inaugural Vice Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, effective December 6, and Deborah Rhebergen was named Vice Dean for Advancement, effective August 2, 2021.

Dwyer joins Penn from Princeton University, where she served as Associate Dean for Diversity and Inclusion in the Office of the Vice President for Campus Life since 2018.

“The depth of Brighid’s experience makes her an outstanding leader, partner, and guide for our community as we continue to work together to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion in our school,” says Fluharty. In this new role, Dwyer will provide leadership in pursuit of the School’s core commitments to achieving and maintaining excellence through diversity, including those articulated in the SAS Inclusion and Anti-Racism Initiatives published last year. She, and the new School Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion that she is charged with establishing, will serve the entire School community, including faculty, students, postdoctoral fellows, and staff.

Dwyer brings to Penn 20 years of experience as a practitioner, scholar, and teacher addressing issues of equity in higher education. At Princeton, she supervised the Women’s Center and LGBT Center and worked with a wide range of campus partners to develop and implement strategies and programs that promote an inclusive community. She received her undergraduate degree in sociology from UCLA and a Ph.D. from the Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education at the University of Michigan.

As Vice Dean for Advancement, Rhebergen is directly responsible for the planning and implementation of a comprehensive program of alumni relations, fundraising, and public relations on behalf of the School.

“We know Deb looks forward to partnering with us on the opportunities ahead,” says Fluharty.

“Her personal passion, combined with her strong knowledge of the Penn community, has her well positioned to lead our Advancement Office as we move into what promises to be an exciting new chapter of Penn’s history.”

Making a Difference in Global Communities and Klein Family Social Justice Grants Penn Arts & Sciences has awarded grants to 15 projects through the Making a Difference in Global Communities and Klein Family Social Justice initiatives.

Making a Difference in Global Communities supports multidisciplinary projects led by Arts & Sciences faculty working with students to address global societal challenges, including inequities in race, gender, sexual identity, socioeconomic mobility, education, healthcare, and political representation, as well as climate change, poverty, and immigration.

The Klein Grants, a new initiative, are a component of the School’s commitment to contributing to the achievement of social justice through research, teaching and community engagement, rooted in the arts and sciences.

“I’m thrilled to see the range of projects in this class of Making a Difference and Klein awardees,” says Steven J. Fluharty, Dean and Thomas S. Gates, Jr. Professor of Psychology, Pharmacology, and Neuroscience. “The breadth of their geographic reach, 3

OMNIA

SCHOOL NEWS

intellectual inquiry, and creative production is indicative of the richness of the liberal arts. With projects gathering data on campus, teaching philosophy and math in prisons, and making music in high school classrooms, among other endeavors, each one of these seeks to empower learning and grow knowledge at Penn and beyond.”

Penn-in-Kenya II: Bringing the World’s Premiere Refugee Film School Online, led by Peter Decherney, Professor of English and Cinema and Media Studies.

Diverse Global Communities and Local Resource Allocation, led by Hans-Peter Kohler, Frederick J. Warren Professor of Demography and Co-Director of the Population Aging Research Center.

Reducing Inequalities in College Access in Latinx Communities in Philadelphia, led by Emilio Parrado, Dorothy Swaine Thomas Professor of Sociology.

Seeds of Understanding: Prejudice-Reduction via Inter-Cultural Contact, led by Nicholas Sambanis, Presidential Distinguished Professor of Political Science.

Sighting Black Girlhood, led by Deborah Thomas, R. Jean Brownlee Term Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Experimental Ethnography.

LAVA: Laboratorio para apreciar la vida y el ambiente, led by Michael Weisberg, Professor and Chair of Philosophy.

4

The 2021 Klein Family Social Justice Grant awardees are: Diversity and Equity Initiative (DivE In) for the Mind Sciences, led by Angela Duckworth, Rosa Lee and Egbert Chang Professor.

Harun Küçük Brings Science, Philosophy, and History to the Middle East Center Harun Küçük, Associate Professor of History and Sociology of Science, was appointed Director of the Middle East Center (MEC) in July 2021, taking over from Interim Director John Ghazvinian.

Penn has a long history of studying the Middle East, going back to the late 1700s, when it was the first university in the nation to offer Arabic-language instruction.

Eric Sucar, University Communications

The 2021 Making a Difference in Global Communities projects are:

My Philadelphia Climate Story, led by Bethany Wiggin, Associate Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures and Founding Director of the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities.

Community Assessment of Race-Related Experience of Stress for Black Mothers, led by Morgan K. Hoke, Assistant Professor of Anthropology.

Belonging, Daily Emotions, and Academic Performance in FirstGeneration Students, led by Sarah Jaffee, Professor of Psychology.

West Philadelphia Community Archaeology Project, led by Megan Kassabaum, Associate Professor of Anthropology.

Prison Teaching Initiative Collaboration, led by Mona Merling, Assistant Professor of Mathematics.

Words and Beats: Music Technology and Social Emotional Healing in Philly Schools, led by Carol Muller, Professor of Music.

Empowering Community Voices and Visions, led

by Karen Redrobe, Elliot and Roslyn Jaffe Endowed Professor in Film Studies.

Philosophy in Prisons and Jails, led by Daniel Wodak, Assistant Professor of Philosophy.

Harun Küçük, Associate Professor of History and Sociology of Science

“Harun is a tireless advocate for the needs of the Center and has demonstrated a deep concern with understanding and listening to the needs of the staff,” says Ghazvinian, who will remain in an executive director role. “He will bring a fresh perspective and a respected voice for understanding our region in its deeper historical context.”

Küçük’s research has focused on everything from the Ottoman medical marketplace to minting practices, and from natural philosophy to gunpowder recipes. As head of the MEC, he plans to focus on diverse voices and perspectives; inclusion and access; and environment, society, and the global Middle East.

“I think my role first and foremost is to maintain all the good things that the Center’s already doing and bolster them,” says Küçük.

For Küçük, what sets the MEC apart is the amount of public programming and public outreach, from providing lesson plans and training for K-12 educators to partnering with the NaTakallam program, which connects forcibly displaced people with language and cultural exchange at schools in the Delaware Valley and beyond.

Recent programming also includes a virtual “Rapid Response” panel on the unfolding events in Afghanistan, and “Twenty Years Later: The Legacy of 9/11.”

“Penn is an institution of excellence and the Center’s public outreach gets that excellence into the community,” says Küçük.

SCHOOL NEWS

FALL /WINTER 2021

Robert A. Rescorla Fund Supports Undergraduate Research With MindCORE Shirley A. Steele has made a gift to create the Robert A. Rescorla Undergraduate Research Fellows Endowed Fund. The gift is made in memory of Steele’s late husband, Robert A. Rescorla, Emeritus Professor of Psychology and former Chair of the Department of Psychology and Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences.

The fund will support undergraduates conducting research on human thinking and behavior as part of MindCORE’s summer fellowship program. MindCORE, Penn’s hub for the integrative study of the mind, hosts a 10-week program that pairs students with faculty mentors for research and training.

Paul Rozin, Professor of Psychology, notes, “Dr. Rescorla was the world’s most distinguished scholar in the area of the

psychology of animal learning and a great teacher. He was perhaps the greatest pure experimental psychologist of the 20th century and a passionate advocate for undergraduates.”

Steele says, “Bob thought it was important for undergraduates to understand and participate in real research. His own college research experience was transformative, and it is only fitting that part of his legacy will be to create similar opportunities for generations of students.”

Steele is an artist whose work explores ideas about the human mind, language, and technology, informed by her career as a research scientist in speech and linguistics.

Robert A. Rescorla, Emeritus Professor of Psychology and former Chair of the Department of Psychology and Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences

OMNIA

SCHOOL NEWS

Faculty Honors Faculty across Penn Arts & Sciences have continued to distinguish themselves through their research and teaching, and their work has been recognized with notable honors and awards. Here are a few of the most recent.

In the natural sciences, Sarah A. Tishkoff, David and Lynn Silfen University Professor in the Department of Biology in Penn Arts & Sciences and the Department of Genetics in Perelman School of Medicine, has been elected to the National Academy of Medicine, one of the highest honors in health and medicine. Joseph Francisco, President’s Distinguished Professor of Earth and Environmental Science, was elected a member of both the American Philosophical Society, an organization that honors extraordinary accomplishments

in all fields, and the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, for his outstanding scientific achievements. Yun Ding, Assistant Professor of Biology, was selected as a Kinship Foundation Searle Scholar, an honor given to exceptional young faculty in the biomedical sciences and chemistry. Martha Farah, Walter H. Annenberg Professor in the Natural Sciences in the Department of Psychology, was awarded the 2021 Howard Crosby Warren Medal by the Society of Experimental Psychologists for her foundational work in cognitive neuroscience.

Two humanities faculty received book awards. David Eng, Richard L. Fisher Professor in English, earned the Society for Psychological Anthropology Boyer Prize for Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic

Lives of Asian Americans, coauthored with Shinhee Han of The New School.

Amy Offner, Associate Professor of History, received the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics 2021 Alice Amsden Award for Sorting Out the Mixed Economy: The Rise and Fall of Welfare and Developmental States in the Americas. Also in the humanities, Julie Davis, Professor of History of Art, was named a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow, an award for individuals who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or creative ability in the arts.

In the social sciences, two political science faculty received notable honors.

Diana Mutz, Samuel A. Stouffer Professor of Political Science and Communication, was elected to the National Academy

SCHOOL NEWS

FALL /WINTER 2021

of Sciences in recognition of her distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. Michael Horowitz, Richard Perry Professor of Political Science and Director of Perry World House, was appointed a senior fellow for defense technology and innovation in the Council on Foreign Relations David Rockefeller Studies Program. And Deborah Thomas, R. Jean Brownlee Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Experimental Ethnography, received the American Anthropological Association 2020 Gender Equity Award, which recognizes individuals who investigate practices in anthropology that are potentially sexist and discriminatory.

Karen Detlefsen Named Vice Provost for Education

Detlefsen is Chair of the Committee on Undergraduate Education in the College of Arts & Sciences; founding director of Penn’s Project for Philosophy for the Young; and an affiliated faculty member of the Center for Research in Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies. She is a leading global scholar of early modern philosophy with particular interests in women in the history of philosophy, the history and philosophy of education, and the history and philosophy of science. Detlefsen has been awarded the Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching, the highest University-wide teaching honor, and the Kahn Award for Distinguished Teaching by an Assistant Professor in Penn Arts & Sciences.

“Karen Detlefsen is renowned for her strong commitments to teaching and education,” says Pritchett, “not only on our campus but also in our Philadelphia community. She will be an ideal partner to help us chart the course for graduate and undergraduate education at Penn as we emerge from the pandemic in the years ahead.”

“I greatly look forward to working with Karen Detlefsen in this new role,” adds Winkelstein. “She is a highly experienced teacher and scholar who is well-known across campus as one of our great mentors and collaborative leaders. She will work closely with me, Provost Pritchett, and our many faculty, staff, and student partners to help shape and implement our core educational initiatives going forward.”

Courtesy of Office of the Provost

Karen Detlefsen, Professor of Philosophy and Education, has been named Vice Provost for Education. The announcement was made

by Provost Wendell Pritchett and Deputy Provost Beth Winkelstein.

New Faculty Penn Arts & Sciences appointed 15 new faculty members for the 2021–2022 academic year. They include Roberto Gonzales, Richard Perry University Professor and Professor of Sociology and Education, who holds a joint appointment in the Graduate School of Education.

Three are Presidential Penn Compact Professors, a new partnership with Penn President Amy Gutmann to promote faculty excellence and diversity: Wale Adebanwi and Keisha-Khan Y. Perry in Africana Studies and Jennifer Morton in Philosophy. Other new faculty are: Anthony Braga, Jerry Lee Professor of Criminology Juan Camilo Castillo, Assistant Professor of Economics Fiona Cunningham, Assistant Professor of Political Science Angela Gibney, Presidential Professor of Mathematics Jon Hawkings, Assistant Professor of Earth and Environmental Science

Karen Detlefsen, Professor of Philosophy and Education

The Vice Provost for Education, reporting to the deputy provost, oversees undergraduate and graduate education at Penn, developing and implementing policies that promote academic excellence, innovative teaching and learning, and interdisciplinary knowledge across the University. Detlefsen will chair the Council of Undergraduate Deans, Council of Graduate Deans, Council of Professional Master’s Degree Deans, Graduate Council of the Faculties, and Faculty Advisory Council for Access and Academic Support Initiatives.

Daniel Krashen, Presidential Professor of Mathematics So-Rim Lee, Korea Foundation Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations Monica McCallum, Assistant Professor of Chemistry Zita Nunes, Associate Professor of English Hugo Ulloa, Assistant Professor of Earth and Environmental Science Christopher Woods, Avalon Professor in the Humanities in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations 7

OMNIA

FINDINGS

Write the Qasbah Megan Robb, Julie and Martin Franklin Assistant Professor in Religious Studies, published a book on Madinah, an early 20th-century newspaper that was influential in creating a shared Muslim identity in South Asia.

BY

LAUREN REBECCA THACKER

P

opular understandings position the relationship between newspaper and community-building as a distinctly Western phenomenon, later exported to the rest of the world. But Megan Robb says that’s only part of the story. Her book on an Urdu-language newspaper printed via lithograph in Binjor, India, reveals how community, religious identity, and nationalism grew alongside one another in early 20th-century British India.

“The history of how print technology developed alongside ideas is distinctive to South Asia, and within that context I’m talking about the Urdu language,” she says.

The book, Print and the Urdu Public: Muslims, Newspapers, and Urban Life in Colonial India, focuses on Madinah, published in Binjor, a qasbah.

Robb, Julie and Martin Franklin Assistant Professor in Religious Studies, explains the meaning of qasbah can 8

vary, but in South Asia it typically refers to a place larger and more bureaucratically significant than a village but not as large and commercial as a city. Qasbahs are often centers of local trade and have a significant Muslim minority, if not a small majority. Madinah, published in a qasbah with minimal financial and cultural connections to the wider world, became an influential voice in Northern India and what is now Pakistan.

Robb wanted to know more about how newspapers move through the world as physical objects. No one had really explored those questions in the history of Urdu, she says, “partly because newspapers are often treated as disposable objects. People mistakenly view them as just records of things that happened instead of places where ideas and identities were worked out. This book is the first to talk in detail about how lithographic newspapers are produced.”

Part of this unique aspect of Madinah is its approach the Urdu language itself.

Metal typesetting allowed a proliferation of newspapers in Roman scripts, but the cursive Urdu script would not be attractive if printed that way. Lithography—a printmaking technique in which characters or images are drawn on a stone or metal plate and transferred to paper via a chemical reaction— flourished instead. This technology is cheaper than typesetting, which meant that qasbahs like Binjor could conduct large-scale printing and distribution.

Robb is quick to point out that Urdu is not an essentially Muslim language. While in contemporary South Asia there are associations between Urdu and Islam, and Hindi and Hinduism, this hasn’t always been the case.

In fact, the associations are relatively recent phenomena and need to be historicized, according to Robb. Since

newspapers like the Madinah helped create those associations, studying Madinah helps with this task.

The relatively small group of Madinah writers and editors, she says, were hashing out what it meant to be Muslim in an India under British rule.

Identity and community were not fixed, but instead were being created and interrogated through the paper.

This is where the idea of a “public,” from the book’s title, is important. “The public is not something we can look at and simply say, ‘oh look, it’s fully formed,’” says Robb. “Instead, the idea of the public is always a conversation: ‘What is this thing that we’re in? What are the boundaries of this conversation that we’re having?’”

Ultimately, her book argues that Madinah was a product of the qasbah even as it created understandings of the qasbah and Muslim life that reverberate today.

FINDINGS

FALL /WINTER 2021

The Story of Immigration Enforcement In an award-winning paper, Aaron Chalfin, Assistant Professor of Criminology, examines the public safety implications of labor market-based immigration enforcement.

BY

DUYEN NGUYEN

W

hen Aaron Chalfin, Assistant Professor of Criminology, began studying the impact on crime of the Legal Arizona Workers Act—an immigration enforcement measure enacted in 2008—he didn’t expect to find much.

That’s because, despite public opinion, “people who are undocumented don’t seem to be a big part of the crime problem in this country,” he explains.

What Chalfin learned, though, wasn’t insignificant. But neither was it the story that opponents of immigration have been telling.

The Legal Arizona Workers Act, which requires all employers in Arizona to establish the identity and work eligibility of new hires through the federal E-Verify system, reflects recent measures for reducing undocumented immigration— legislation that controls who can participate in the U.S. labor market. The law allows the state to suspend or revoke the business licenses of employers who knowingly hire undocumented workers.

The act’s impact on the state’s demographics became clear within a year, Chalfin says, noting that the Mexican immigrant population decreased by as much as 20 percent. Chalfin and Monica Deza of CUNY, Hunter College set out to determine what implications, if any, the act and labor market immigration enforcement in general had for crime.

Chalfin and Deza published their findings in the article, “Immigration Enforcement, Crime, and Demography: Evidence from the Legal Arizona Workers Act,” which received the 2021 Best Paper Award for Earlier-Career Scholars from the journal Criminology and Public Policy.

To study the impact of the law on Arizona’s crime rate, the researchers compared Arizona to other states with

similar pre-2008 trends in crime, using a statistical estimator to determine the most appropriate comparison group.

Chalfin and Deza found that, prior to the passage of the Legal Arizona Workers Act, Arizona’s crime trends reflected those of other states. But, the article reports, after the law was enacted, property crimes in Arizona dropped more precipitously than in other parts of the country. What does this suggest about the relationship between labor market immigration enforcement and crime?

Not what some might think, Chalfin says, explaining that Arizona’s legislation disproportionately drove younger people out of the state. Men between the ages of 15 and 39 accounted for the largest decrease in Arizona’s Mexican immigrant population. The reason for this demographic shift, Chalfin explains, is that many undocumented immigrants, especially young men, come to the U.S. in search of employment. So, Chalfin says, the real story is about age and gender.

Criminological research shows that

“young men commit an outsize share of the crimes,” he explains. “Anytime you get rid of a chunk of the young male population, crime is probably going to go down.

So, what we’re finding really isn’t specific to undocumented people.”

Nor are Chalfin and Deza’s findings specific to the current landscape. A study of incarceration rates for immigrants in early 20th-century America found that the immigrant populations at the time were less likely to be incarcerated than U.S. natives—with the exception of immigrants from Italy. He explains, “People coming from Germany and Ireland were equally likely to be men and women—they were young families, not the demographic that tends to be involved in crime—while most Italians were young men.”

Chalfin, whose current research focuses on the costs and benefits of policing, concludes that, on the list of drivers of public safety, immigration is not as consequential as some may believe.

Illustrations by Maggie Chiang

9

OMNIA

FINDINGS

CSI: Shakespeare Zachary Lesser, Edward W. Kane Professor of English, used ghosts and scrapes to learn more about how Shakespeare’s work was seen in his own time.

BY

SUSAN AHLBORN

O

ver the space of five years, Zachary Lesser got up close and personal with about 350 copies of Shakespeare’s plays. His new book, Ghosts, Holes, Rips and Scrapes: Shakespeare in 1619, Bibliography in the Longue Durée, uses what he saw to challenge some long-held perceptions about how Shakespeare was seen in his own time.

Lesser, Edward W. Kane Professor of English, looked at nearly all surviving copies of the 1619 “Pavier Quartos,” the first collection of Shakespeare’s work. Scholars have believed that a publisher named Thomas Pavier put out the collection in 1619, but Shakespeare’s acting troupe, the King’s Men, asked the Lord Chamberlain to issue an order forbidding the printing of any of their plays, so that their own edition, the First Folio, would not be scooped.

Pavier then put false dates on

10

his plays and split them up to make them look like leftover copies of earlier editions.

But no one has gone back to look at the original copies for nearly a century. Lesser visited about 35 libraries from London to Fort Worth to Penn Libraries’ Kislak Center to do his own analytic bibliography, which he calls a “forensic analysis of books.”

“Ghosts” are faint images caused when pages are pressed against each other for a long time, showing that books now found alone were once bound together. Holes are the tiny slits deep in the gutter margin, indicating the play was once sold as an individual pamphlet that was simply sewn together.

A combination of the two showed Lesser that many more copies of the complete collection were sold than has been thought and revealed that a non-Shakespearean play was often included. Rips and scrapes are signs that

the already falsified date was further disguised by being scraped off with a knife or just torn off, suggesting to Lesser that someone felt the books needed to be disguised in an ongoing way.

One of Lesser’s biggest findings was that Thomas Pavier was not actually the main agent behind the Pavier Quartos. Instead, it was the printers William and Isaac Jaggard—a surprise because the Jaggards also printed the King’s Men’s First Folio.

“Once you say, well, the same people printed the Folio who printed this bootleg version, which has plays that aren’t

by Shakespeare, which has versions of some of Shakespeare’s plays that seem like they might not be authoritative versions, then you start to muddy the waters over the texts in the First Folio,” says Lesser. He thinks that modern scholars have seen Pavier as the prime mover of the collection to prevent this

“contamination” of the Folio, because of Shakespeare’s canonization as an author.

“Theatrical texts have a lot of collaboration in them, and the history of Shakespeare editing has been all about trying to discern a way to find the texts that came out of his pen,” he says. But he thinks book buyers in 1619 were less invested in this distinction.

Ghosts, Holes, Rips and Scrapes reads like a detective story, but Lesser cautions that this approach can lead to false conclusions. “It pushes you towards a perfect Agatha Christie-type narrative, which can mean that you don’t see certain things that are loose threads or that don’t fit as well.”

He’s also fascinated by what could have been if the 1619 collection had succeeded and scooped the First Folio: “How would Shakespeare look different? It suggests the accidental nature of a lot of our literary history.”

FINDINGS

FALL /WINTER 2021

Remote Learning and Social and Emotional Health Angela Duckworth, Rosa Lee and Egbert Chang Professor, and colleagues found that teenagers who attended school virtually fared worse than classmates who went in person.

BY

MICHELE W. BERGER

R

esearchers are still trying to understand how remote learning influences students. Recent work from Angela Duckworth, Rosa Lee and Egbert Chang Professor in the Department of Psychology and the Wharton School, published in the journal Educational Researcher focuses on remote learning by high school students.

For 10th, 11th, and 12th graders, the findings were clear: Those on Zoom school struggled more than peers taking classes in person. For 9th graders, however, the divide between groups was much smaller.

“Maybe 9th graders had never experienced high school before, so their pandemic fall semester wasn’t as influenced,” Duckworth says. “But I think a different explanation, and one that makes sense to us as developmental psychologists, is that the older you are the more you want to separate from your parents. The period of adolescence is when you transition from being a dependent child to an independent adult.”

Duckworth and colleagues from the Character Lab—a nonprofit she founded and runs that is focused on the science and practice of character development— along with researchers from Temple University and an organization called Mathematica, looked at data from more than 6,500 students in grades nine through 12. Some attended virtual school full-time, others attended in person.

Remote students reported lower levels of social, emotional, and academic well-being, findings that held even when accounting for factors like gender, race and ethnicity, and socioeconomic status.

“There is a thriving gap,” says Duckworth, who is also Director of Education for Penn’s Behavior Change for Good initiative. “On every measure tested we saw a difference favoring kids who were in-person versus learning at home and therefore alone. We’re inferring from this that, all things being equal, teenagers would really prefer to be with each other and with adults like their teachers, not home with mom and dad.”

Collecting these data began long before the pandemic, through the Character Lab Research Network. Three times a year, participants complete a Student Thriving Index, through which they rate facets of their well-being, including how

well they think they fit in, whether there’s a trustworthy adult at school, and how interesting they find their classes.

“It’s a way of taking the pulse on how students are feeling,” Duckworth says.

“We’ve realized there’s only one way to truly know how teenagers are doing, and that’s to ask them.”

Student participants had completed a February 2020 survey, which became the pre-pandemic baseline. The following survey took place in October; at that time 4,202 students were attending school remotely and 2,374 students were going in person. Because Duckworth and colleagues hadn’t randomly assigned participants into groups, they controlled for whatever variables they could.

During the pandemic, researchers have paid a great deal of attention to young children, and rightly so, Duckworth says.

But to her, this work shows the importance of closely watching what’s happening to teenagers, too, of paying attention to their social and emotional needs.

Like much about the pandemic, it’s difficult to say whether blips like this will become long-term challenges. Duckworth expects most teenagers will bounce back. “It would be consistent with what we know about adolescent development,” she says. “The most common response to adversity is resilience. It’s the rule, not the exception.”

Other researchers included Emma Satlof-Bedrick and Sean Talamas of the Character Lab; doctoral student in psychology Benjamin Lira; Temple University’s Laurence Steinberg; and Tim Kautz and Amy Defnet of data analytics organization Mathematica.

Illustrations by Maggie Chiang

11

OMNIA

OMNIA 101

DEFINING MODERN ART André Dombrowski, Frances Shapiro-Weitzenhoffer Associate Professor of 19th-Century European Art, discusses modern art’s origins, influences, and impacts.

By Jane Carroll

I

n the history of art, the term modern art encompasses a wide range of artistic practices and time frames, resisting easy definition. André Dombrowski, Frances Shapiro-Weitzenhoffer Associate Professor of 19th-Century European Art, attempts to define it—or at least describe and circumscribe it—in a new undergraduate course called What Is Modern Art? “It’s very much devised as a course offering an archaeology of the students’ current relationship to art, to new media, and image culture more broadly,” says Dombrowski.

Here, Dombrowski shares his thoughts on what makes art modern. He says the lack of any one, clear-cut definition of the term is not necessarily a bad thing. “I’m not a one-answer kind of person,” he says.

12

OMNIA 101 offers readers a peek into what faculty do each day in their classrooms and how their research and expertise are inspiring the next generation.

How do you describe modern art?

On a basic level, modern art describes the period roughly from the late 19th century to the 1960s, and it tends to include art made in Europe and North America but was obviously a global phenomenon. The “isms” most people are familiar with—Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Cubism, Dada, Surrealism, and so forth—are subsets of Modernism.

On a more conceptual level, modern art, or Modernism, implies a particular mindset and a particular practice—a willingness to double down on the category of art itself, to question it, to interrogate it, to be particularly self-aware about the concept of art and the various practices of art making. In that sense, Modernism is a willingness to experiment, to take things to extremes, to push the boundaries, to break existing rules and protocols.

That interrogation or experimentation can happen at the level of form—digging into the structures and materials of painting, sculpture, or photography.

It can be experiments with identity, such as when someone like Andy Warhol photographed himself in a number of guises, or the 19th-century artist Rosa Bonheur dressed in men’s clothing to

FALL /WINTER 2021

OMNIA 101

gain access to the male-dominated art establishment. Or, some artists projected themselves into different (better) futures or pasts.

debate. When I teach this, I introduce students to both of these origin stories.

I do think that the truth of the matter is somewhere in between.

And finally, Modernism can mean an experimentation within, and with, the social. Modern art can offer visions of different communities and collectivities, new gender and sexual norms, and postcolonial conditions, even new forms of museum practice and other, more open forms of cultural and institutional belonging. The best modernist art is perhaps that in which form is probed substantively for social meaning and resonance.

What is the relationship between Modernism in visual art and literature?

Are there particular works of art or artists that critics point to as the beginning of the modern period?

It’s one of the central questions of Modernist studies in art history, and there isn’t a clear-cut answer because different scholars come down on different sides of the above polarities. For those interested in form and formalism, Modernism starts in the late 19th century with Paul Gauguin, Paul Cézanne, and Vincent Van Gogh, that moment around 1890 when a whole group of artists started to use color independently—painting trees blue and so on—or when they obliterated Renaissance perspectival space. Some go further back to Édouard Manet in the 1860s and say that he’s the one who started to break actively with established academic rules of the past within his paintings.

The other group of scholars is more interested in the relationship between Modernism and modernity, in the social origins of Modernism. They tend to take the story still further back. Some say that Modernism began with the American, French, and Haitian revolutions, or the American Civil War. Their argument would sound something like this: It’s in those moments when the instability and volatility of the political and colonial environments emerge most articulately, and therefore the formal experimentations of art and artistic practice can respond more easily to what’s happening on a social level.

I don’t think there is a camp that truly wins out, and the conversation between them is what energizes so much of this

From the very beginnings of modern art, those lines are very blurry and fine artists were friends with poets and writers.

There are many examples in which the milieu of writing and the milieu of the fine arts deeply intersected. And there are poets, like Stéphane Mallarmé, who were very interested in what one might call visual poetry, where the word and the letter become visual sign and image.

And once that happens, there really is no longer a true distinction between the fine arts and poetic or literary expression.

How did cultural events like wars and technological advances impact Modernism?

Wars and technological advancements are social vehicles of change, so if you have an artistic movement that banks everything on changing existing norms and practices, then it in turn will feed on those historical moments during which change itself registers forcefully—when new social orders get tested or old political regimes overthrown, often by violent means.

Modern art thrives on those moments and conditions when life itself is interrupted and disrupted, either in terms of politics or when it comes to gender norms or race relations. That kind of coming together, a willingness to explore the boundaries of form at the very moment when the social is at its most volatile—I think that combination energizes modern art profoundly.

Secondly, modern art of course has a technocratic bent. Modern artists think of art-making often in almost militaristic terms—a “call to arms,” or, a “let’s tear this down.” In many ways, Modernism has a deeply violent rhetoric, and sometimes violent practices as well, at its core.

And those tend to reverberate more when a whole culture speaks in similar desires for change and social restructuring. So, it’s a loop—political culture and art feeding each other.

Some critics see Modernism as primarily male and Euro-centric.

Is that a fair characterization?

I’m not sure whether Modernism (or modern art) in itself deserves the label of being male and Euro-centric. The historic record is truly diverse and wide ranging, and art history is making expanded efforts currently to demonstrate the true breadth of art-making in the modern era, with new histories of Black Modernisms and Feminist Modernisms and Queer Modernisms being written. They have mainly just not been told enough. So, I would rather lay the blame at those powerful institutions, like museums and art academies, art history departments, art magazines, journals of art history, that have shaped artistic preferences and tastes over centuries, but also a broader bias that has favored a modern art to be this virile, white, Euro-centric, North American kind of thing.

Where does the postmodern period begin?

This is as difficult to answer as the question of when modern art begins. Some say the postmodern period has never truly begun, because we are still living through a late phase of Modernism and modernity itself. But if one were to make the following distinction—that Modernism is a concentration on the category of art itself and an ontological questioning of art as a practice, then postmodern art is somewhat more interested in the social functions of art, the social meanings that surround the artwork, and in bringing out those social implications. If one looks carefully, there’s a postmodern strand that runs parallel to Modernism itself; despite the “post” prefix, they are contemporaries. Much of the course I’m teaching is anchored around World War I, and in an utterly parallel manner, pure abstraction emerges in Hilma af Klint, Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian, and others, just around this time. But in those same years, Marcel Duchamp is making the first readymades and the nihilistic Dada movement is in the offing as well.

It’s a much more looping and recursive narrative overall, rather than a jump from Modernism to Postmodernism.

(L–R) Frédéric Bazille, Young Woman with Peonies, 1870; Henry Ossawa Tanner, The Seine, c. 1902; Kazimir Severinovich Malevich, A Peasant Woman Goes for Water, 1913; Hilma af Klint, The Ten Largest No. 8 - Adulthood, 1907 13

OMNIA

The Future

of History

Three historians weigh in on how we can understand our past.

BY SUSAN AHLBORN ILLUSTRATIONS BY VANESSA LOVEGROVE

14

FALL /WINTER 2021

15

P

OMNIA arents, teachers, and school boards arguing over how classrooms talk about race. Monuments coming down. Passionate defenses of our history as a noble past clashing with views that see that same history as the roots of today’s injustice.

In the United States and around the world, we’re debating what our history is, what it means, and how to share it. “We have to somehow acknowledge that it can take hundreds of years to discover the meaning of something, just as if an event happens in our own life, it can take us years for us to process that event,” says David Young Kim, an associate professor of history of art. “I just love that quote from William Faulkner when he says, ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’”

How does history affect our lives? How can we make it come alive? What does it mean to rewrite history?

Three historians share their thoughts.

Looking Back

Reexamining our history through the lens of the present is not new, says Sophia Rosenfeld, Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History.

“I had excellent teachers in high school and college who made it clear that history was a good way of thinking about the past, but also a good way of thinking about the present,” she says. “It gave you a perspective on where you’re situated in the world and what other possibilities are out there.”

Winky Lewis

Sophia Rosenfeld, Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History 16

More than that, she says, history has always been written in some way to serve the present, whether it’s as entertainment, moral didacticism, or political persuasion. “We’re not finished writing it not just because the past keeps getting longer,” she explains. “It’s also because the present keeps changing. We ask new questions about the past that are often related to what’s happening in the world today.”

Rosenfeld studies the underlying assumptions that have grounded democracy since the 1650s. In her most recent book, Democracy and Truth: A Short History, she took what she’d learned about the connections between truth and democracy historically to evaluate their bearing on modern-day politics. A previous book, Common Sense: A Political History, won the Mark Lynton History Prize and the Society for the History of the Early American Republic Book Prize and has been translated into French, Chinese, and Korean.

Looking back at the past through our present perspective doesn’t mean drawing a straight line between the two. Heather Andrea Williams, Geraldine R. Segal Professor in American Social Thought, finds that many students—and adults—think they can directly connect something that happened in the past to something now. “In class, when we’re talking religion, somebody will start to formulate

some arguments about religion or Christianity, and I’m saying slow down, slow down,” she says. “We’re going to spend a week talking about that and reading ‘till we work this out, and then you may still form the same conclusion, but at least you’ve thought about it.”

Williams is the author of Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom; Help Me to Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery; and American Slavery: A Very Short Introduction. Her goal is to get, and give, “a feel of what things were like, what people were like, where they’re standing. I want my students to dig in and be fascinated by the study of history.

And if by chance that helps them to understand something that happens later on, great.”

I think studying history is a little bit like traveling. You can’t really see your own culture and your own situation in the world until you’ve seen other possibilities.

FALL /WINTER 2021

Visiting the Past A professor of Africana studies and the Graduate and Undergraduate Chair of that department, Williams often takes her students to visit plantations (this semester they’re going virtually). “You can see how the white people’s house is elevated. It’s on this hill. You see the cabins where the enslaved people lived. And you can see that up at the big house, they can look down to where the enslaved people were. You see the distance between the cabins and the house so that you know that there may have been moments of privacy, of secrecy.

But the overseers are close by. So, we’re layering that onto what we’re reading.”

Williams knows that seeing matters.

She connects Mamie Till, who made the decision to leave open the coffin of her 14-year-old son Emmett after he was lynched, with George Floyd. “Why does

it take something so awful? Why do we have to see it with our own eyes for it to make such a difference?” she asks.

“What about when we are able to erase the image from our minds?”

To think historically, Rosenfeld says, people need to move out of their natural understanding of the present and enter other worlds. “I think studying history is a little bit like traveling,” she says. “You can’t really see your own culture and your own situation in the world until you’ve seen other possibilities. What do other families look like? What do people eat? What counts as danger? All of those things look different when you’re traveling in space or time, and afford you the opportunity to look again at the things we often take for granted.”

On these trips into the past, we’ll see people behaving in ways that are repugnant to us: enslaving other humans or fighting to drive indigenous people from their land. Some of today’s

debates center around how we should judge figures like Thomas Jefferson, a founding father who enslaved people.

“I think one of the least interesting conversations that we could have is about who was a good person and who was a bad person in today’s terms, or even in the terms of the past,” Rosenfeld says. Instead, she believes we are better off approaching forms of injustice and inequality in the past by trying to understand the moral, ethical, political, and other tradeoffs that people made in different times in response to different circumstances and beliefs. What drove them to create forms of oppression and forms of liberation, to accept or try to change the status quo?

Rosenfeld reminds us that the future is coming for us, too. “We will be judged and found wanting in all kinds of ways,” she says. “I would hope that people in the future look back and certainly condemn injustice wherever they see it in our own world, but also try 17

OMNIA to understand the contradictions that people live with in different moments and places and times.

Otherwise history is considerably less interesting and fruitful.”

Williams turned to history trying to find that understanding. She was a lawyer before she came to academia, but teaching a seminar on race and racism in American history to middle- and high-school students re-ignited questions she’d had since she came to the United States from Jamaica when she was 11: “Where did this thing come from? Why is it that some people think that they’re better than me based on our skin color? It was baffling to me.”

Williams’ research focuses on Black people, specifically African Americans, and the white people who “put in place the world that really conscribed the movements, the possibilities for those Black people. To me, you’ve got to know about both of those. But it can be very hard to find material on African Americans, especially in the earlier periods, whereas it’s much easier to find on, say, elite white men or elite white women. I have to be very careful about not letting the white men take all my attention.”

Their individual points of view act like a light that refracts the meaning and the emotion that these works of art provoke.

Finding the material takes persistence and imagination.

Williams is a quilter, and compares her search through sources like newspaper archives and legal documents to how she puts small pieces of fabric together. She doesn’t often find journals or letters by Black people, many of whom were legally forbidden to become literate.

But she finds letters about them and court documents and later interviews that report their words.

Clay Williams

“To do this research means to really put in the time and the effort,” she says, “and when you can’t find exactly what you’re looking for, you find something and you sit with that and you turn it upside down and you turn it sideways and you say, ‘What can I do with this?’” She adds that digital access to newspapers has been “fantastic” because she can search terms and then names once she finds them.

Kim’s objects of study—art from the Italian Renaissance—can themselves be sources, but must be approached with care. He’s interested in the language of art and in how images complicate the historical sources we have. “I think it’s dangerous to use works of art as illustrations of history,” he says. “They can actually create a meaning that can be in opposition to what we know.”

Heather Andrea Williams, Geraldine R. Segal Professor in American Social Thought 18

Because these artworks continue to exist in our own time, says Kim, we can experience them in a historical way, according to the interlocutors of the 15th and 16th centuries, as

Codebreaking Historians often must get over an early hurdle of just understanding the sources. It can mean learning a foreign language but also earlier forms of a language, like Medieval English. There will be different expressions, or words that have different meanings—for a long time, “boy” could refer to a Black man of any age. “You have to break the code,” says Heather Andrea Williams, Geraldine R. Segal Professor in American Social Thought.

Today’s students face a new barrier: Many of them have not learned cursive writing. “It’s like me looking at Greek,” Williams says. “They don’t know what to do with it, and they get frustrated.

But I insist because if you can’t read this or if you just push it aside because it’s hard to read, that means all these stories never get told.”

For David Young Kim, Associate Professor of History of Art, the barrier is even more basic: How do we use language to describe or offer an account of something which will inevitably escape language?

“I think, because English is my second language, I’ve always been very interested in how art history is perhaps the most challenging linguistic discipline because the very subject matter is nonverbal,” he says. He works with international students using art history as an instrument through which they can explore different dimensions of English— “giving students lexica, words, ways of speaking about works of art, because it’s like discovering a different part of the English language that is somehow mysterious or not often explored, and even native English speakers may not know.”

FALL /WINTER 2021

19

OMNIA Courtesy of David Young Kim

well as their relevance for us today.

He’s often asked if there’s anything new to say about his specialty. “We often have a perspective just like someone looking through a telescope with a different magnifying lens. We have a different perspective than what people in the 16th century had, because things that were obvious and familiar to them may be strange and mysterious and fascinating for us,” he says. “I tell my students that there’s always something to be said because their individual points of view act like a light that refracts the meaning and the emotion that these works of art provoke.”

David Young Kim, Associate Professor of History of Art

Like all historians, Kim must set the contextual stage for his subject. Today’s college students, from a range of cultural and religious backgrounds, don’t necessarily know the Bible and Greco-Roman mythology that influenced Renaissance art. “It forces you as a professor to explain certain assumptions about Western and Renaissance culture that we often take for granted,” he says. “Why is the Virgin dressed in this particular color? Or why was this painting round?”

“It’s almost as though art history is about learning how to speak a variety of historical languages,” continues Kim. “I think that’s what I find very interesting.

20

You’re speaking the language of the past.

And sometimes, in the classroom, you’re speaking the language of the present, hoping to teach students how to think according to terms of the past.”

Refocusing the Lens on the Past

Beginning in the second half of the 20th century, as a result of developments like the labor and women’s movements, historians turned their attention to the stories of ordinary people, “whether they were peasants or early union organizers, which the dominant narrative had submerged, if not erased,” says Rosenfeld.

Right now, environmental history is big, as is a focus on race. “I’m very interested in how the present can reveal or unearth things about the past,” says Kim. “Current concerns about gender and race and identity allow us to see those issues that were kept in the backyard.”

Kim’s book, The Traveling Artist in the Italian Renaissance: Geography, Mobility, and Style, explores 16th-century discourse

FALL /WINTER 2021

concerning artists’ travels and the impact of that travel on artistic process, as well as viewing those journeys in relation to Renaissance ideas concerning geography, the environment, the act of creation, and selfhood. One of his current projects, Lives Found in Translation: Giorgio Vasari, Global Art History, and Cultural Authenticity, looks at translations of Vasari’s s Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, which was written in the mid-1500s. He’s focusing on a translation done into Korean by Lee Keun Bai, a Korean biochemist, in 1986.

“It’s an interesting historical circumstance because the translator was a colonial subject of the Japanese empire. But that very colonial education enabled him to be acquainted with European culture and works of art,” says Kim. “It’s a very complex and delicate subject, and I’m trying to do it justice, especially in the moment in which we’re living.”

To Kim, who was born in the United States to Northern Korean immigrants who then moved to Brazil, the topic also touches on questions of “subterranean expectations” of who should do what. “I think that there’s all this discourse about global art history and transcultural exchange, but we don’t really take the time to stop and think, who are the practitioners in our field, and whom do we expect to be a certain historian of a particular discipline?”

The new angles also fill in gaps. Williams sees students eager to connect slavery to the present try to jump over a century and a half. “Slavery lasted from the 1600s to 1865. It ended 156 years ago, but what’s happened since then? I really push my students to be more nuanced and to think about what else comes in there and what’s

changed. And don’t talk about ‘for the better’ or ‘for the worse,’ let’s just talk about what’s changed. How Black families are structured in America, rules about welfare, rules around all kinds of things have changed over time. The delusion of white supremacy changes to meet the needs that people see in that moment.”

We can also turn to history to see if we’re replaying an era or breaking with the past—looking back at the 1918 influenza pandemic to compare it to COVID-19, for example, or for political conflicts similar to today. “At the moment, I feel strongly that knowing more about the past can help us assess the present,” Rosenfeld says. “It offers tools for analyzing why we have the norms we do, but also sometimes reveals interesting paths not taken but worth re-exploring now.

21

OMNIA

“History is being rewritten continually.

That doesn’t mean that the facts aren’t facts, though sometimes new facts are discovered,” adds Rosenfeld. “But maybe more importantly, we ask new questions and the new questions drive us to look at different kinds of material and sources, which in turn lead to new conclusions.”

The Past in the Present

To Kim, art lives outside history in some ways. “I don’t think that art necessarily has a history, like an organism that is born, lives, and dies,” he says. “We exist in the same space as it. So art history for me is using language to refine how we talk about works of art.”

He believes that we shouldn’t necessarily think of fields of study as immediately relevant or transparently consumable.

“Sometimes studying something which is esoteric and strange can open up different ways of thinking that may not necessarily be immediately obvious. And I think it’s now, more than any time, we need to understand our present in new ways.”

22

You find some little things, some little questions, something that makes you curious and you go off. Don’t begin with an argument.

The American Historical Association, where Rosenfeld just ended a term as a vice president, is more involved in contemporary politics than in the past, she says, “simply because historical controversies have become political controversies, and because the question of the keeping versus destruction of records has become very important in political life.

Our cultural wars have intersected with questions about the teaching of history and the researching and writing of history that can’t be avoided.”

The number of students who take classes or major in history has been falling in the United States, as students choose more obviously professional paths, but Rosenfeld isn’t worried that this means history itself is obsolete. “It’s a very exciting time to be studying history and to be thinking about history,” she says. “I think our students are extremely invested in what they’re reading and writing about and excited about what they’re uncovering, because it seems meaningful. It’s a field where they are, ideally, gaining tools to begin reorienting big conversations about the world we live in.”

Describing one of her students, Williams says, “She was an amazing student who was just curious and loved history and found something that really was just covered in a paragraph and decided to do her capstone paper on that topic and to explore that topic. And that’s what you do as a scholar. You find some little things, some little questions, something that makes you curious and you go off. Don’t begin with an argument, don’t begin with what you think you already know and what your position already is, but what are you curious about?”

FALL /WINTER 2021

Season 3 explores scientific ideas that cause big reactions.

We’ll look at stories of science getting knocked around and standing back up again, in a world full of polarization, politics, misrepresentation, and simple misunderstanding.

Listen to In These Times at

www.sas.upenn.edu/in-these-times or search OMNIA Podcast wherever you listen.

23

NOIRLab

24

OMNIA

FALL /WINTER 2021

Connecting the CELESTIAL DOTS Pedro Bernardinelli, then-doctoral candidate in physics and astronomy, and Gary Bernstein, Reese W. Flower Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics, discover the largest comet on record.

By Blake Cole

An artist’s conception of Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein, which is expected to be a slowly evaporating mixture of ice and rubble, with some modest departures from a perfectly spherical shape.

25

OMNIA

“O

nce in a lifetime” is often used figuratively, but in the case of the discovery of a new comet—one that only visits our celestial neighborhood every five million years—the phrase is quite literal.

Comets have been a cornerstone of astronomical investigation since antiquity, with evidence of detailed observations dating back to ancient Greece. What were historically seen as portents of doom are now an invaluable tool for researchers searching for clues about the early solar system.

The newly discovered comet occupies a special spot amongst the current pantheon of known comets, as it is the largest ever discovered in modern times, overtaking 1995’s Hale-Bopp.

Pedro Bernardinelli, GR’21, a graduate of the physics and astronomy doctoral program, first spotted what became the Bernardinelli-Bernstein comet this past spring while he was combing through data captured by the Dark Energy Survey (DES), a collaborative project involving universities and institutions around the globe. DES has released nearly 700 million images of stars and galaxies and is an invaluable resource for researchers and students worldwide. In Bernardinelli’s case, he was using software he designed to look for Trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs), often described as minor planets.

(L–R) Gary Bernstein, Reese W. Flower Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics; Pedro Bernardinelli, GR’21 26

“Trans-Neptunian objects are relics from the early days of the solar system.

Frozen inside them is information about what conditions were like,” says Gary Bernstein, Reese W. Flower Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics, and Bernardinelli’s mentor in the researching of TNOs. “Their locations can tell us, for example, that Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune did not form where we see them now.”

Most comets are around 10 kilometers across and would fit between the Penn campus and the Philadelphia airport. This newly discovered comet is, by an educated guess, more like the distance from the Penn campus to Baltimore.

The Bernardinelli-Bernstein comet originated not in the space beyond Neptune, where TNOs are generally found, but from an even more distant reservoir known as the Oort cloud. Comets found in this region are long-period, taking vast amounts of time to make a return trip to our corner of space, unlike Halley’s Comet, the best-known of the “periodic” comets that return often enough to be seen twice in a human lifetime.

The mysteries of space have fascinated Bernstein ever since he watched the moon landing at age seven. He describes his research as being focused on “extracting gems of astronomical knowledge from large piles of astronomical images.” This consists of using methods like weak gravitational lensing, which refers to the careful examination of how the deflection of light by gravity subtly changes the shapes of distant galaxies, to hunt down new objects and better understand phenomena like dark matter and dark energy.

Bernstein’s research focus struck a chord with Bernardinelli when Bernstein spoke at a seminar series for first-year graduate students. “Masao Sako [Professor and Undergraduate Chair of Physics and Astronomy] and I explained the projects we’d been working on, including the search for TNOs,” says Bernstein. “Pedro approached us, and since he joined in the research, he has discovered over 800 TNOs—about a quarter of all the ones that are known. Discoveries of this scale usually require a team of a dozen people or so, but Pedro has done much of the work himself.”

TNOs are monitored by observing how they move with respect to the stars. “The software is essentially trying to spot anything that’s moving,” says Bernardinelli, who, since he was a child, wanted to “understand how things worked,” and thus was drawn to physics. “When it came to Penn, this naturally led me to work with Gary.”

Bernardinelli delved deeper and deeper into his search for TNOs, until, near the end of his observation period, he spotted a celestial body he could immediately tell was not a TNO, but something else entirely.

“We could tell this object had a cometlike orbit because we could track it using archived DES images that dated back to 2014,” says Bernstein. “Once you see an object in the sky more than three times or so, you can use Newton’s laws to figure out what its orbit is.”

The Bernardinelli-Bernstein comet is an extraordinarily large specimen.

“Most comets are around 10 kilometers across and would fit between the Penn campus and the Philadelphia airport.

This newly discovered comet is, by an educated guess, more like the distance from the Penn campus to Baltimore.”

The telltale attribute of a comet is, of course, its tail, and not just in a pop culture sense. Indeed, a tail must be witnessed through scientific imaging before an official comet designation is verified.

Dark Energy Survey and NOIRLab

FALL /WINTER 2021

Bernardinelli-Bernstein (C/2014 UN271)

Color composite image sourced from the Dark Energy Survey in October 2017 that includes Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein. At this time the comet was 25 times farther from the Sun than Earth, and too cold to produce a coma, or tail, that would be easily visible.

“We didn’t see a tail in our pictures, so I sent a request to the Hubble Space Telescope, which would get us the clearest picture. They have an emergency request program, but we were turned down fairly promptly due to capacity, then the space telescope was broken for the next month,” Bernstein says.

Without confirmation of a tail, the researchers were in a holding pattern.

What exactly gives a comet its all-important tail? Bernstein says that these “dirty snowballs” [a term coined by American astronomer Fred

Lawrence Whipple] consist largely of ices of water and other molecules, like carbon dioxide, that evaporate during orbit, mixed with dust and rocks.

“When we witness a comet, it is already dying—coming apart, freeing some of the more solid debris that creates a tail,” says Bernstein. “Since the solar system is four billion years old, comets like this one can’t have been coming into our neighborhood for very long, because they would’ve evaporated away into a cloud of pebbles only millions of years ago, which

When we witness a comet, it is already dying—coming apart, freeing some of the more solid debris that creates a tail.

is a short time for astronomy.

So, besides being just visually spectacular things that get people’s attention, they are of interest because they’re like little time capsules from the earlier days of the solar system.”

Because they couldn’t capture an image of the comet’s tail using the images they had on-hand, the pair decided to take a leap. “We released what we had on the object into the public domain and allowed people to go after it, instead of keeping it in our vest pockets.”

They never could have anticipated the response.

27

OMNIA

The Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, in Chile on a clear night. The Milky Way stretches up from the left dome and the Large Magellanic Cloud hovers over the central dome, which houses the 4-meter Blanco Telescope and the Dark Energy Camera used by the Dark Energy Survey.

“It was really unexpected, the amount of feedback we got from the community once we announced the discovery,” says Bernardinelli. “I was on a quick trip to Seattle and my phone wouldn’t stop ringing from people sending me messages on Twitter or emails, and saying, ‘Hey, this is cool. Can I send more data? Do you mind if I talk about it?’ It was a very crazy week.”

28

Within 24 hours of their announcement of the object to the Minor Planet Center and various bulletin boards, an amateur astronomer captured images of a tail, and in another day or two, another had confirmed the same finding.

As of June 21, 2021, it was official—it’s a comet. And though the pair had asked that it be called “Comet DES” after the

Dark Energy Survey, because the discovery had become a collaborative effort, the International Astronomical Union insisted on it bearing Bernstein’s and Bernardinelli’s names.

Bernstein says of the discovery, “There’s a good quote that I learned from watching The Incredibles, when the character Edna Mode says, ‘Luck favors the prepared,

Dark Energy Survey

FALL /WINTER 2021

Once the comet was made official, the excitement finally started to sink in. “I started telling this to my family and they were like, ‘Wait, explain this to me again,’” Bernardinelli laughs. “And at some point, I got contacted by a senior member of the International Astronomical Union saying that the object was going to be renamed in mine and Gary’s name, and I tell this to my wife and to my parents, and they were really excited. My dad said at some point his boss called him to congratulate him, because it made it into major Brazilian media. So, my entire family, seeing our last name being thrown around in the media—it was totally wild.”

As more research is completed on the comet, it provides a clearer window through which to track its epic journey into view. Bernstein says it likely originates from a family of comets that were kicked out by Jupiter in the early days of the solar system and thrown into an orbit that wasn’t quite fast enough to leave the Sun entirely.

“It’s basically been in a very, very distant orbit, and that means it takes millions of years to come around each time,” says Bernstein, referring to the comet’s long-period nature. “To put the distance of the journey into context, Neptune is around 30 AU [one AU, or “astronomical unit,” indicates the distance from Earth to the Sun], but the comet travels 40 thousand AU away before returning. So, occasionally, one of these objects, which has lived out even further beyond than Neptune, where ice is happy to last billions of years, comes into the inner solar system and becomes a comet.” darling,’ which I read is actually based on a quote from Pasteur [a renowned French chemist and microbiologist]. And Pasteur said something very apt: ‘Chance favors the prepared mind.’ So, in this case, we were well prepared because the software was designed to find objects that orbit just beyond Neptune, but we got lucky to find something that was zooming past Neptune from much, much farther away.”

With current imaging technology, the researchers will likely be able to monitor the Bernardinelli-Bernstein comet up until about the year 2040, and maybe even beyond if technology improves. No stranger to innovation regarding imaging technology, Bernstein, during his time as a postdoc at Bell Labs, designed an electronic detector for a telescope. This same detector was used by physicists Saul Perlmutter, Adam Riess, and Brian

Schmidt in their discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe, which won the trio a Nobel prize in 1998. To this day, Bernstein is contributing his expertise to upgrading telescope technology used in the DES.

There’s a famous saying about comets that they’re like cats— they have tails, and they do whatever they want. And that they seem to each have their own individual behavior.

So, what does the future hold for the researchers and their comet?

“I will certainly follow the news of what other observers might find; I’m pretty sure that already other professional telescopes have been pointed at it. And I’d like to pursue time with the Hubble Space Telescope to get a better picture of the comet’s tail,” says Bernstein.

“There’s a famous saying about comets that they’re like cats—they have tails, and they do whatever they want. And that they seem to each have their own individual behavior.”

The pair finished writing a paper detailing more of the findings this past summer.

Bernardinelli since began a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Washington where he’ll be working to develop tools to discover more TNOs and other celestial bodies.

“Right now, as I understand, this is the third comet found at a vast 15 astronomical units,” Bernardinelli says.

“It will be interesting to see as it develops how similar or different it is to the other two that were found at this distance as well, and then see whatever else we find in the next few years. Because there are certainly going to be more coming, as more projects measure the sky find these sorts of objects.”

29

OMNIA

30

FALL /WINTER 2021

t the close of the Power of Penn Arts & Sciences Campaign, we are bolder and bigger, with a more diverse, dynamic faculty and a student body engaged in research and knowledge-building across the social sciences, natural sciences, and humanities.

As a three-time graduate of Penn Arts & Sciences and a proud Penn parent, I’ve always been certain of the power of the liberal arts. The past several years have only served to strengthen my belief that the world needs critical thinkers and experimenters—people who can build bridges between communities, disciplines, and traditions. The success of the Power of Penn Arts & Sciences Campaign is testament to the enduring relevance of the liberal arts.

Since we launched the campaign in 2018, I’ve been sharing opportunities for support and stories of success.

Now that the campaign has concluded, I’m thrilled to share the tremendous impact that the gifts we received are already having and will continue to have on future generations of Penn Arts & Sciences students and faculty.

This is a moment of celebration and gratitude. Even as we look back, we continue to work toward the future.

I am confident that our community will continue to learn, grow, and lead.

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

31

OMNIA

FACULTY DISTINCTION AND STUDENT POTENTIAL Our faculty and students are what make Penn Arts & Sciences exceptional.

Over the course of the campaign, new endowed professorships amplified the eminence and diversity of our faculty and academic leadership at all levels and across all disciplines, support for graduate fellowships swelled, and $113 million was added to the School’s undergraduate financial aid endowment.

CREATING A SUSTAINABLE PLANET Energy research is being transformed through prominent faculty hires, the establishment of the Vagelos Institute, and plans for the construction of the new Vagelos Laboratory for Energy Science and Technology. Penn Arts & Sciences is a center for research, learning, and collaboration, drawing leading scientists and the students who will drive energy solutions in the future.

32

(Clockwise from top left) Karen Kim, C’21; Herman Beavers, Julie Beren Platt and Marc E. Platt President’s Distinguished Professor of English and Africana Studies; an event at Perry World House; Quentin Wedderburn, C’20, and Adam Pines, neuroscience graduate student; Robin Barrow, doctoral candidate in history of art; Bernie Wang, C’21, ENG’21, and Karen Goldberg, Vagelos Professor in Energy Research and Director of the Vagelos Institute for Energy Science and Technology

FALL /WINTER 2021

DRIVING GLOBAL CHANGE Research, conversation, and debate at the newly endowed Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy and support for student fellowships at the Center for Ethnicity, Race, and Immigration are advancing knowledge on topics that matter deeply to our world. Both centers establish a community of researchers and critical thinkers that includes faculty and students, along with scholars, academics, analysts, and journalists around the world.

HARNESSING THE POWER OF THE BRAIN MindCORE received endowment and fellowship support, establishing itself as a hub for mind and brain research and the home of training for the next generation of scientists.

MindCORE student fellows learn to pursue rigorous original research and, together with faculty from across the University, engage in interdisciplinary efforts to understand human intelligence and behavior.

EXPLORING THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE The newly endowed Wolf Humanities Center and Price Lab for Digital Humanities advance the liberal arts and support inquiry for faculty and students alike. They highlight the necessity of humanistic investigation and create space for cross-disciplinary conversations that deepen our understanding of history, art, and culture.

33

OMNIA

Eric Sucar, University Communications

34

FALL /WINTER 2021

The career of Tulia Falleti, Class of 1965 Endowed Term Professor of Political Science, grew from her activism as a student in a newly democratic Argentina.

BY LAUREN REBECCA THACKER

hen she was in the sixth grade, Tulia Falleti’s father took her to a marble building that spanned a whole city block. They entered through columns and arches and visited the multi-floor library with dark wood walls lined floorto-ceiling with books and topped by ornate, domed skylights. It was the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires, and she was enchanted.

The trip was part of Falleti’s parents’ plan to make education an integral part of their children’s lives, though they did not receive it themselves. She and her two siblings grew up in what she describes as a lower-middleclass neighborhood in Buenos Aires at a time when Argentina was transitioning out of a violent dictatorship and into a democracy, a transition that would ultimately shape her career. Her father, Brunello Falleti, had begun an engineering program but ultimately left because he did not have a strong foundation in math, while her mother, Rosa Bracaccini, who Falleti calls “an amazing student,” had to leave school at only 13 years old to care for her own mother, who had been paralyzed.

“They always instilled in my siblings and me the idea that we were going to go to college,” Falleti, now Class of 1965 Endowed Term Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for Latin American and Latinx studies, remembers. “It wasn’t a question. It wasn’t something debatable—we were going to college.”

Falleti, also Senior Fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics, is now a noted political scientist.

She published her first book, Dominación política, redes familiares y clientelismo, with Fabián E. Sislian in 1997

while still a student, and she was an assistant professor at Penn by 2004. Her first solo book, Decentralization and Subnational Politics in Latin America, came out in 2010 and was named the best book on political institutions by the Latin American Studies Association.

Her current research focuses on Indigenous politics— a subject she says is under-studied across political science. She previously published on how citizen participation can affect public services at the local level, along with Emmerich Davies, former graduate student and current Harvard Graduate School of Education faculty member, and Santiago Cunial, a doctoral candidate in political science. This work led her to study when and how Indigenous communities in South America are consulted about infrastructure projects that impact their land.

Falleti began studying Indigenous political organization in Bolivia alongside Thea Riofrancos, then a political science graduate student and now a faculty member at Providence College. From there, she researched the rights and demands of the Mapuche people in the southern regions of present-day Argentina and Chile, and the Wichí in the north of Argentina.

All of this was on her mind in the summer of 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic continued and protests against police violence swept the United States, and then the world. “I was already trying to address questions of why my discipline had been making invisible Indigenous peoples and their organization, their demands,” Falleti remembers. “In political science, we’ve been studying states as if they are units that are more or less homogeneous, even when we recognize

35

OMNIA

that they may be multicultural—we refer to them as nation states with the implication that there is one dominant nation.”

Falleti’s desire to shine a spotlight on what had previously been made invisible motivated her to envision a research project enormous in its scope: from South America to Canada, from 1492 to the present. In 2021, her bold vision was recognized with a $5 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and her interdisciplinary project is now underway.

Community Commitment Falleti’s journey to college began on that trip to the Colegio Nacional, when she fell in love with the beautiful building and took an entrance exam that allowed her admittance to the public, but highly selective, high school. Because the school was run by the University of Buenos Aires, students who attended did not have to take additional college exams. Another benefit of the school’s university affiliation was an innovative curriculum and a pride in its long history and prestigious alumni— Nobel prize winners, former presidents, and top scientists had all attended. Along with that pride came a sense of responsibility and commitment to social justice.

Falleti explains, “As I entered the first year of high school in 1983, Argentina started a transition to democracy from a military dictatorship. We were in this elite and leading public school at a time 36

of political opening and our student union was extremely active in supporting social causes and demonstrations for democracy.

We were transitioning to a new political regime, one that was much more open, but where there was a sense that a lot of justice had to be done.”

As I entered the first year of high school in 1983, Argentina started a transition to democracy from a military dictatorship.

We were in this elite and leading public school at a time of political opening and our student union was extremely active in supporting social causes and demonstrations for democracy.

One of the biggest injustices that needed to be addressed was the plight of the desaparecidos, or, the disappeared. In the 1970s, the military junta that overthrew Isabel Perón as President of Argentina began kidnapping, torturing, and killing people associated with leftist or social justice causes. An estimated 30,000 people were disappeared, and their families’ search for justice continues today.

Even under a democratic regime, the specter of the disappeared hung over Falleti’s activism. As she and her classmates raised awareness, protested against

the International Monetary Fund, and tutored disadvantaged students in the area, her family worried about what would happen in the event of another dictatorship.

“Since the 1930s, the history of Argentina had been a succession of military dictatorships followed by weak democratic governments, and then there was another coup and another military dictatorship,” Falleti says. “Because of my activism, my parents were very afraid that if there would be another military dictatorship, we could be disappeared. But of course, you’re a teenager and you do what your parents don’t want you to do.”

A combination of her teenage rebellion, social commitment, and love of learning motivated Falleti to decide to study sociology at the University of Buenos Aires.

There, she learned the building blocks that prepared her to switch fields into political science.

Reflecting on her college days, she says, “I loved biology and at one point I thought I wanted to be a doctor. But in the end, I decided that I would do sociology. It was related to my political activism. I went into sociology just because I was fascinated by what I would be studying, not because I had any idea of what I would do afterwards with my degree.”

By the early 90s, Falleti was teaching at two universities in Buenos Aires and struggling to make ends meet. She’d been studying English since high school and had always been fascinated by American higher education.

FALL /WINTER 2021

Courtesy of Tulia Falleti

Tulia Falleti, Class of 1965 Endowed Term Professor of Political Science, shares a collection of photos from her childhood and young adulthood.

“So,” she says, “In 1995, I applied to doctoral programs in the U.S. But of course, you’re in Argentina, there is no internet. I would request brochures and all of my applications were mailed.”

When considering where to apply, she realized that many sociology departments in the U.S. seemed to be focused on topics related to the U.S. But she came across something called comparative politics in political science departments, where people studied political regimes. On discovering the field, she remembers thinking, “It was all I wanted to do.”

She ended up at Northwestern University in Chicago, a city that she had never visited. She chose it largely because of Edward Gibson, a scholar with an Argentine father who had spent part of his childhood in the country. Gibson, until recently a vice dean at Northwestern, studies Latin American politics. At Northwestern, Falleti felt she would have the opportunity to learn about the things she cared about—political regimes, the relationship between states and societies—within the traditions of a new discipline.

“And that’s how I chose political science over sociology,” she recounts. “Then, the rest is history!”

A Distinguished Career/ Una Carrera Distinguida Falleti finished her Ph.D. at Northwestern in 2003 and was off to a running start.

Early in her career, Falleti prioritized the most prominent, highly regarded journals and publishers in her field. This meant mostly publishing in English and, she admits, a certain naiveté.

“I remember when I was a post-doc at the University of British Columbia, I mailed my article-length manuscript based on the main argument of my dissertation to the American Political Science Review, the flagship journal of my discipline,” she says. “It was like, ‘Oh my gosh, there goes that FedEx envelope with my little baby inside.’ I remember thinking if they rejected it, I would die.”

The journal asked for a revise and resubmit— a response from an academic publisher that requests changes but offers the hope of publication. The journal published her article, “A Sequential Theory of Decentralization: Latin American Cases in Comparative Perspective,” in 2005, and the following year, it was given the Gregory Luebbert Article Award for best article in comparative politics from the American

I’m a product of the public education system in Argentina. I know that many students there are not proficient in English. I feel like I have a certain responsibility to give back.

Political Science Association. In 2006, Falleti published a Spanish translation of the article in Desarrollo Económico.

“I was so naïve, sending it to the best journal in the field, with an over 90 percent rejection rate,” Falleti says of her younger self. “I got the R&R. I guess I got lucky. I was committed to doing the things I needed to for my career.”

Falleti has continued publishing since: in collaboration and solo, and in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. She’s known for her expertise in comparative politics, the field that caught her attention as she pondered graduate school, and Indigenous politics, Federalism, and health care systems, among other topics.

The sense of community that was first instilled in her as a student at the Colegio Nacional has influenced her career.

“I’m going every year back to Argentina, and sometimes other countries like Bolivia, Brazil, or Chile. I have a network there of peers,” she says. “And, I’m a product of the public education system in Argentina. I know that many students there are not proficient in English. I feel like I have a certain responsibility to give back.”

Spanish and Portuguese publications—like that first award-winning article—are the result of that feeling. Falleti often retains the rights to translate her own work, so that if she is particularly proud of a piece, she can publish it in a Spanish-language journal, or if an article is about Brazil, she can make it available to speakers of Portuguese.

37

OMNIA

Dispossessions in the Americas Falleti’s network in South America and at Penn was on full display in her proposal for the interdisciplinary project recently funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The project, called Dispossessions in the Americas: The Extraction of Bodies, Land, and Heritage from La Conquista to the Present, has two aims. First, to document territorial, embodied, and cultural heritage dispossessions in the Americas, and second, to outline how the restoration of land, embodiments, and cultural values can recover histories and promote restorative justice. It will partner with over 40 institutions and community groups across the Americas and counts among its collaborators faculty, curators, undergraduate and graduate students, and postdoctoral fellows from across Penn and the Americas.

Falleti coordinated the project in response to Mellon’s Just Futures initiative, which called for proposals from multidisciplinary, university-based teams committed to racial justice and social equality. She recalls reading the call for proposals in summer 2020: “It’s hard to believe that this initiative was not a direct response to everything that was happening in the U.S. during that summer, and the fact that the killing of George Floyd and the pandemic revealed entrenched issues of systemic racism and inequalities like never before. In the aftermath of so much suffering and loss, it’s important to be able to document the ways in which the effects of this pandemic and other crises are mounted on structural, systemic inequalities and dispossessions that you can trace back 500 years.”

Reading about Just Futures allowed Falleti to imagine a large-scale project that could bring oft-neglected stories and communities into the spotlight. But not without a large team and considerable community participation.

Falleti started assembling her team by calling on colleagues in the Department of Africana Studies. Next up, the Native American and Indigenous Studies Program.

Before long, she was working with faculty affiliated with the Departments of Anthropology, History, and History of Art, and the 38

Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program, Penn Cultural Heritage Center of the Penn Museum, and the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Informatics in the Perelman School of Medicine.

ratified the declaration. But this future horizon is very important, and that’s the part of the horizon that we want to contribute to building together.”

The proposal was accepted and received a $5 million grant. The funds will allow Falleti and collaborators to create a multilingual website; host conferences; publish journal articles, an art catalog, and two coedited volumes; develop arts and performance events, and participate in the design of cultural heritage museums in Mexico and Belize.

A Home at Penn

In the aftermath of so much suffering and loss, it’s important to be able to document the ways in which the effects of this pandemic and other crises are mounted on structural, systemic inequalities and dispossessions that you can trace back 500 years.

Falleti says, “It’s very important to put forward proposals that could give hope. It’s not only documenting what was lost, but also proposing measures for restorative justice, for healing, that are built from the ground up with communities.”

What exactly restorative justice means, she says, will be defined by the Indigenous and Afro-descended communities the project partners with. What she is certain of is that working toward justice can shape a different future.

“It’s not so much what I think should happen,” Falleti says. “It’s more important what the communities and the legal experts working with these communities imagine as aspirational policies. Perhaps they are not all possible now, but let’s establish an agenda for the future. Some of the Indigenous rights that are rooted in the U.N. Declaration of Rights of Indigenous Peoples are aspirational and not all are implemented in the countries that have

People often say that dreaming in a new language is a signal of true fluency. Falleti passed that milestone years ago. But English will never be her first language, and speaking Spanish will always conjure a sense of home.

“As an immigrant from Latin America, many times you find yourself at odds with the majority of the population—at odds in the sense that your culture, your history, your language are different,” Falleti says.

“You’re most relaxed when you speak your own language, right? You get to the most precise reflection of your thoughts when you’re speaking in your first language.”

The feeling of being at odds is why Falleti’s position as director of the Center for Latin American and Latinx Studies is so important to her. Thinking about why she took on the role, she says, “It was more than just directing an undergraduate curriculum program. It was building a community, or coming together with a community, where I felt in many ways closer to home.”

The center’s history dates back to 1988, when Nancy Farriss, Professor Emerita of History, founded the Latin American Cultures Program, which focused on faculty expertise in the anthropology, archaeology, and ethnohistory of Latin America. The program evolved to include the study of the fluidity and hybridity of transnational cultural and identity construction and the experiences of Latinx people in the United States. After Farriss, Ann Farnsworth-Alvear, Associate Professor of History, and Emilio Parrado, Dorothy Swaine Thomas Professor of Sociology and a fellow University of Buenos Aires graduate, took the helm.

Falleti became the director five years ago, and, in the spring of 2021, the program officially became a center.

Through it all, students have always been at the heart of the community, from courses for majors and minors to guest

FALL /WINTER 2021 Brooke Sietinsons

Tulia Falleti, Class of 1965 Endowed Term Professor of Political Science, speaks at the Center for Latin American and Latinx Studies' annual Almuerzo de Bienvenida, held in September 2021.

speakers that address pressing issues.

Students are leaders in the Penn Model Organization of American States program, a university–community-based program engaging undergraduate and high school students in academic, experiential learning to explore solutions to the most pressing problems facing the Americas.

When the program became a center, Falleti called it “the realization of a dream.”

The new designation opens up exciting new possibilities, particularly around research. In addition to having more funds to support student and faculty research, the center will host postdoctoral fellows, visiting scholars, and public lectures.

Students also led the drive for a recent change, Falleti says. “About two years ago, we included Latinx in the program’s name,” she explains. “This was a student-led change; the trans community among our students didn’t feel represented by the “Latino” terminology. We had an academic panel where we discussed the differences between Latino and Latinx and what it meant to people in academia and also to people who are activists or in local politics.

Students gave us the push to do this work, and everyone was on board.”

Key to the center’s success is its interdisciplinarity. “The problems we have in Latin America and with Latinx communities are very complex,” she explains. “Our competitive advantage is that we have this amazing interdisciplinary community.

Let’s bring problems to the table so that we can tackle them from different disciplines, with grad students and undergrads coming from different departments.”

In the spirit of interdisciplinary research, the center has launched two research clusters. One, focused on

Afro-Latin Americans and Afro Latinx epistemologies, is led by FarnsworthAlvear and Odette Casamayor-Cisneros, Associate Professor of Romance Languages. The other cluster studies environmental justice and is led by Kristina Lyons, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, and Falleti. Graduate and undergraduate students will also participate in research with both groups.

Ultimately, directing the center combines Falleti’s academic expertise with her lifelong commitment to community.

“It is a point of pride to show the rest of the university what Latin America is about and to highlight what do we do when we write in Spanish or in Portuguese and why it’s important,” she says. “To serve our diverse community has been a pleasure, an honor.”

39

OMNIA

BY LORAINE TERRELL ILLUSTRATIONS BY DAN LEE PHOTOGRAPHY BY ERIC SUCAR, UNIVERSITY COMMUNICATIONS

FALL /WINTER 2021

he phrase “better living through chemistry,” which began life in 1935 as part of a DuPont advertising slogan, accumulated some baggage over the course of the 20th century. Initially an expression of unbridled optimism about the potential of science to solve virtually any human problem, over time it came to be used more frequently as a sardonic comment on the missteps associated with scientific progress. But today, as the global community wrestles with the need to reverse or adapt to the impacts of climate change, we continue to look to science—especially chemistry—to solve problems we can’t seem to address fully through other means.

We asked Eric Schelter, Professor of Chemistry, for his thoughts about chemistry’s continuing promise, and its public relations problem. Schelter’s work focuses on the inorganic chemistry of rare earth elements—the elements that are vital to technologies ranging

from batteries and smart phones to flat screen TVs. These elements tend to be difficult to extract without causing environmental harm, and his lab has invested considerable brainpower in establishing ways to recycle them.

Schelter’s lab also explores reactions that may help to mitigate the release of methane into the atmosphere and could lead to a readily available carbon source for sustainable energy.

This conversation is drawn from a new OMNIA podcast series, “In These Times: Fear and Loathing and Science,” which looks at the challenges of understanding science in a world full of polarization, politics, misrepresentation, and simple misunderstanding.

PEOPLE HAVE A SENSE OF WHAT CHEMISTRY IS ABOUT, BUT I THINK THAT THEY DON’T NECESSARILY HAVE AN APPRECIATION OF JUST HOW MUCH IT TOUCHES THEIR LIVES.

Hear more from Schelter, and listen to other full episodes at www.sas.upenn.edu/in-these-times

Eric Schelter, Professor of Chemistry (right), with colleagues Jessica Anna, Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Elliman Faculty Fellow; and Joseph Subotnik, Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Chemistry.

41

OMNIA

There’s a sense that chemistry is poorly understood by the general public compared to other sciences. What’s your perception?

When I have discussions with the general public or people I meet at cocktail parties—when I go to cocktail parties—and tell them I’m a chemist, there’s always a visceral response to it. It’s often kind of negative. People have a sense of what chemistry is about, but I think that they don’t necessarily have an appreciation of just how much it touches their lives. Every aspect of their existence, from the food that they eat to the car that they drive, has a major set of chemical processes, and solutions, associated with it that really has transformed society and raised the standard of living of everyone on this planet in no uncertain terms.

It’s an interesting dichotomy between the reaction that people have to chemistry and the fact that so much of society and human civilization relies on the fact that we do chemistry well. With every kind of major problem that we face in society, there is a chemical aspect to it and mastery and development of chemistry is going to have a significant impact on the trajectory that civilization takes in the next century. So I wonder, is it a marketing problem?

What are some of the sources for these visceral negative feelings?

The unintended consequences that have come along with chemical discoveries. When chemists set out to make molecules to work on some problem or advance the field, or provide some solution to a challenge, they might not know all of the possible ways that compound can interact with the complex system that is life on planet Earth.

Chemistry in the 20th century was about the immediacy of finding solutions to problems and developing a discipline and taking it forward.

I think this is true of all science, just because the world we live in is so complex that there are unintended or unanticipated consequences to discoveries in science, and chemistry is no different. From an epistemological standpoint, thinking about what that knowledge will do or what the products of that knowledge will do out in the world is not clear and will only become clear after some amount of time has passed.

42

FALL /WINTER 2021

What were some of the triumphs of chemistry that drove the kind of optimism about science that we saw throughout most of the 20th century?

Things like the Haber-Bosch process, which totally transformed agriculture. [Note: The Haber-Bosch process is a technique that allows for largescale synthesis of ammonia from hydrogen and nitrogen.] The ability to build a reactor that could produce ammonia that can be used as a fertilizer totally changed the world.

CHEMISTRY IN THE 20TH CENTURY WAS ABOUT THE IMMEDIACY OF FINDING SOLUTIONS TO PROBLEMS AND DEVELOPING A DISCIPLINE AND TAKING IT FORWARD. When you can feed as many people as it became apparent that we could feed with synthetic ammonia, that totally changed the landscape for humanity, right? But there is potentially the downside of massive amounts of agricultural runoff and the burden that it brings to have an increased population at a high standard of living on planet Earth.

Another transformational discovery is polymer chemistry—the discovery of these synthetic chains

of molecules that are created from smaller subunits that turn out to be useful for everything. But now a lot of chemists are thinking, well, there’s a huge amount of little tiny pieces of polymers that are floating around in the ocean. And we didn’t really think about that when we were developing the field of polymer chemistry.

These materials persist. So how does the natural system interact with a tiny piece of polymer that is floating around in the ocean for hundreds of years? Can it degrade it, or do they just continue to accumulate? And then what happens to aquatic life in the oceans as that material accumulates inside them? It’s a challenge.

There have obviously been negative environmental consequences associated with advances in chemistry, but how is chemistry working now to solve the problems surrounding climate and sustainability?

In the best-case scenario, climate change needs to be addressed by trying to clean up the amount of carbon that we’ve released into the atmosphere—having negative emissions by using materials that chemistry can create to actually capture CO2, to try and turn back the clock a little bit. Then, figuring out new ways to have our civilization powered by renewable energy sources.

A lot of researchers at Penn and many other places are thinking about the action of capturing solar energy and then converting it into compounds that store that energy, that we would generally refer to as a solar fuel. Some of the most important solar fuels are hydrogen gas that we obtain from the

water-splitting reaction. That’s a huge science and engineering problem, and places like Penn and the Vagelos Institute, namely, are bringing together engineers and scientists to stimulate fundamental discoveries related to materials, and also the chemical reactions and catalysts that will drive that [water-splitting] reaction.

Solving the sustainability problem is the challenge of the 21st century, and chemists are going to be the ones working with engineers to develop the solutions that are going to make our civilization sustainable.

What worries you most when you see the reaction to the science surrounding COVID-19? Has it impacted your thinking on what scientists could or should be doing in how they communicate about their work?

I think it’s easy to say, but scientists can do better. They can continue to work on improving skills around communication to wide groups of people, not just other scientists. And we need to learn also from other fields about how to communicate the findings of science, to allow everyone to make decisions. As a chemist, I want to be able to inform policy makers.

I want to be able to inform the general public. I want to be able to inform my neighbors about what it is I do and why it’s important, and how the information I’m generating in my research should be used to guide people in decision-making.

43

C A O T M K P C U A B (For the First Time) S First- and second-year College students on what they’re looking forward to with on-campus living.

By Alex Schein

On August 30, the College of Arts & Sciences held a special welcome event at Penn Commons for first- and second-year students—many of whom would be taking classes in-person for the first time since schools and universities shut down in 2020 amid the COVID-19 pandemic. We asked the students what they were most excited about as they began the fall semester.

44

to, C’25 ósi

Gau ri L

a ho

ws k

b hał Wyrę

ko

Marya

Mic

’25

i, C ’ 25

ti, C

An d r ea E

sp

m

A

lm

a fr achi, C’25

Joyc eD av

C is, ’24

ne Ga

yC Joe

ha

n

n, C

’24

Ch in

niah, C’24

Andrea Espósito, C’25

Maryam Almafrachi, C’25

Joyce Davis, C’24

Ganen Chinniah, C’24

Panama

Syracuse, New York

Being new to Penn, I’m really looking forward to learning about people’s backgrounds. One thing I’m excited about is the Integrated Studies Program for the Benjamin Franklin Scholars. The theme for the first semester is Food in Society. I want to major in economics and political science on the prelaw track.

I come from a suburban area, and it’s nice to be in the city and live the city life.

I’m Middle Eastern, and it’s so cool that I can take a class called Ancient Middle Eastern History and Civilization. I’m super excited for that, because I feel like I’m going to be more connected to Iraq, where I come from.

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Harrisburg, Pennsylvania

I can really get to know my classmates, see what motivates them, what they’re passionate about, and then find common interests and build meaningful friendships. I’m also excited for my healthcare management course, because I want to minor in it and eventually have my own business.

Michał Wyrębkowski, C’25

Gauri Lahoti, C’25

I think it will be nice to come into class again and meet my fellow classmates and have that interaction.

I’m interested in majoring in neuroscience, and I’m looking forward to a lot of the labs being in person again, to be able to get hands-on and perform experiments.

Poland

Morganville, New Jersey

I’m looking forward to the research opportunities at Penn and the random encounters that could generate some of the coolest ideas.

I would like to do some economic history research, energy research, and environmental research.

I’m also taking a seminar about the geopolitics of energy in Russia and Eurasia.

I want to be a biology major, and my bio class this semester seems so interesting. I’m excited about that and look forward to meeting my professors in person. Even small things like walking to class together with your friends and getting coffee and stuff—I think it makes a huge difference.

Joey Chan, C’24 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania I’m excited to get to know the community better and join clubs and extracurriculars at Penn, like the Pan-Asian dance troupe. And I’m excited to meet my professors and TAs in person. I’m taking intro to computer science this semester, which is something new that I’m exploring.

45

Dwelling in Possibility

OMNIA

Celebrating poetry and literature at Penn since 1985, Al Filreis, Kelly Family Professor of English, continues to create community at the home for writers he founded in a Locust Walk house a quartercentury ago.

By Louisa Shepard Photography by Eric Sucar, University Communications

46

W

hether eliciting thoughts about poetry online from thousands of participants around the globe, or from a dozen students sitting in a circle in the Kelly Writers House, Al Filreis creates community while encouraging discussion, an inclusive approach that forms the foundation of his many endeavors since coming to teach at Penn in 1985.

Filreis is the Kelly Family Professor of English and faculty director of Kelly Writers House, which he founded in 1995 as a home for anyone interested in writing, poetry, literature, music, or simply being part of a small academic artistic community within a big university.

His student-centered approach to teaching has attracted attention and accolades, including this year’s Penn Alumni Faculty Award of Merit.

“Al believed in inclusiveness and equity before we ever thought of using those words in relationship to education,” says poet Herman Beavers, Julie Beren Platt and Marc E. Platt President’s Distinguished Professor of English and Africana Studies, who joined Penn in 1989. “Al understood that for students to be involved, you had to involve them.”

Filreis is also Director of the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, a University entity he created in 2003 across the Kelly Writers House, the Creative Writing Program, the Critical Writing Program, and the many other special projects he has shaped.

An innovator in the humanities, Filreis founded and still leads one of the first-ever massive open online courses through Coursera, Modern & Contemporary American Poetry, known as ModPo. Now in its 10th year, ModPo has 62,000 current

subscribers worldwide, and more than 200,000 since its inception.

In addition, he co-founded PennSound with Charles Bernstein, Donald T. Regan Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature, who says it is the world’s largest online archive of poetry recordings; produces and hosts the podcast series PoemTalk; and publishes Jacket 2, which offers commentary on modern and contemporary poetry and poetics.

“Al Filreis has straight-up enthusiasm: for learning, creating, connecting, teaching, and forming sustainable structures to deepen students’ experiences,” says Lorene Cary, C’78, G’78, a celebrated author who has taught creative writing at Penn since 1995. “He continues to innovate to bring both complexity and joy to learning. Al’s an entrepreneur as well as a scholar. It’s such a rare, and welcome, combination.”

With his research and writing focused on 20th-century American literary history, Filreis is author of several books, the latest of which is 1960: When Art and Literature Confronted the Memory of World War II and Remade the Modern, published in October. Other publications include 2008’s Counter-Revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945–60 and several works on modernist poet Wallace Stevens.

Why poetry? “Poetry is the one genre of writing that is inherently open-ended and undecided,” Filreis says. “I like poetry because you can talk about it forever. I’ve been talking about the same Emily Dickinson poems for 37 years at the University of Pennsylvania.

I still hear new things when people talk about them. Any art that will require discussion is good.”

CAPTIONS

47

OMNIA

At the Kelly Writers House in 2019 (from left) Filreis, Davy Knittle Ph.D.‘21, Sophia DuRose C’21, and poet Simone White, the Stephen M. Gorn Family Assistant Professor of English at Penn. They participated in a recorded reading of a poem by Walt Whitman.

The Way to Penn Parents Sam and Lois Filreis, from immigrant families, lived in New York City before moving to suburban New Jersey, where their children went to public schools. In searching for a university in 1974, Al Filreis had little guidance. “I really thought Colgate was Colby,” he says. “So, I didn’t make a very aware choice.”

Attending a conservative college during a radical time, Filreis says he became alienated from the mainstream culture at Colgate. He found his way to modern philosophy and literature, encouraged by mentoring professors and his father, a self-taught engineer driven to learn.

“When I got into poetry, I called my dad and I said, ‘I don't know where to start, but I’ve decided to write an honors thesis on William Carlos Williams; he’s a doctor-poet from New Jersey and seems like the right character for me to write about,’” Filreis says.

48

The very next Saturday his father drove to New York City to New Directions Publishing. “He didn’t know what to do, but he decided to go and buy a bunch of Williams books. And he didn’t ship them to me; he drove up to Colgate to give them to me,” says Filreis.

“You asked me about my inspiration … my dad is my inspiration.”

Filreis pursued a Ph.D. in English at University of Virginia. It wasn’t a perfect fit for “a Jewish New Yorker, a New Jersey guy in t-shirts and cutoff shorts” on a campus with a formal Southern culture, he says. “I connected with some great people, but I always felt a little alienated.”

Not realizing he could apply for fellowships, he worked several part-time jobs, which proved to be more valuable than the funding. “I became entrepreneurial in the department, running the lecture series, helping out with advising, teaching, writing, tutoring, because I had to make my own way. I took a different

approach to being a member of an English department,” he says. “And I discovered how much I loved teaching.”

Filreis got a couple chapters of his doctoral dissertation on poet Wallace Stevens published, which helped as he hit the job market in 1984. He got a lot of interviews, he says, and offers.

His finalists: Penn and Princeton.

Poetry is the one genre of writing that is inherently open-ended and undecided ... I’ve been talking about the same Emily Dickinson poems for 37 years.

FALL /WINTER 2021

The interview with faculty at Princeton went well, as did a restaurant lunch in the charming small town. He then got on the train to Philadelphia, walking from 30th Street Station to 34th and Walnut streets. “Bennett Hall was a fixer-upper, a shambles, both outside and in—just unbelievable,” he says about the since-renovated and renamed Fisher-Bennett Hall, home to the English department. Searching through chaotic crowds in the hallway, he found the main office, where he met David DeLaura, department chair, who took him and two hastily assembled professors to the Faculty Club for a mediocre steam-table lunch.

As they walked back, Filreis says he looked around—cars sped down Walnut Street, ambulances down 34th Street, and people down the busy sidewalks. “And I said to myself: this is the place for me. I really did. I thought ‘this looks like the kind of place where someone with some positive energy can do stuff,’” he says. “I discovered very quickly that at Penn, because of our decentralization, one can do almost anything. And there was a kind of just-do-it, can-do attitude that was maybe the opposite side of the coin of this-is-a-fixer-upper.”

Students at the Center Focused on teaching, research, and writing two books, Filreis hunkered down until he got tenure in 1990. “That was the day I started doing stuff,” he says. “I felt like what we needed to do is figure out whether there were other ways of educating.

And I began to experiment.”

An early adopter of new technologies, Filreis realized the potential for expanding conversations through just-emerging electronic mail, creating listservs. He used his position as undergraduate chair to set up students with their first Penn email addresses, and formed an undergraduate advisory board.

“They were activists, students who felt that learners should be leading the conversation, or at least part of it,” he says. “ So, we all began to talk day and night and weekends by email.”

Deborah Greenberg, C’94, was one of those students: “Our mission was a natural continuation of Al’s classroom questions: How could we innovate the English major experience?

How could we make it more progressive, more interdisciplinary, less performative, more meaningful?”

Filreis asked students to choose a position on the reading and explain why they agreed or disagreed, sitting on one side of the room or the other. They were able to switch if they changed their minds, but they’d have to explain why.

“He never lectured,” says Greenberg, who became a high school English teacher.

“Classes were purely discussion-based; they were intense, fast-paced, and personal.

Al created a culture in which one must participate and he fostered total engagement …

No matter the content of the

class, Al wanted us to interrogate why it mattered and how it mattered.”

Every two years, Filreis teaches his course Representations of the Holocaust, for which there is always a waiting list. Four of the 38 students in the course this fall semester are children of his former students, including Josh Sherman, C’25, whose parents, Rachel and Mark Sherman, both C’95, met in that class their senior year.

“It’s incredibly special to us that Josh is able to have Al as a professor,” says Rachel Sherman.

“Al had a teaching style unlike any other teacher or professor I ever had; it was so inspiring and thought-provoking.”

“Al teaches you to listen and take a position—skills that have been valuable to my career as an attorney,” says Mark Sherman. “He’s energetic,

Arielle Brousse C'07, SPP'12

He created several extracurricular projects, including a tutoring program, regularly driving English majors and graduate students to Thomas Alva Edison public high school in North Philadelphia. “This was outreach, but it wasn’t just supporting the high school students; it was also about making it possible for me as a teacher to be a gateway to other experiences for my students,” he says. “I created all kinds of ways that the conversations in class could continue outside of the class.”

The impact of Filreis’s then-radical approach in the classroom was “extraordinary,” and “thoroughly transformed how the department thought about teaching literature” at a time when professors would lecture for most of a 50-minute class, Beavers says. “Al has put the students at the center and then made their concerns relevant to what they’re reading.”

At the Writers House Fellow reading by poet Susan Howe (from left), Filreis, Rivka Fogel C’11, Kelly Writers House staff member Michelle Taransky, and Sarah Arkebauer C’11 49

OMNIA he’s warm, he’s inspiring. He pulls emotion and conviction out of your soul that you never knew were there.”

Filreis engages in “a student-centered teaching, but it’s not easy teaching,” says David Wallace, Judith Rodin Professor of English. “His energy is always, always positive. I mean just an extraordinary, encouraging presence when he’s in charge of anything.”

A Home for Writers In the fall of 1995, Filreis got a call from Robert Lucid, a former chair of the Department of English, about a new initiative by then-Penn President Judith Rodin to create “hubs” to foster student engagement. Lucid invited Filreis to take a walk down Locust Walk, stopping just past the 38th Street bridge in front of a structure hidden by overgrown bushes and trees. “Bob said, ‘See that house there? What would you do if we gave it to you?’ Filreis says. “And I said, ‘We’d create a writers’ house.’”

The first thing you think about when you come into [Kelly Writers House] is, oh, it’s like home.

There’s just people who walk in generation after generation because they just feel like, wow, that seems like the house for me.

On a Saturday in October, Filreis opened the door and entered the house for the first time, along with a small group of students, faculty, and friends.

“We sat in the living room and we talked

from about 10 in the morning till after six at night,” he says, noting the lack of electricity. “It was dark. We lit candles, continued to talk, and drew up plans.”

The planning committee named itself The Hub, the same name it has today.

They met once a week and decided the purpose of every one of the 14 rooms, including a full working kitchen, a generous dining room, lounges with comfy sofas, classrooms and offices, and at the center an “Arts Café,” filled with mismatched wooden chairs donated by friends.

Filreis supported Lucid’s theory that the “architectural idea of learning at a university was more akin to the concept of the loft than it was to a room with fastened-down tablet chairs ... This became our loft space. It was students’ ideas that would take the forefront. That was the idealistic goal,” he says.

What started a quarter-century ago continues today. “The idea that everyone could and should have a voice in creating the space and creating the content and creating the ethos, that came from Al,” says Jessica Lowenthal, GR’07,

Filreis is teaching his course Representations of the Holocaust in the Arts Café of the Kelly Writers House this fall semester

50

FALL /WINTER 2021 Brooke Sietinsons

Brooke Sietinsons Brooke Sietinsons

Al Filreis, Kelly Family Professor of English, facilitates conversations with Writers House Fellows and other guests during public events at the Kelly Writers House. Clockwise from top left: Screenwriter, director, and producer Matthew Weiner (right) was a Writers House Fellow in 2016. / Poet Eileen Myles (left) was a Writers House Fellow in 2016. / Charles Blow (left), author and New York Times columnist, was a Writers House Fellow in 2018. / Andrea Mitchell, CW’67 (left), NBC News Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent, spoke about her 40-year-plus career in journalism in 2019. / Singer-songwriter and author Rosanne Cash (left) was a Writers House Fellow in 2019. / Author and literary critic Samuel Delany (left) was a Writers House Fellow in 2016.

a graduate student and teaching assistant with Filreis before becoming Director of Kelly Writers House in 2005.

The aim is to be welcoming. “The first thing you think about when you come into the house is, oh, it’s like home,” Filreis says.

“There’s just people who walk in generation after generation because they just feel like, wow, that seems like the house for me.”

Filreis has been the main fundraiser for that house, cultivating many donors, who give an average of $100. Some gifts, however, are transformative. The late Paul Kelly funded a major renovation in 1997, and an anonymous gift from a former student supported another project in 2019, enlarging the Arts Café and upgrading the audio-visual capabilities while retaining the distinctive character.

Programming expanded as well. It was Kelly who asked Filreis if he could support recognizable names as guests along with the newcomers. What emerged was a course taught by Filreis that invites eminent authors, poets, and journalists

as visiting artists, starting with Gay Talese in 1999. Since then, three Kelly Writers House Fellows have each come for several days in the spring semester, meeting and eating with the students and appearing at two public events.

The list of 67 fellows during the past 22 years is impressive, and Filreis and the students immerse themselves in their works to prepare. “Every spring I go into the semester barely ahead of the students, because in some cases I’ve read this writer forever, but not closely enough to teach it,” he says. “Which is to say we’re going to do it together. I just love teaching that course.”

Future Focus Filreis lives just a few blocks from campus, in a house in West Philadelphia. He is married, to Jane Treuhaft, and has two grown children, Ben Filreis and Hannah Filreis Albertine.

Ask anyone about Filreis and inevitably they will remark upon the mystery of how he does everything he does at such a high level of attention, energy, and enthusiasm.

“Not a lot of sleep,” he says. “And I’m very efficient with email and texting.”

But most importantly, he says, are the key people he has put in place to help lead the projects, especially since he plans to retire on June 30, 2026. Meanwhile, he is working toward his goal to add $10 million to the existing Kelly Writers House endowment so his successor will have secure funding.

“One of Al’s great strengths is really nurturing the talents and ideas of individual people and giving them room to grow into their work,” says Lowenthal. “I think one of the strengths of Writers House is that it continually renews with the new ideas of the people who are entering the space and making it their own. That was Al’s idea from the beginning, that the Writers House is made by the people who are part of it.”

51

OMNIA

STUDENT SPOTLIGHT

Summer School MindCORE hosted two 10-week research programs for students eager to get back in the lab and connect with peers.

MindCORE—Penn’s home for integrative study of the mind—hosts two summer research programs that create a research community consisting of undergraduates from Penn and across the country and Penn faculty. The Lila R. Gleitman Undergraduate Summer Fellowship Program is for Penn students, while students from outside Penn are part of the Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Site in Interdisciplinary Mind and Brain Studies funded by the National Science Foundation. REU places a special emphasis on recruiting students who are traditionally underrepresented in the sciences or who attend colleges with limited research opportunities.

For 10 weeks this past summer, students and faculty worked alongside one another, both in-person and virtually. There was hands-on research, as well as guest lectures, professional development events, and journal clubs where students would read academic articles and come together for discussion. Students learned to use software like JsPsych and PCIbex and practiced coding with RStudio, MatLab,

and Python. The program culminated in a symposium for the students to share their findings.

Students were drawn to the program for different reasons. Bema Boateng, C’22, a neuroscience major and bioethics minor, was looking for an opportunity to focus solely on research without balancing it with classes, and she chose the MindCORE program over others because it combined that in-depth research with the opportunity to learn and connect with faculty and peers. Sabine Chavin, C’22, wanted to research with Vijay Balasubramanian, Cathy and Marc Lasry Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, whom she had taken a class with in her sophomore year.

And Drey Diggs, a student at Pomona College, learned about the program from their school’s Department of Linguistics and Cognitive Science.

Diggs says, “I was originally apprehensive about applying because I assumed I wouldn’t be qualified, but I had a chat with the professor who had sent out the opportunity, and he encouraged me to apply.”

As part of the REU program, Diggs worked with Meredith Tamminga, Associate Professor of Linguistics, on the origins of a particular feature of the Philadelphia accent. Diggs explains, “Philadelphians often pronounce ‘th’ sounds, like in ‘this’ or ‘that,’ as a ‘d’ sound, like ‘dis’ or ‘dat.’

By looking at conversational speech data from G.I. Generation and Silent Generation speakers, we were able to trace this feature back to likely origins among Italian immigrants. The Italian language doesn’t use the ‘th’ sound, so it makes sense that native Italian speakers learning English would start to replace the sound with something easier to pronounce.”

Chavin, a physics major and computer science minor, says she was impressed by the amount of work she and her peers were able to accomplish in just 10 weeks.

Her project was focused on looking at spatial navigation processes in the brain.

She explains that all of our sensory data is perceived relative to ourselves, using Brooke Sietinsons

Bema Boateng, C'22; Sabine Chavin, C'22; and Drey Diggs, a student at Pomona College 52

STUDENT SPOTLIGHT

FALL /WINTER 2021

our heads and bodies as the frame of reference. But the brain takes that egocentric data and creates cognitive maps that are allocentric, or based on external frames of reference.

“We’re modeling those types of transformations using neural networks,” says Chavin. “The theory is that if our network self-organizes successfully and can find these representations, then that could be an indicator that our brains use similar transformations.”

Boateng worked in the lab of Joseph Kable, Baird Term Professor of Psychology and Director of MindCORE. Working with Min Su Kang, a graduate student in psychology, she researched how depression affects metacognition and confidence during decision-making. Boateng says the experience was about more than simply doing an experiment: “I was given a great preview into what actually goes into planning a research project and new study.” Boateng and Kang considered two types of decision making, perceptual decision making and value-based decision making, and had to design a study that tested both.

While past research shows that people with depression are less confident, it also shows that the same people are highly accurate. Boateng’s research seeks to find out if depression affects people’s decision-making confidence and accuracy when it involves things of value that are not seen to necessarily have a right or wrong answer. — LAUREN REBECCA THACKER

Stephanie Gibson, a doctoral candidate in the history of art, explores monuments of trauma in Africa, the Caribbean, and the Black Atlantic.

Courtesy of Stephanie Gibson

Forgetting Doesn’t Heal

Prisoners in Philadelphia’s historic Eastern State Penitentiary spent 23 hours a day alone in their thick-walled cement cells, released for a single hour during which they still had no human contact. Established in 1829, Stephanie Gibson, a doctoral candidate in the history of art the penitentiary pioneered solitary confinement, a practice that led inmates to experience paranoia, delusions, anxiety attacks, psychotic episodes, and suicidal tendencies—repercussions that went unaddressed for decades as more than 300 prisons worldwide copied the institution’s system of isolation.

Now a museum, Eastern State maintains an exhibit condemning mass incarceration and solitary confinement.

The site’s conversion is among the case studies Stephanie Gibson, G’20, doctoral candidate in the history of art, will feature in her dissertation about monuments of trauma in Africa, the Caribbean, and the Black Atlantic.

“I’m interested in how museums and commissioners and designers of monuments are interpreting sites with painful histories to help people move past the trauma that occurred there,” says Gibson, who has a bachelor’s degree in art history, criticism, and conservation from Emory University and a master’s degree in history of art from Penn, and expects to complete her Ph.D. in spring 2023.

Eastern State’s explicit criticism of its own history exemplifies this phenomenon, Gibson explains.

Through multimedia installations and an interactive tour that is sometimes guided by staff who were formerly incarcerated, the museum promotes criminal justice reform and shows visitors they are closer to the prison industrial complex than they might believe.

“You are asked whether you have ever committed any crime, like underage drinking or something else that most people don’t even think could have led them to incarceration,” she says. “It makes you question your own truth and challenges the way you view the world.”

Last year, Gibson received a graduate fellowship through Monument Lab, a Philadelphia-based studio that examines the way history is portrayed through art in public spaces. She used this opportunity to scrutinize the representation—and misrepresentation—of Black trauma through monuments and memorials, beginning with the statue of Sally Bassett, an 18th-century Bermudian slave burned at the stake for trying to poison her granddaughter’s enslavers.

Gibson’s family lives close to where Bassett was executed; she drives past the spot regularly whenever she’s home in Bermuda. But an unrelated monument stands at the site, with Bassett’s statue obscured in a more remote location because, as Gibson says, some locals protested being “forced” to see it.

“They did not want to reckon with the atrocities that their ancestors committed. Such thinking perfectly demonstrates why the monument should be in public view,” she wrote for Monument Lab. “An avoidance of the past signals an unwillingness to properly work through history.”

Gibson has lobbied for Bassett’s statue to replace the one that currently stands at her execution site, a movement that is steadily gaining momentum. Particularly in the U.S., she notes, many activists have been fighting 53

OMNIA

STUDENT SPOTLIGHT

for the removal of offensive monuments, like those depicting Confederate leaders and other racist symbols. Calling her work “the other side of the coin,” Gibson focuses on the erection of memorials to figures from marginalized communities.

“Once we remove people who should never have been heralded, how should we fill that space? I am more interested in the putting up than the taking down, in making sure we fill our monumental landscape with people and things that deserve to be remembered,” says Gibson, who aspires to be an art history professor. “Monuments are part of the narrative that our society tells the world, and the stories we tell should be true.”

— KAREN BROOKS

Unconscious Memory Damian Pang, Penn LPS Online Certificate in Neuroscience graduate, may have discovered a new type of memory.

“Consciousness is one of the final frontiers of science that we still know so little about as human beings, which is ironic considering it’s our most immediate experience. It’s a subject that has fascinated me since my youth,” says Damian Pang, who completed the Penn LPS Online Certificate in Neuroscience in 2021 and recently co-authored an article in the journal Scientific Reports on unconscious memory.

Courtesy of Damian Pang

One of the great mysteries of science is the nature of consciousness. How do human beings perceive themselves and the world?

Pang’s research took that technique a step further by repeating the process with the same images to see if that repetition made a difference in participants’ recall. It did make a difference, which could have significant implications for the study of unconscious memory.

“The leading theory has been that the second image kind of erases the first image so that it’s not perceived by the brain; however, if that were true, it wouldn’t matter how many times you repeated the images because you start from a blank slate,” says Pang. “That’s not what we found. In fact, we found that if you repeat the imagery within a short timeframe, people actually start seeing it very clearly.

That means the image doesn’t get erased, and if it doesn’t get erased, it must be stored somewhere in order to influence your subsequent experience. If our interpretations are correct, this would suggest a new type of memory.”

This research may show that human beings have a short-term memory buffer that saves incoming information below the level of consciousness when the brain is not 100 percent sure that the information matters, says Pang. However, that information can be brought into conscious awareness when—in this case, through repetition—that information gets deemed important.

Pang has an M.Sc. in psychology from the University of Liverpool but felt he was lacking a strong foundation in neuroscience. The Penn LPS Online Certificate in Neuroscience was the ideal solution to gain additional knowledge and skills while still working full time as an airline pilot out of Hong Kong.

Damian Pang, Penn LPS Online Certificate

“Psychology taught me a lot about the in Neuroscience graduate behavioral aspects of the mind, but I was lacking a deeper understanding of the underlying biological processes. The Penn LPS certificate helped me to dive deep into neurobiology and understand how the brain works on a fundamental level. Through the certificate, I came to understand the theories of cognitive neuroscience that I’d been engaging with for over a decade in a more profound and encompassing way, which really helped me as I conducted research on consciousness,” he says.

Pang partnered with University of Liverpool professor Stamatis Elntib to complete basic research probing whether information stored in the brain without awareness can be consciously accessed. They conducted experiments using a technique called visual masking.

Pang explains, “With visual masking, you show a participant an image for a very short 54

amount of time and then immediately distract them with a different image. This reduces the way they see the first image to the point where, if done correctly, they will not perceive the first image at all.”

Pang is hopeful others will independently verify his findings and is evaluating additional data that he plans to publish in the future.

“Consciousness is the bedrock of our human experience. It’s so important to every single person on the planet but it’s this massive question mark. For me, this is the big intrigue and fascination that I can’t stop exploring. The Penn certificate made it convenient for me to fill in my neurobiology deficit to make my research into consciousness stronger.”

— KATELYN SILVA

STUDENT SPOTLIGHT

FALL /WINTER 2021

When Democracy Arrives Undressed Kira Wang, C’24, spent her summer unveiling how many naked ballots were invalidated in the 2020 General Election in Pennsylvania.

The 2020 General Election occurred against the backdrop of an international pandemic, resulting in unprecedented numbers of mail-in ballots. In Pennsylvania, mail-in ballots should arrive in a secrecy envelope enclosed in another return envelope.

In September 2020, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that any mail-in ballots that arrive “naked”—without a secrecy envelope—must be completely discarded by election officials, leading to concerns about voter suppression.

To help ascertain just how many mail-in ballots were invalidated due to arriving naked, Wang conducted outreach to all 67 counties to collect the essential data. She also had the opportunity to explicitly connect her two majors—political science and computer science—when asked to create data graphs in R, a programming language, to illuminate some of the data findings.

“My majors are often seen as a weird combination. There isn't much overlap in terms of curriculum between them. However, working with PORES allowed me to see firsthand the intersection between coding and political science. It showed me how coding can inform quantitative political science research and how important that research is to the field,” explains Wang.

What most surprised Wang about her research experience wasn’t the number of naked ballots, which, though still being counted, look to be fewer than feared—but how decentralized county governments appeared.

Courtesy of Kira Wang

Kira Wang, C’24

Kira Wang, C’24, spent summer 2021 helping Marc Meredith, Associate Professor of Political Science, investigate how many naked ballots were received in each Pennsylvania county. Her research was supported by a fellowship with the Penn Program on Opinion Research and Election Studies (PORES), which pairs Penn undergraduate students with faculty who are conducting research on political outcomes in the United States using public opinion and election-related data.

“There was a lot of concern in the state that hundreds of thousands of ballots might be discarded because they arrived naked, to the extent that there were massive outreach campaigns to educate voters about the importance of making sure they used the envelopes correctly,” says Wang, who is passionate about preventing voter suppression.

“I was shocked that there was no standard way for counties to keep track of their election data or even to run their elections,” she says. “Some counties told us they didn’t collect the data on naked ballots, while it should have been clear from the Supreme Court decision that the information was important to collect.

Different counties had different responses to our questions and different understandings of the ruling. It was really interesting to see that election processes may not always be the well-oiled machines we expect.”

In fact, the research showed that only 32 of the 55 counties who responded to survey outreach could provide exact information on the number of naked ballots received. The total number of naked ballots may never be known.

In addition to her naked ballot research, Wang assisted on another project related to election administrator turnover rates.

She administered and oversaw data collection, conducted data cleaning processes, and coordinated the construction of new datasets in multiple coding languages and programs.

Wang has long been interested in issues of civic engagement and voter rights. In high school, she interned for her local congressperson, helping constituents get information about and access to social services, and she helped encourage young people to register to vote.

“I believe that voting is the most actionable thing you can do as an individual, whether interested in politics or not, to make things better for people who are worse off than you,” she says.

— KATELYN SILVA 55

OMNIA

IN THE CLASSROOM

Archaeobotanical teaching specialist Chantel White, third from right, teaches the undergraduates a process called flotation, used to separate out plant-based materials.

FIELDWORK EXPERIENCE, NO TRAVEL REQUIRED During a two-week, in-person bootcamp at the Penn Museum, 11 undergrads learned basic archaeological skills in subjects from ceramics and sampletaking to archaeobotany.

By Michele W. Berger Photography by Eric Sucar, University Communications 56

n a muggy summer morning in the Stoner Courtyard at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, five undergraduates surrounded a square patch of ground, 1 meter by 1 meter, cordoned off by neon pink rope.

Using trowels, they dug up the topsoil, which they dumped into a nearby five-gallon blue bucket. With enough surface dirt removed, they turned to a handheld brush and dustpan. “You might have thought before this that you couldn’t clean dirt,” says Mark Van Horn, a graduate student in Art and Archaeology of the Mediterranean World. “But you can actually get dirt very clean.”

From there, they systematically moved through the tidied site, inspecting anything that stood out. By day’s end, they’d found a broken plastic sprinkler nozzle and a heavy glass fragment. Ten feet away, at another site abutting a Museum building, a second student group discovered a rusty nail, more glass, some pottery, and farther down, bricks coated with tar, consistent with historical construction practices aimed at keeping water out of the foundations.

The day-long excavations marked the halfway point of a twoweek archaeology bootcamp facilitated by the Penn Museum and spearheaded by Anne Tiballi, the Museum’s director of academic engagement. Eighteen instructors, including faculty from the Departments of Anthropology and Classical Studies, the Museum’s Center for the Analysis of Archaeological Materials, and Penn Libraries, among others, offered

IN THE CLASSROOM

FALL /WINTER 2021

11 undergraduates basic archaeology skills in subjects ranging from ceramics and sample-taking to fieldwork design and archaeobotany.

The pandemic had halted much fieldwork, an important and often transformative learning experience for students considering a career in archaeology.

“We were all feeling really bad for our students that they basically missed two summers of being able to learn how to do this and to see how the whole thing works,” says Lauren Ristvet, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Chair of the Art and Archaeology of the Mediterranean World graduate group, and an associate Museum curator. “You can’t have a Zoom excavation. Learning how to excavate isn’t just reading a book or talking about it. There’s a crucial step of learning the physical skills involved.”

On-campus fieldwork emerged as a viable solution. Most of Penn’s active archaeologists joined the effort, creating a syllabus that covered as many subjects as could fit into two weeks.

Ashley Fuchs, C’22, a political science major, learned about the opportunity through an email from the Department of Classical Studies. “It became the perfect opportunity to dive deeper into

archaeology and gain a broader understanding of the subject without having to travel outside of Philadelphia,” she says.

becoming a better archaeologist and also to understanding how all the pieces of the archaeological puzzle fit together.”

Sometimes gaining that wider understanding means breaking down a subject into its tiniest parts, like the preserved plant material—seeds and fruits from prehistoric meals, for example—that Chantel White, an archaeobotanical teaching specialist, studies.

For Van Horn, one such component is the solidarity that builds after spending weeks of fieldwork in close quarters, eating and sleeping and working with the same people, often from a variety of institutions and places. It’s something he felt during his own experiences in Europe and Israel.

“Many people think that fragile organic material such as plant remnants can’t possibly survive for thousands of years,” says White. But “there is more to archaeological excavation than meets the eye.

We must also carefully consider evidence for past human activities at the microscopic level.”

“You get this mixing pot of people, who you get to know very well. You get incredibly comfortable,” he says. “That’s something we couldn’t really mimic to a large degree. But even with just two weeks and without a shared living situation, a lot of the joking and camaraderie started to emerge by the end.”

During White’s half-day session, which began with a broad conversation about archaeobotany, she taught the students about flotation and dry sieving, two techniques used to separate out organic materials like carbonized seeds, wood, and nutshells.

The bootcamp threw students headfirst into archaeological practice, which can be demanding mentally and physically— like an early experience in Penn Park led

by Thomas Tartaron, Associate Professor in Classical Studies, and Jason Herrmann, Kowalski Family Teaching Specialist for Digital Archaeology.

“It’s one thing to read about flotation in a textbook and a completely different thing to learn how to operate a flotation system yourself and to see how collecting tiny fragile seeds actually takes place,” she says.

“That kind of experience is valuable to

The plan was to conduct a field survey, a process that requires a good deal of equipment. The students carried everything themselves—a pop-up tent, a wagon of pottery sherds, clipboards, surveying equipment, and poles—just as they would have done at a real site.

That day turned out to be Fuchs’s favorite. “It’s nothing I could have ever fathomed,” she says. “I loved being outside with a group of people, having Professor Tartaron talk about excavations and field survey in Greece, and feeling the physicality of archaeology—walking, picking up pottery, and going through the extensive data collection process.”

Students learn basic archaeological skills.

Archaeology isn’t an easy field. It’s messy, with literal digging in the dirt required.

But at the end of the day, it’s about people, those whose history is waiting to be discovered, and those who endeavor in the process of that discovery. For two weeks this summer, 11 undergrads got down in the dirt and came away with a newfound appreciation for history and each other.

57

OMNIA

MOVERS & QUAKERS

Courtesy of Ami Shah Brown

COMING FULL CIRCLE Ami Shah Brown, C’96, works on a DNA-based COVID vaccine, a technology she first witnessed as an undergraduate researcher.

By Katelyn Silva

A

mi Shah Brown, C’96, says that it was an in-depth research opportunity at Penn as an undergraduate that inspired her career-long interest in DNA-based vaccines. Shah Brown is now the Senior Vice President of Regulatory Affairs at Inovio, a biotechnology company that develops and commercializes DNA vaccines and medicines to prevent and treat cancers and infectious diseases,

58

including COVID-19. She is responsible for all strategic endeavors related to moving Inovio’s infectious diseases and immunology programs through regulatory processes, in the U.S. and around the world.

Here, Shah Brown discusses her career path, the role of DNA-based vaccines in the fight against COVID-19, and her advice for Penn students.

MOVERS & QUAKERS

FALL /WINTER 2021

How did your undergraduate research experience influence your career path?

My Penn experience was foundational to my understanding of what I wanted in a future career. I was exposed to vaccine development as part of an undergraduate research opportunity.

I worked on the bench—doing hands-on research—in the laboratory of former Penn Professor David Weiner in the mid-90s on one of the first clinical trials for DNA-based vaccines for HIV, which was novel at the time.

It was remarkable to be part of researching and developing methods for DNA-based vaccines as an undergraduate. I continued working on the bench for several years postgraduation, and from that experience I learned that I love the science of vaccine development. However, I also learned that I wanted to be more involved with applied work and exploring the design of large clinical trials. As a result, I decided to pursue a Master of Public Health degree at Emory University, and then a Ph.D. at The John Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health.

How did you make your way from academia to Inovio?

My first work opportunity was with the Albert B. Sabin Vaccination Institute, a vaccine policy and advocacy organization based in Washington D.C. Around that time, the Institute received a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to become a regulatory sponsor for the development of vaccines for neglected tropical diseases. I had to learn and build drug development systems from the ground up. After about six years, the program was moved to Texas, and I started looking for new opportunities.

I had always kept in touch with my Penn network, including Professor Weiner, who, together with a former

colleague, J. Joseph Kim, started VGX Pharmaceuticals, which later became Inovio Pharmaceuticals.

Together with several members of our original Penn team, I’ve been at Inovio in Regulatory Affairs for more than a decade working on DNA-based vaccines for HIV and many different infectious diseases, the most recent being COVID-19, as well as exploring DNA-based approaches for immunooncology, which use the body’s immune system to fight cancer.

I began working on COVID-19 before it even had a name. I was speaking with regulatory agencies about development programs for COVID-19 before the global pandemic was declared.

How did COVID-19 impact your work on vaccines?

I began working on COVID-19 before it even had a name. I was speaking with regulatory agencies about development programs for COVID-19 before the global pandemic was declared. DNA technology is well suited for quick action against this type of virus because it is only the genetic sequence that is needed to design a vaccine candidate because it is simply an application for an existing platform technology—the template for which has been previously utilized to bring other vaccine candidates into clinical trials. Inovio won the silver medal, so to speak, on getting a COVID vaccine from design to Phase 1 human testing in the United States.

Inovio did it in 83 days, shortly after Moderna. Phase 3 efficacy evaluations have been initiated.

The Inovio vaccine, like the HIV vaccines I worked on at Penn, is a DNA-based vaccine that has a lot of potential to fight COVID-19.

How might a DNA-based vaccine contribute to curbing the COVID-19 pandemic?

The Inovio DNA-based vaccine certainly has a role to play in curbing the COVID-19 global pandemic. First and foremost, DNA-based vaccines have demonstrated an excellent safety and tolerability profile and its role as a booster strategy is currently being evaluated. Inovio’s DNA-based vaccines have a favorable thermostability profile, which means they don’t require ultra-cold temperatures for transport and storage, which matters a lot in environments where cold storage poses a challenge. And finally, the cellular immune responses elicited by Inovio’s COVID-19 vaccine do not seem to be impacted by the recent variants of concern, lending support to the potential longer-term utility of a DNA-based approach for COVID-19 prevention.

You remain connected to the Penn community as part of the Professional Women’s Alliance.

What keeps you wanting to engage?

Even though I did pursue a scientific pathway, I’m so appreciative of the broad-based liberal arts foundation I received at Penn. That foundation helped me to become a critical thinker and writer, which are skills I use every day and skills that are essential in most professions. I enjoy advising prospective students on why the liberal arts experience is so valuable.

When I talk to students, I tell them that Penn has unlimited opportunities for growing your academic, personal, and professional foundations. Don’t limit yourself. Don’t be afraid to take any opportunity, explore every interest, and keep your options open.

59

Scott Spitzer, University Communications

OMNIA

Thanking Our Volunteers There’s something amazing about people who take the time to share their expertise and energy with others. Our volunteers have been even more exceptional during the pandemic, when time and effort have sometimes felt hard to muster. Over the last 20 months, they’ve stepped up in support of Penn Arts & Sciences alums, students, and staff.

Members of the advisory boards of the Arts & Sciences Ambassador Council and Professional Women’s Alliance have developed programs and plans that responded to the challenges of the pandemic.

Other alums shared their career paths and answered questions in virtual events for students and alums worldwide. And dozens have worked with College students to give one-on-one career advice through the Ben Connect Formal Mentorships.

INSPIRING COMMUNITY P

enn Arts & Sciences’ Alumni Engagement program aims to bring the School’s alums together through programs and events that celebrate the liberal arts and offer a connection to one another, the campus, and its students. Our theme of “inspiring community” both reflects that goal and describes our alums.

From financial advisors to poets to candy makers, every grad is part of our story.

This year, as we continue to make connections in a time of transition, we’ll be providing a blend of programming that includes both the convenience and reach of virtual programs and the immediacy of in-person encounters. Visit www.sas.upenn.edu/stay-involved-support to learn more about our events, networking and mentoring opportunities, groups like the Professional Women’s Alliance, and other ways to get involved with your fellow alums and the School.

60

Our volunteers allowed us not just to keep going during the pandemic but to actually grow our activities and community. We salute and thank the Penn Arts & Sciences alums who have given their energy and experience during this tumultuous time, and look forward to your continued engagement.

Kathe Archibald Director, Global Alumni Engagement kathea@sas.upenn.edu Chrissy Bowdren Associate Director Alumni Engagement and Inclusion cbowdren@sas.upenn.edu

INSPIRING COMMUNITY

FALL /WINTER 2021

PWA Welcomes New Advisory Board Members At the start of the new academic year, the Professional Women’s Alliance (PWA) welcomed two members to its Advisory Board.

Advisory Board members are accomplished professionals who are dedicated to supporting liberal arts students and alumnae.

JANINE JJINGO, C’02

REBECCA SCOTT, C’06

Partner | Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP and Affiliates

Client Partner | Nextdoor FINE ARTS MAJOR

HISTORY MAJOR

“Hey Day stands out as such a memorable day at Penn.

By that point, you know so many of your classmates and get to let loose together.

Plus, I love the theme and tradition.”

“When I think about my Penn experience, it is not really defined by a single moment. It’s really this collection of rich experiences—from a world-class education that opened my mind to so much, to lifelong friendships formed with such fun memories—that defines those years for me.”

For more information, visit the Professional Women’s Alliance webpage at www.sas.upenn.edu/pwa.

Penn Arts & Sciences at Work Penn Arts & Sciences at Work is a photoblog series that highlights College alums in their workplaces as they reflect on how and why their careers took shape.

To see more, visit www.sas.upenn.edu/at-work.

JENNIFER JUN, C’06 Senior Manager, International Policy, Stockholm International Water Institute ANTHROPOLOGY AND COMPARATIVE LITERATURE DOUBLE MAJOR STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN

“The U.N. Climate Change conference in Glasgow this November was a moment that many followed closely. I’m thrilled to be a part in translating a long-held ambition into reality for the global water community: uniting under a first-ever Water & Climate Pavilion. This is an effort to mobilize leaders and support science-based action.”

61

OMNIA

INSOMNIA

THREE QUESTIONS: A BIOLOGIST’S PHOTOGRAPHY From beach grass to fallen leaves, Philip A. Rea, Professor of Biology, uses a camera to give a new view of the things around us.

By Susan Ahlborn

Photography by Philip A. Rea

62

INSOMNIA

FALL /WINTER 2021

“I

get a huge kick out of finding out stuff about stuff and sharing it with others,” says Professor of Biology Philip A. Rea, whether it’s a research finding, a piece of music, or a new way of seeing something through one of his photographs. Rea’s exhibit, “Taken,” opened in the Burrison Gallery and Lenape Room at the Inn at Penn on March 11, 2020, which he jokes made it the record holder for the longest unseen exhibit in Penn’s history until it reopened for a few weeks in the fall. We asked Rea, who is also Rebecka and Arie Belldegrun Distinguished Director of the Vagelos Program in Life Sciences and Management, three questions about his photography.

Q: What aspects of photography interest you?

One of the things is the way in which one can capture images that emphasize a part of the whole. There are things we see almost every day which, if examined as entities in their own right, from a particular angle or in a particular light, resonate with our senses. For me, and I hope for the viewer, art photography evokes a heightened awareness of being alive and part of things but in an almost timeless, contextless way.

Q: How does photography intersect with your work as a scientist?

From a very early age, first as a musician, then a scientist, I’ve been aesthetically driven.

The images I strive to capture as a photographer are simply another way—in many ways more universally accessible—of finding out stuff and sharing it with others. I remember Dr. Tom Blundell (then a junior lecturer, now Sir Tom Blundell FRS) showing my group of firstyear university students a slide of the crystal structure of an insulin hexamer and exclaiming with palpable excitement, “Do you see it—the Chartres Rose Window of Notre Dame, Paris?”

This was a truly igniting moment for me. It’s what sparked my life-long passion for biochemistry. He made plain the parallels between what he does as a scientist and what it is about art and music, and life in general, that brings him such a sense of meaning and fulfillment.

Q: What are you trying to convey in your photographs?

Although my photographs are firmly rooted in accurate depiction, they have abstract elements in that they attempt to isolate or emphasize colors, forms, textures, structural repeats, and gradations to reveal things that might otherwise not be seen or given much thought. Whether it is an image of the rust-redness of fallen maple leaves on a rain-sodden sidewalk, the tempera-like quality of an algae-encrusted iron chain in the shallows of a lake, or the intricate multihued weave of the quills on fallen barley, the thrust of what I aim to do through these images is have the viewer come away thinking, “I kinda knew that but would not have given it as much time—would never have really seen it that way—if not for the images put before me.”

To see more of Rea’s photos, visit www.philiparea.com.

Left: Water Chained, 2013; Top to bottom: Barkly, 2014; Razor Sharp, 2015; Puddle Tempera, 2009; Skye Reeds, 2018; 63

OMNIA

EXPLAINED, EXPLAINED Vijay Balasubramanian, Cathy and Marc Lasry Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, reflects on his recent appearance on the hit Netflix show, Explained.

64

Kielinski Photographers

INSOMNIA

I

RECEIVED AN EMAIL from the producer, and it said, “I’m writing to you from the Netflix show, Explained, produced for Vox Media, and I’m wondering if you could have a conversation about an episode we’re trying to think about, about the nature of time.”

— I THOUGHT, NETFLIX? They can’t be serious. So, I went and searched, and what do you know, there was the show.

And I watched an episode on cricket, because I used to play cricket when I was a kid in India, and it was great.

— I WAS ONE OF THE SPEAKERS at the World Science Festival, on a panel discussion about the nature of time.

And then there was another talk I did on emergent time, time dilation, and special relativity. The producer had seen these, so that’s why she contacted me.

— I TOLD HER ABOUT all the cool things you might say in an episode on time, and what questions people have. And she said, “Well, that sounds great. Do you want to be in it?” I said, “Seriously?

Well, sure. Why not?”

— NORMALLY, THEY SHOOT THESE in New York, but this was in the middle of the pandemic. So, they sent a crew of three

people to my house and filmed me in my living room. Everybody was masked.

The producer Zoomed in.

— THERE WAS A CONVERSATION that lasted two, three hours. In the episode, there are a number of snippets of me basically saying a sentence. But actually, some of the narration, which is done by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, comes from things I said. I thought it was cool. For example, the little diagram of the grid of time, and the phrase “some when”— those are all from me.

— A LOT DIDN’T MAKE IT IN. I talked about ancient notions of time and modes of time keeping, and different ideas of time that are used in different parts of the world. For example, in India, the universe is often conceived as cyclic, from creation to destruction, versus linear.

— AT THE VERY END of my interview I asked who else was participating. They told me one of the other people was Mark Kelly, the astronaut. I said, “Wow, now that makes me cooler.” Nothing cooler than an astronaut.

— IT TOOK ME THREE DAYS TO WATCH IT.

You just worry, “Oh no, what’s it going to be like?” But it was great. The big reaction is that my daughter and son’s friends think it’s great. “Your dad’s on Netflix!”

Jun Ma

FALL /WINTER 2021

E

ach one of your cells contains two copies of 23 chromosomes, one inherited from each of your parents. During meiosis—the cell division process that creates our reproductive cells (eggs and sperm)— our chromosomes (in blue) pair up along a filamentous spindle (in red), pulled by their centromeres (in green) to each side of the cell, which then divides, and later divides again. Normally, we think each copy of our chromosomes has a 50-50 shot of getting into eggs

LAST LOOK

and sperm—but that’s not the case. Michael Lampson, Professor of Biology, and colleagues have shown that chromosomes can cheat, improving their odds of being passed down to the next generation. They’ve also recently found certain proteins that act to suppress this cheating in a kind of evolutionary arms race that pits advantage against equality. The implications could shed light on when meiosis goes awry, sometimes resulting in chromosomal disorders.

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

Building experiments that illuminate the human mind is my FRONTIER.

With a strong foundation, students and faculty can find the very frontier of knowledge, creating the future of their fields.

Your gift to the ARTS & SCIENCES ANNUAL FUND supports them every step of the way.

Make Your Gift Online www.sas.upenn.edu/gifts/annual

Neuroscience is my FOUNDATION.

B E M A B OAT E N G, C’22