Omnia Magazine: Fall/Winter 2018

From Cityscape 30 to Lab Space

Students Examine 36 Penn's History With Slavery

Launching 44 Liberal Arts Careers

FA L L / W I N T E R 2 0 18

22 Giving Voice FALL/WINTER 2015 to Violence-Stricken Communities

Widening thE LEns On LanguagE Study Penn Arts and Sciences faculty use language to unravel mysteries of culture, cognition, and communication.

PAGE 14

OMNIA

FA L L / W I N T E R 2 0 18

14

22

30

WIDENING THE LENS ON LANGUAGE STUDY

THE HEALING WORD

FROM CITYSCAPE TO LAB SPACE

Penn Arts and Sciences faculty use language to unravel mysteries of culture, cognition, and communication.

Deborah Thomas, R. Jean Brownlee Professor, embeds herself in communities stricken by violence to chronicle the humanity revealed during the aftermath.

By Karen Brooks

By Blake Cole

EDITOR’S NOTE

2

Researchers across Penn Arts and Sciences are learning from and in Philadelphia.

By Michele Berger

FINDINGS

A Layered Approach

Crowding Between the Book Covers

By Blake Cole

By Dan Hanson

DEAN'S MESSAGE

3

9

By Katherine Unger Baillie

Where Innovation Leads

Music, Ethnicity, and the Legacy of War in Sri Lanka

By Steven J. Fluharty

SCHOOL NEWS

Understanding the Social Dynamics That Cause Cooperation to Thrive or Fail

8

4

10

By Laura Ziv

Light, Dark, and All in Between

11

By Katherine Unger Baillie

Alef Is for Allah, C Is for Cute

12

By Lauren Rebecca Thacker

A Physics Treasure Hidden in the Pattern of Wallpaper

By Katherine Unger Baillie

13

CONTENTS

FALL/WINTER 2018

36

44

49

THE STORIES WE TELL

LAUNCHING LIBERAL ARTS CAREERS

THE POWER OF PENN ARTS & SCIENCES

The Professional Women’s Alliance connects female students and recent graduates with accomplished College alumnae.

The Campaign advances the core that keeps Penn exceptional.

Undergraduates dig into archival records to reframe Penn’s historical ties to slavery.

By Jane Carroll and Lauren Rebecca Thacker

By Katelyn Silva

ONLINE CONTENT

65

STUDENT SPOTLIGHT

72

FACULTY OPINION

66

PARTNERS & PROGRESS

76

Why (Women's) Politics Hasn't Changed That Much

INSOMNIA

By Dawn Teele

IN THE CLASSROOM

68

Sustainability in Action

By Lauren Rebecca Thacker

MOVERS AND QUAKERS From the Printing Press to Online Marketplaces: Michelle Tandler, C'08

By Lauren Rebecca Thacker

Archival Encounters

78

The Sole of Things: Social Awareness and Success Through Footwear

80

LAST LOOK 70

A Space for Sea Lions

81

OMNIA

EDITOR’S NOTE

A LAYERED APPROACH When we converse about our favorite TV show or debate the issues of the day, most of us are unaware of the complex processes that make this communication possible. One of the many strengths of research at Penn is our faculty’s drive to unpack everyday phenomena. Our cover story, “Widening the Lens on Language Study” (p. 14), does just this, examining language across fields as diverse as psychology, neuroscience, anthropology, philosophy, education, computer science, and artificial intelligence in order to investigate big questions like how babies learn language and how accents develop.

We explore further how multiple approaches can lead to solutions in “From Cityscape to Lab Space” (p. 30), which tells the story of how Penn faculty and students are bringing scholarly attention to issues and neighborhoods too often swept under the rug. From teaching philosophy to first-graders to analyzing road dust for harmful pollutants, these faculty and students are making the city a better, safer place to live in.

“The Healing Word” (p. 22) is a more personal journey through the life and career of anthropologist Deborah Thomas, who uses many approaches to give voice to those affected by violence. In a career that began by promoting social change through dance and now addresses the wrongs of the past through documentary filmmaking, she is giving strength to those in pain and helping future academics step outside the bounds of conventional research to increase their impact on communities.

Penn students and alumni are leading their own efforts to reveal truths and make a difference in society. The students featured in “The Stories We Tell” (p. 36) are on a uniquely important quest to understand Penn’s involvement with slavery in the University’s earliest

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

POWER.SAS.UPENN.EDU 2

decades. Student investigators pored over archives from the University, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and a database of Pennsylvania tax records.

And in the alumni sphere, “Launching Liberal Arts Careers” (p. 44) highlights how the Penn Arts and Sciences Professional Women’s Alliance is connecting female students and recent graduates with accomplished alumnae for mentorship and career exploration.

“Why (Women’s) Politics Hasn’t Changed That Much” (p. 66) sees political scientist Dawn Teele examine why a record number of women are running for office in November’s midterms and beyond, while our alumni Q&A, “From the Printing Press to Online Marketplaces” (p. 70), tells of a career in tech that has roots in 17th-century advancements. And in “Sustainability in Action” (p. 68), we follow our intrepid students as they travel to Berlin and Rotterdam to meet architects, activists, engineers, and policymakers involved in ambitious sustainability projects and policymaking.

For some fun—but still rigorous—scholarship, check out our Insomnia section (p. 78), which this time around includes an academic investigation into UFO conspiracy theories, and a profile on a student who is catalyzing social change one pair of sneakers at a time.

With each issue, we look forward to sharing the stories behind the exciting research coming out of Penn Arts and Sciences in a way that speaks to the intellectual and dreamer within us all. Thanks for reading.

OMNIA is published by the School of Arts and Sciences Office of Advancement EDITORIAL OFFICES School of Arts and Sciences University of Pennsylvania 3600 Market Street, Suite 300 Philadelphia, PA 19104-3284 Phone: 215-746-1232 Fax: 215-573-2096 Email: omnia-penn@sas.upenn.edu STEVEN J. FLUHARTY Dean, School of Arts and Sciences LORAINE TERRELL Executive Director of Communications LAUREN REBECCA THACKER Director of Advancement Communications BLAKE COLE, Editor SUSAN AHLBORN, Associate Editor LUSI KLIMENKO, Art Director LUSI KLIMENKO ANDREW NEALIS Designers CHANGE OF ADDRESS Alumni: visit QuakerNet, Penn’s online community at quakernet.alumni.upenn. edu. Non-alumni: email Development and Alumni Records at record@ben. dev.upenn.edu or call 215-898-8136.

The University of Pennsylvania values diversity and seeks talented students, faculty and staff from diverse backgrounds.

The University of Pennsylvania does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, creed, national or ethnic origin, citizenship status, age, disability, veteran status or any other legally protected class status in the administration of its admissions, financial aid, educational or athletic programs, or other University-administered programs or in its employment practices. Questions or complaints regarding this policy should be directed to the Executive Director of the Office of Affirmative Action and Equal Opportunity Programs, Sansom Place East, 3600 Chestnut Street, Suite 228, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6106; or (215) 898-6993 (Voice) or (215) 898-7803 (TDD).

Blake Cole, Editor Cover Illustration: Gracia Lam

Advancing Faculty Distinction

Driving Global Change

Harnessing the Power of the Brain

Realizing Student Potential

Creating a Sustainable Planet

Exploring the Human Experience

DEAN’S MESSAGE

FALL/WINTER 2018

WHERE INNOVATION LEADS At institutions like Penn, innovation is our daily business. It’s hard to imagine anything more fundamentally innovative than the pursuit of new knowledge, whether it involves humanists using technology to recreate and understand lost cultures, or scientists making observations that are uncovering the physics of the big bang.

The desire to innovate in teaching at Penn Arts and Sciences has also been demonstrated through 20 years of exploration of the potential of online learning.

This process of experimentation paved the way for a major innovation in the School’s College of Liberal and Professional Studies, which we are launching this fall: an online degree program for adult, non-traditional students (p. 4). The new Bachelor of Applied Arts and Sciences (BAAS) degree represents a first for Penn and a first in the Ivy League, bringing an undergraduate education to many students who would otherwise be unable

The process of innovation also continues in our classrooms on campus. This year, we’re working to advance excellence in teaching through a range of new initiatives. Faculty are currently engaging in broad discussions of pedagogy, considering such areas as core competencies associated with undergraduate majors and metrics that can be used to evaluate graduate groups. We are planning a teachers-in-residence program, which would engage a cohort of faculty across disciplines to build a community of learning. Work also continues to enhance mentoring of junior faculty, including creating ways for them to learn from senior faculty who excel in teaching. In addition, a pilot program involving departments from the humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences is exploring new, more nuanced ways to evaluate teaching, beyond the traditional student evaluations. Proposed methods will be identified and tested in the coming year.

Candace DiCarlo

What might be less obvious is how seamlessly these habits of mind that drive innovation in scholarship flow directly into the classroom. Our faculty are constantly engaged in conversations to push the frontiers of teaching, redefine best practices, and deliver a liberal education that responds to the challenges of the 21st century. This ongoing process of innovation is reflected in a range of initiatives from recent years, from updates to the curriculum; to new approaches to classroom teaching such as SAIL (structured, active in-class learning) courses, where class time is focused on interaction and problem solving; to interdisciplinary initiatives like the Integrated Studies Program, which introduces College freshmen to broad questions in the liberal arts, to name just a few.

to pursue liberal arts study at Penn. This option places us at the forefront in creatively meeting the expanding need for adult education in the liberal arts.

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

These are just a few examples of how the spirit and habits of innovation that define the liberal arts are evolving the way we teach. I expect these new initiatives to lead in exciting new directions and to enhance the educational experiences of our undergraduates and graduate students, as well as students who come to Penn Arts and Sciences at all points in their lives, for generations to come.

Steven J. Fluharty

3

OMNIA

SCHOOL NEWS

opening doors for more students to learn and to become empowered by education.

In the U.S. today, only 30 percent of adults over the age of 25 have completed a bachelor’s degree, and with this new initiative LPS is moving forward to meet this educational need. ” Enrollment for the certificate program is now open. The BAAS degree program has begun accepting applications and will officially launch in fall 2019.

THE RONALD O. PERELMAN CENTER FOR POLITICAL SCIENCE AND ECONOMICS OPENS ITS DOORS

LPS LAUNCHES NEW ONLINE BACHELOR’S DEGREE AND CERTIFICATE PROGRAMS

Nora Lewis, Vice Dean of Professional and Liberal Education, says, “The goal of this new platform is to make an Arts and Sciences education more accessible, flexible, and affordable for working adults.

Penn LPS Online redefines the notion of who can get an Ivy League education by making it accessible to anyone who demonstrates the ambition and potential to earn it, without sacrificing the quality of the education offered.”

The new Bachelor of Applied Arts and Sciences (BAAS) degree combines general-education requirements and 4

Lusi Klimenko

The College of Liberal and Professional Studies (LPS) launched a new program that is the first to make an Ivy League bachelor’s degree accessible online. Beginning in the fall of 2019, the Penn LPS Online platform will offer a fully-accredited, online education from Penn for working adults and other non-traditional students.

This fall, the Ronald O. Perelman Center for Political Science and Economics, which represents Penn Arts and Sciences’ most ambitious capital project in support of the social sciences in decades, opened its doors to faculty and students.

interdisciplinary concentrations. The program, designed by an advisory board of Penn Arts and Sciences standing faculty with input from management executives from more than 20 regional, national, and global employers, is distinctive for its emphasis on connecting a liberal arts education to professional and career outcomes. In addition to the BAAS, Penn LPS Online is launching forcredit certificate programs. Students will have the option to take single courses or to earn the certificate by completing four courses.

Steven J. Fluharty, Dean and Thomas S. Gates, Jr. Professor of Psychology, Pharmacology, and Neuroscience, says, “This new degree is unique among our peers and places Penn at the forefront in creatively meeting the expanding need for adult education in the liberal arts. I’m proud that Penn’s innovative faculty are

The Ronald O. Perelman Center for Political Science and Economics

SCHOOL NEWS

FALL/WINTER 2018

Will Schmenner

On the Penn-in-Havana trip, students talk with artist Salvador González at the Calle Hueso.

The Perelman Center brings together scholars engaged in social science research and creates opportunities for collaboration. In addition to being the home to the Departments of Political Science and Economics, the new space houses several centers focused on global scholarship, including the Center for the Advanced Study of India, the Christopher H. Browne Center for International Politics, the Center for the Study of Contemporary China, the Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy, and the Penn Institute for Economic Research. The Perelman Center also houses the undergraduate Program for Opinion Research and Election Studies, which engages students in data-driven social research.

The new facility includes a 120-seat auditorium, classrooms, undergraduate meeting rooms, and graduate student and faculty offices.

PENN ARTS AND SCIENCES INITIATIVES PROMOTE GLOBALLY ORIENTED OUTREACH Faculty and students are pursuing a range of new multidisciplinary initiatives thanks to two special funds established

by Penn Arts and Sciences. The Making a Difference in Diverse Communities program, which encourages faculty to explore innovative ways of applying their expertise through a combination of coursework, research, and service, is supporting five projects that address issues of diversity and inequality at the local, national, and international level. The Dean’s Global Inquiries Fund, an initiative that encourages the investigation of global topics across the liberal arts, is supporting seven new transdisciplinary projects that explore a range of cultural, political, and economic forces on multiple continents.

The projects funded by the Making a Difference in Diverse Communities program are: • Penn-in-Havana: Visual Culture and Public Art in Cuba, led by Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, Associate Professor and Undergraduate Chair of History of Art. • Increasing Turnout in Off-Cycle Elections in the City of Philadelphia, led by Daniel J. Hopkins, Associate Professor of Political Science.

• Philosophy for the Young, led by Karen Detlefsen, Professor of Philosophy and Education.

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

5

OMNIA

SCHOOL NEWS

• Using Virtual Reality and Digital Video to Document the Post-Hurricane Maria Recovery Efforts in Puerto Rico, led by Peter Decherney, Professor of English and Cinema Studies.

The projects funded by the Dean’s Global Inquiries program are:

PENN ARTS AND SCIENCES PSYCHOLOGISTS HONORED Sharon Thompson-Schill, Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor and Chair of Psychology, and Michael Kahana, Professor of Psychology, have been awarded the inaugural Psychonomic Society Mid-Career Award. The Psychonomic Society, recognized as the preeminent society for the experimental study of cognition, gives the award for exceptional 6

In addition, Martha Farah, Walter H. Annenberg Professor in the Natural Sciences and Director of the Center for Neuroscience and Society, has been made a Fellow of the prestigious British Academy.

She is among 76 distinguished scholars to be elected to the Academy in recognition of work in the field of cognitive neuroscience. Farah’s research focuses on the interface between neuroscience and society, socioeconomic status and its relation to brain development, and implications of neuroscience for law education and other policy areas. The British Academy is a community of over 1,400 of the leading minds that make up the U.K.’s national academy for the humanities and social sciences. Past Fellows include Winston Churchill and C.S. Lewis.

MICHAEL C. HOROWITZ AWARDED GRANT TO STUDY AUTONOMOUS SYSTEMS AND AI

collaboration with researchers from the University of Denver, the Naval War College, and Yale University.

“Potentially rapid advances in autonomous systems raise fascinating questions about how technology affects human behavior inside and outside the military domain,” says Horowitz, who has provided expert commentary on military technology to Congress and is the author of the award-winning book, The Diffusion of Military Power: Causes and Consequences for International Politics.

“Answering these questions requires going beyond technological simulations and instead examining how behavioral factors—like trust, emotions, and organizational incentives—might shape the use and effectiveness of autonomous systems.”

In addition, the team will work to advance knowledge about the potential consequences of autonomous systems for DoD policy and the modern battlefield, as well as shed light on how other actors—both state and non-state—will incorporate autonomous systems.

“I am excited about the opportunity to apply social science research to this technological space,” says Horowitz. “It will help to build a broader understanding of the potentially disruptive behavioral and organizational effects of autonomy.”

Kyle Kielinski

• Trauma and the Arts: South Africa in Dialogue with Philadelphia, led by Carol Muller, Professor of Music.

• Shared Practices, Common Legacies: Ottoman Science from a Global Perspective, led by Harun Küçük, Assistant Professor of History and Sociology of Science.

• Undergraduate Seminar on Comparative Ancient Epics, led by Peter Struck, Professor and Chair of Classical Studies.

• Urban Sea: Living in Anthropogenic Waters, led by Nikhil Anand, Assistant Professor of Anthropology.

• Religion and the Global Future, led

by Steven Weitzman, Abraham M. Ellis Professor of Hebrew and Semitic Languages and Literature and Ella Darivoff Director of the Katz Center of Advanced Judaic Studies • Active Coating Technologies (ACT) to Mitigate the Global Water Crisis, led by Zahra Fakhraai, Associate Professor of Chemistry.

• Ongoing collaborative research in Africa, led by Guy Grossman, Associate Professor of Political Science.

contributions to the field of experimental and cognitive psychology and related areas. Thompson-Schill studies the biological bases of human cognitive systems, while Kahana studies human memory and its neural mechanisms, with a current focus on developing technologies to restore memory function in people who suffer from memory loss due to disease or traumatic injury.

Michael C. Horowitz, Professor of Political Science, will lead a research team that has been awarded a $1.04 million grant from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, through the Department of Defense (DoD) Minerva Initiative. The Minerva program is designed to facilitate social science research relevant for national security.

Horowitz is the primary investigator for “The Disruptive Effects of Autonomy: Ethics, Trust, and Organizational Decision-Making.” The project studies the effects of autonomous systems and artificial intelligence and involves

Michael C. Horowitz, Professor of Political Science

SCHOOL NEWS

FALL/WINTER 2018

TWO INNOVATIVE RESEARCHERS SELECTED AS CARNEGIE FELLOWS

NEW FACULTY

Eric Sucar

Penn Arts and Sciences has appointed 22 new members to its standing faculty for the 2018–2019 academic year.

Beth Simmons, Andrea Mitchell University Professor, and Daniel Q. Gillion, Julie Beren Platt and Marc E. Platt Presidential Associate Professor of Political Science

Two faculty from the Department of Political Science have been selected as 2018 Andrew Carnegie Fellows. Daniel Q. Gillion, Julie Beren Platt and Marc E. Platt Presidential Associate Professor of Political Science, and Beth Simmons, Andrea Mitchell University Professor, will each receive a $200,000 stipend allowing them to devote as long as two years to research and writing.

Gillion will work on a project titled “The Loud Minority: Why Protests Matter in American Democracy,” focusing on how activism influences elections and voter turnout.

“Protest is the pulse of American democracy that indicates the inevitable changing political tide. It places issues on the political agenda and makes certain issues salient,” says Gillion.

Zeroing in on the political consequences of protest activities across the partisan divide, the project will study the ways protests act as an avenue of communication between activists and non-activists, providing a space for greater discussion on difficult issues. To complete his project, Gillion will evaluate media reports regarding protests from 1940 to 2018 and conduct a national survey of voters following the 2018 midterm elections. He will also look at whether gerrymandering endangers democracy and heightens racial inequality.

Simmons, a Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor who also holds an appointment in Penn Law, will focus on “Structures and Sentiment: Understanding Anxieties About International Borders in the Modern World.”

The project will develop two databases. One is a first-of-its-kind global satellite-generated database of major border crossings. The second documents public sentiments that view international borders as spaces of opportunity versus threat.

“This innovative research will give us a fresh understanding of both architectural structures and societal sentiments that point to contemporary anxieties about international borders,” says Simmons, who studies international political borders during an age of globalization. “It will provide essential data to ultimately understand the consequences of thickened and hardened borders for human rights, health, security, and well-being in the border regions.”

The next phase of Simmons’ project examines the built environment at border crossings in their broader institutional contexts.

She will work to understand the layers of official bordering that support the filtering of mobility and trade.

Created in 2015 by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the fellowship program supports high-caliber scholarship and research that applies perspectives from the humanities and social sciences to address pressing issues.

The new recruits include four at the rank of full professor. Two of these scholars pursue energy-related research, an area that is a key priority of the School’s strategic plan. These include Joseph Francisco, President’s Distinguished Professor of Earth and Environmental Science, and Thomas Mallouk, Vagelos Professor in Energy Research and Professor of Chemistry. Mallouk will arrive in early 2019. Other senior faculty recruits include Professor of Political Science Roxanne Euben and Roquinaldo Ferreira, the Henry Charles Lea Professor of History.

Francisco and Mallouk bring different strengths to the School’s energy research. Francisco is an internationally recognized scholar of atmospheric chemistry and chemical kinetics whose work extends across chemical, earth, and environmental sciences, while Mallouk’s research has led to fundamental advances in materials chemistry and nanoscience.

Euben is a political theorist with expertise in Muslim and Euro-American political thought.

Ferreira specializes in the history of the transatlantic slave trade, colonialism, and the histories of Africa, Latin America, and the wider Atlantic world.

In addition to Ferreira, the Department of History is being strengthened by the addition of three new junior faculty members, bringing fresh expertise in U.S. and world history. Joining the department are Oscar Aguirre Mandujano, Brent Cebul, and Melissa Teixiera, all assistant professors.

7

OMNIA

FINDINGS

CROWDING BETWEEN THE BOOK COVERS BY

DAN HANSON

isolated protagonists view themselves as statistics, part of a vast set of devalued lives.

In Populating the Novel, Steinlight contends that, rather than simply reflecting this demographic growth, such pervasive literary crowding contributed to a seismic shift in British political thought.

She shows how the 19th-century novel claimed a new cultural role as it took on the task of narrating human aggregation at a moment when the specter of surplus population suddenly became a central premise of modern politics.

Courtesy of Emily Steinlight

Emily Steinlight, Stephen M. Gorn Family Assistant Professor of English

Think of a Charles Dickens novel—pick almost any one. It is likely packed with characters, from named ones to the throngs navigating London streets and populating orphanages, prisons, factories, and workhouses. In her book, Populating the Novel: Literary Form and the Politics of Surplus Life, Emily Steinlight examines not the well-studied characters of 19th-century British writers such as Dickens, Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, and Joseph Conrad, but the unidentified masses that pervade their literary works.

“Reading 19th-century novels, and especially the novels of Dickens, I became more and more interested in their sheer crowdedness—their human density,” says Steinlight, the Stephen M. Gorn Family Assistant Professor of English. “There’s a sense when you read a novel like Bleak House that character crowding almost

8

exceeds the capacity to give names to people, or even to describe them in impressionistic ways.”

Dickens’ novels, and those of several of his contemporary British writers, could be seen to mirror the times.

During the 19th century, the population of England and Wales more than tripled from about 8.9 million in 1801 to 32.5 million in 1901 as the country moved from a rural, agrarian economy to an urban, industrial economy.

During novels of this time period, population served as the center of meaning, a position previously held by individual protagonists, Steinlight says. This shift is the case not just in works where crowds are directly represented, as in Dickens’ city novels or Gaskell’s industrial novels, but also in much more sparsely populated stories set in the countryside. Hardy’s novels, for instance, make even their

As the population of England boomed, social issues associated with it began to impact political thought. Thomas Malthus’ “Essay on the Principle of Population,” published in 1798, serves as a touchstone for population science and the emergence of biopolitics. That essay paints a grim picture of the future, one filled with poverty, violence, and epidemic as checks to human population if otherwise unchecked.

Steinlight connects the writers of the 19th century—poets, essayists, and novelists— to Malthus’ political ideas. These writers were some of the key voices debating his conclusions. Some of them argued against him that inequality, poverty, and ecological scarcity and damage were the product of social rather than natural causes.

“Malthus saw this just as a given, an unfortunate fact of life to be reined in where possible to preserve social order as it stood," Steinlight explains. "But other thinkers and writers in his wake actually made overcrowding into an enabling condition: on the one hand, a palpably real problem, but on the other, a starting point for telling different kinds of stories about society. That was the central challenge that a lot of 19th-century novels were trying to think their way through.”

FINDINGS

FALL/WINTER 2018

UNDERSTANDING THE SOCIAL DYNAMICS THAT CAUSE COOPERATION TO THRIVE OR FAIL BY

KATHERINE UNGER BAILLIE

Amiyaal Ilany

Examples of cooperation abound in nature, from honeybee hives to human families. Yet it’s also easy enough to find examples of selfishness and conflict. Studying the conditions that give rise to cooperation has occupied researchers for generations, with implications for understanding the forces that drive workplace dynamics, charitable giving, animal behavior, even international relations.

A basic tenet of these studies is that cooperative behavior arises when individuals interacting in a social network derive some benefit from being generous with one another. Yet social networks are not fixed. What if the structure of the network itself alters as individuals become more cooperative?

In a report in the journal Nature Communications, Erol Akçay, Assistant Professor of Biology, addresses this question of how an evolving social network influences the likelihood of cooperation in a theoretical social group. He finds that, although networks in which connected individuals are closely related are more likely to cooperate, such groups can trigger a feedback loop that alters the structure of the network and leads to cooperation’s collapse.

“We know from a half-century of study that cooperation is quite easy to evolve in principle,” says Akçay, “in the sense that there are many, many sets of conditions that can make cooperative behaviors a better strategy than non-cooperative behaviors.

So given that, why isn’t the world a cooperative paradise?

Because we know it isn’t.”

The work builds upon studies that Akçay pursued with former postdoctoral researcher Amiyaal Ilany, now a faculty member at Bar-Ilan University. They developed a mathematical model of how individual animals inherit their social connections that can explain the structure of social networks in animal groups.

In the new work, Akçay built on that earlier model by adding in an element of choice; individuals in the network could either connect with a parent’s connection, or randomly with individuals aside from a parent’s connections. The probabilities of making each type of connection determine the structure of the network.

Each individual in the model was further designated to be either a cooperator or a defector. Cooperators provide a benefit to those they connect with, but the total amount they provide is fixed, so the more connections they have, the less each connection receives. Both cooperators and defectors reap a benefit based on the number of links to cooperators they possess, but defectors don’t offer anything in return.

Somewhat intuitively, Akçay found that groups with low levels of random linking—that is, connections not made through a parent—were more likely to have cooperation emerge, because they

Spotted hyenas are often cooperative animals, dwelling in large groups and assisting one another during hunts.

resulted in high relatedness between connected individuals.

In contrast, the probability of making connections through one’s parent had a relatively small effect on cooperation. But when he let the model continue to run, he found something he hadn’t anticipated.

“If everyone is handing out candy,” Akçay says, the best strategy is to “just go collect candy from everyone without being too selective about the connection.”

In other words, in a mostly cooperative population, making random links is just as beneficial as only making links to your parent’s connections. That leads to a situation in which cooperators begin forming connections with defectors, triggering a decline in the overall cooperative nature of the network.

But Akçay did find a way to push back against the descent into defection. When making a social link is costly—such as the time primates spend grooming one another, or the effort that goes into remembering to send a holiday gift to distant relatives— the likelihood of making random links goes down, and so, too, does the probability that a cooperative society will collapse into selfishness.

The work was supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Army Research Office, U.S.-Israel Binational Science Foundation, and National Academies of Science Keck Future Initiative.

9

OMNIA

FINDINGS

MUSIC, ETHNICITY, AND THE LEGACY OF WAR IN SRI LANKA BY

LAURA ZIV

Brooke Sietinsons

Jim Sykes, Assistant Professor of Music

What if our standard ways of describing traditional musics exacerbate perceptions of ethnic difference and thus help drive ethnic conflicts?

That is the question Jim Sykes explores in The Musical Gift: Sonic Generosity in PostWar Sri Lanka. The book is based on 11 years of intermittent research, including fieldwork conducted on the Indian Ocean island during and after the end of the country’s civil war, a 25-year conflict that arose out of ethnic tensions between the Sinhala majority and the Tamil minority.

The war ended in 2009.

Sykes, Assistant Professor of Music, was the first musicologist to conduct fieldwork in Sri Lanka’s former warzones of the east and north as these regions opened to the outside world for the first time in decades. Originally conceived as a study of the ritual drumming of the island’s Sinhala Buddhist community in the far south of the island, his book became a study of how these regions and their geographically disparate communities have a somewhat shared music history.

10

Sykes, a long-time drummer who has recorded and toured with numerous indie and noise rock groups, became interested in Sri Lanka’s music as a graduate student at the University of Chicago. There, he became increasingly intrigued by the drumming of Sri Lanka’s Sinhala Buddhist ethnic majority.

“The drumming is performed in all-night rituals that are famous in anthropology but which at the time had not been studied by any musicologist in English,” says Sykes. “I was intrigued by how language-like the drumming is. It is not structured by what we call ‘time signatures’ in the West. I could tell the rhythms were memorized and repeated, but I couldn’t tell where the beat was or how to subdivide the notes. I was hooked, and my research initially involved studying drumming in these all-night Sinhala Buddhist rituals.”

During his fieldwork in Sri Lanka between 2004 and 2008, he began to recognize that numerous musical connections exist between Sinhalas and Tamils, sparking an interest in Tamil music history and Tamil musicians’ experiences during the war.

Sykes realized that the way Sri Lanka’s music history is typically described hinges on the idea that each ethnic group has its own thoroughly distinct musical cultures. This idea of an essential connection between music and ethnic identity, Sykes says, is of Western derivation and plays directly into the hands of ethnonationalism and is at odds with definitions of personhood in Buddhism. He concluded that Sri Lankan traditional musics were originally about something quite different.

“I discovered music that was given by gods to one ethnic group, who gave it to another, who now give it back to the gods in rituals. I learned that such musical gifts, construed differently in Sinhala and Tamil cultures, were offered during the war to protect soldiers and civilians on both sides,” Sykes says.

The Musical Gift also explores a newly discovered history of musical exchange between ethnic groups in the domain of popular musics, and how ethnonationalists on both sides of the conflict sought to obscure connected musical histories.

Sykes has also investigated other phenomena, including a theory on the relationship between sound and the experience of war, in the article, “Ontologies of Acoustic Endurance: Rethinking Wartime Sound and Listening,” published in the journal Sound Studies. In the end, he says, sound and music can constitute shared experience even when difference or discord is highly visible.

“My research explores how we might choose to define music history as a space of connection and respect for others rather than merely as a space for the demarcation of communal difference,” says Sykes.

FINDINGS

FALL/WINTER 2018

LIGHT, DARK, AND ALL IN BETWEEN BY

KATHERINE UNGER BAILLIE

Courtesy of University Communications

Sarah Tishkoff, David and Lyn Silfen University Professor

An international team led by geneticist Sarah Tishkoff has identified new genetic variants associated with skin pigmentation. While most genes known to contribute to normal variation in skin color have been discovered through studies of European populations, the new study, published in the journal Science, incorporated samples from diverse African groups.

The findings help explain the vast range of skin color on the African continent, shed light on human evolution, and inform an understanding of the genetic risk factors for conditions such as skin cancer.

“We have identified new genetic variants that contribute to the genetic basis of one of the most strikingly variable traits in modern humans,” says Tishkoff, the David and Lyn Silfen University Professor in Genetics and Biology with appointments in the School of Arts and Sciences and the Perelman School of Medicine.

“When people think of skin color in Africa most would think of darker skin, but we show that within Africa there is a huge amount of variation, ranging from skin

as light as some Asians to the darkest skin on a global level, and everything in between.”

Tishkoff and colleagues measured the light reflectance of the skin—a stand-in for melanin content—of more than 2,000 Africans from ethnically and genetically diverse populations. They found the darkest skin in Nilo-Saharan pastoralist populations in eastern Africa, and the lightest skin in San hunter-gatherer populations in southern Africa.

Using genetic information from nearly 1,600 people, the researchers found four key areas of the genome where variation closely correlated with skin color differences.

The region with the strongest associations was in and around the SLC24A5 gene, one variant of which is known to play a role in light skin color in European and some southern Asian populations and is believed to have arisen more than 30,000 years ago. This variant was common in populations in Ethiopia and Tanzania that were known to have ancestry from Southeast Asia and the Middle East, suggesting it was carried into Africa from those regions.

Another region, which contains the MFSD12 gene, had the second strongest association to skin pigmentation. This gene is expressed at low levels in depigmented skin in individuals with vitiligo, a condition where the skin loses pigment in some areas.

“I still remember the ‘Ah ha!’ moment when we saw this gene was associated with vitiligo,” says Nicholas Crawford, a former Penn postdoctoral fellow who worked in collaboration with Tishkoff.

“That’s when we knew we’d found something new and exciting.”

Additional associations with skin color were found in the OCA2 and HERC2 genes, which have been linked with skin, eye, and hair color variation in Europeans, though the mutations identified are novel.

And a final genetic region the researchers found to be associated with skin pigmentation included genes that play a role in ultraviolet light response and melanoma risk.

“Africans don’t get melanoma very often,” Tishkoff says. “The variants near these genes are highest in populations who live in areas of the highest ultraviolet light intensity, so it makes sense that they may be playing a role in UV protection.”

The work gives a broader picture of the evolution of skin color in humans. Most of the genetic variants associated with light and dark pigmentation from the study appear to have originated more than 300,000 years ago, and some emerged roughly 1 million years ago, well before modern humans evolved. The older version of these variants in many cases was the one associated with lighter skin, suggesting that perhaps the ancestral state of humans was moderately pigmented rather than darkly pigmented skin.

Tishkoff noted that the work underscores the diversity of African populations and the lack of support for biological notions of race.

“We show that skin color is extremely variable on the African continent and that it is still evolving,” Tishkoff says. “There’s no such thing as an African race.”

The study was conducted with support primarily from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.

11

OMNIA

FINDINGS

ALEF IS FOR ALLAH, C IS FOR CUTE BY

LAUREN REBECCA THACKER

In his field work across the Muslim world, Jamal J. Elias frequently saw images of children used to communicate religious, national, and civic ideals in places ranging from Turkey, a country with near-universal literacy, to Pakistan, a nation with low educational spending and correspondingly low literacy rates. Images, particularly images of children, teach a visual literacy that creates a shared cultural language.

Elias points to illustrator Cem Kızıltuğ and his influential series on the lives of prophets. A scene representing the crucifixion of Jesus, for example, is awash with bright colors and uses round shapes to represent “good” figures, while “bad” figures are represented by spiky, angular shapes. The cross itself is anthropomorphized and notably absent a human figure.

The simple scene teaches the story but avoids explicitly mentioning its violence.

These observations led Elias, Walter H. Annenberg Professor in the Humanities, Professor and Chair of Religious Studies, and Professor of South Asia Studies, to focus his research on representations of childhood in contemporary Iran, Pakistan, and Turkey and the questions they raise about matters ranging from religion and nationhood to concepts of childhood and innocence. His 2018 book, Alef Is for Allah: Childhood, Emotion, and Visual Culture in Islamic Societies, is the first systematic, comparative treatment of visual representations of childhood in Islamic societies.

In media for children and adults alike, children are used to elicit emotional responses of identification or sympathy.

In Iran, nationalist images figure children in several ways, including as sacrificial boys or grieving daughters. Elias traces these gendered representations through children’s books, a large number of which were published after the Iranian Revolution of 1978, and posters and state-issued stamps intended primarily for an adult audience.

Elias argues that while particular experiences of childhood vary across cultures, there is a global agreement of what an idealized childhood looks like.

“People with relative security have developed a remarkably similar notion of an idealized childhood: a time of innocence, a time of protection, and a time of schooling. This understanding results in images of children serving as a cultural shorthand for innocence and virtue, without those qualities being explicitly stated.”

Alef Is for Allah demonstrates that these adult constructions of childhood inform visual texts intended for both child and adult populations.

Turkish children’s books, for example, often use cuteness to make religious stories more compelling and more palatable.

12

Elias stresses the adult hand in creating images of children, regardless of the intended audience or purpose. Children’s books are grounded in both what adults expect children to know and in what they assume children can emotionally and intellectually process, while adult media relies on shared understandings of an idealized childhood.

“Children are multipliers,” Elias says.

“They multiply the emotional content of any message, and in that way we socially invest children with a symbolic value that is greater than the value we assign to adults.”

“Because images of children are so emotionally constitutive, they play an outsize role in not only reflecting a culture’s values, but in constructing and reinforcing those very values.”

Alef Is for Allah: Childhood, Emotion, and Visual Culture in Islamic Societies

By Jamal J. Elias Walter H. Annenberg Professor in the Humanities, Professor and Chair of Religious Studies, and Professor of South Asia Studies

FINDINGS

FALL/WINTER 2018

A PHYSICS TREASURE HIDDEN IN THE PATTERN OF WALLPAPER BY

KATHERINE UNGER BAILLIE

Physicist Charles Kane and chemist Andrew Rappe were part of an international team of scientists to discover a new form of insulating material with a metallic surface that may enable more efficient electronics, or even quantum computing.

Their findings were facilitated by the development of a new method for analyzing existing chemical compounds that relies on the mathematical properties that govern the repeating patterns seen in everyday wallpaper.

The research, published in the journal Science, involved a collaboration among groups from Penn, Princeton University, Sungkyunkwan University, Freie Universität Berlin, and the Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics.

The discovery of this phase in crystals of lead-strontium, Sr2Pb3, completes a decade-long search for an elusive three-dimensional material that combines the unique electronic properties of two-dimensional graphene and three-dimensional topological insulators, a phase Courtesy of University Communications

The unusual symmetries present in everyday wallpaper and wrapping paper played a role in the discovery of a new type of insulating material.

of matter discovered in 2005 in independent works by Kane and Princeton’s B. Andrei Bernevig. Topological insulators are materials that are insulators on their interior but conduct electricity on their surface. Their special properties as efficient conductors have driven speculation that they could serve as a foundation for super-fast quantum computing.

“You can think about a topological insulator like a Hershey’s Kiss,” says Kane, a corresponding author on the paper and the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Physics. “The chocolate is the insulator, and the foil is a conductor.

We’ve been trying to identify new classes of materials in which crystal symmetries protect the conducting surface. What we’ve done here is to identify the simplest kind of topological crystalline insulator.”

The new work demonstrates how the symmetries of certain two-dimensional surfaces, known as the 17 wallpaper groups for their wallpaper-like patterning, constrain the spatial arrangement, or topology, of three-dimensional insulators. The researchers applied these constraints to discover phenomenologically distinct topological insulating phases in real materials.

In a conventional three-dimensional topological insulator, each two-dimensional surface exhibits a single characteristic group of states with cone-like dispersion. These cones resemble the elements on graphene called Dirac cones, features that imbue the material and other two-dimensional Dirac semimetals with their unusual electronic-transport qualities. Yet these elements on the new material are distinct because graphene possesses a total of four Dirac cones in two pairs that are “glued” together.

Kane had suspected that, with crystal symmetries, a second kind of topological insulator could exist with a single pair of glued Dirac cones, like “half” of graphene.

“What I realized was that a single pair of Dirac cones is impossible in a purely two-dimensional material, but it might be possible at the surface of a new kind of topological insulator,” Kane says.

“But when I tried to construct such a state, the two cones always came unglued.”

A solution emerged when Benjamin Wieder, then a graduate student in Kane’s group and now a Princeton postdoctoral associate, visited Princeton. There, Bernevig and colleague Zhi Jun Wang had just discovered “hourglass insulators”—topological insulators with strange patterns of interlocking hourglass-like states—which Wieder recognized as acting as if a three-dimensional crystal had been wrapped with a special kind of patterned wallpaper.

“We realized that you could get not just the hourglass insulator, but also this special Dirac insulator, by finding a crystal that looked like it was covered in the right wallpaper,” says Wieder.

The researchers applied mathematical rigor to this recognition, resulting in a new, wallpaper symmetry-based methodology for diagnosing the bulk topology of three-dimensional crystals.

“For the first time, we can directly relate the symmetry of a surface to the presence of desired topological surface states,” says Rappe, Blanchard Professor of Chemistry.

“This allows an elegant and immediately useful means of designing desirable surface and interface states.”

The work was supported in part by the Simons Foundation, Nordita, the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, the Packard Foundation, the Schmidt Fund for Innovative Research, and the National Natural Science Foundation of China.

13

OMNIA

14

FALL/WINTER 2018

Widening thE LEns On LanguagE Study Penn Arts and Sciences faculty use language to unravel mysteries of culture, cognition, and communication.

BY KAREN BROOKS 1 ILLUSTRATIONS BY GRACIA LAM

H

ave you ever wondered why we say “bought” rather than “buyed?”

Or why some of us drink “soda” while others drink “pop?” Or why it is easy to pick up a new language as a child, but hard as an adult?

Understanding language is a complex endeavor that represents an academic gold mine for researchers across many disciplines. The greatest of all social tools, language lets people share knowledge and feelings, conduct business, make plans, tell stories, give instructions, and transmit culture from generation to generation.

But beyond facilitating interpersonal interactions, language provides a window to the inner workings of the human mind. As a field of study, it connects the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences,

incorporating areas as diverse as psychology, neuroscience, anthropology, philosophy, education, computer science, and artificial intelligence.

“How we learn, process, and use language, and how we change language over time—these are really fundamental aspects of being human, so a lot of different experts are asking these questions,” says Professor of Psychology John Trueswell. “Having multiple disciplines collaborating and using different methods to find the answers is what makes the study of language so interesting.”

Using a variety of observational and experimental approaches, Penn Arts and Sciences faculty are delving deeply into the mechanisms underlying language acquisition, interpretation, and production. Their work reveals the intricate ways in which people shape language—and in which language shapes us.

Story Contents GEMS VERSUS JUNK 16 When learning their first words, children face more challenges than we may realize.

THE SOUNDS THAT MATTER

16

Babies understand much about language even before they are able to speak.

CHOOSING AND USING OUR WORDS

17

Sometimes our words don’t communicate the things we want them to.

ARTIFICIAL LANGUAGES: THE FRUIT FLIES OF LINGUISTICS? 18 The study of language evolution might be an experimental science after all.

HOW PEOPLE “TAWK” IN PHILADELPHIA 18 The city’s famous local dialect is changing, but nobody is quite sure why.

BEYOND THE TIPPING POINT

20

Counting and speaking follow similar rules.

THOUGHT WITHOUT LANGUAGE 21 Research shows creatures without language are capable of conceptual thought.

15

OMNIA

Gems versus Junk Children generally make acquiring language look effortless. As infants become toddlers, they simply begin to speak, without formal instruction.

Professor of Psychology John Trueswell knows this is harder than it appears. “It would seem that children could learn the meanings of their first words simply by looking at the world around them—shoes are around when they hear the word ‘shoe’—but the problem is that the world gives them both too much and too little information to figure out what most words mean,” he says.

The “too much” comes into play with concrete nouns like “ball” or “book,” which could refer to any item a baby can see—or even one they can’t.

Trueswell and longtime collaborator Lila Gleitman, Emerita Professor of Psychology, have demonstrated how

difficult it is to match words with objects in the absence of verbal clues, even for adults. In their experiment, participants watched muted videos of parent-child interactions, then heard a “beep” at the moment a parent said a concrete noun. When asked to guess the word, they often had no idea.

“Identifying a particular word’s referent, especially when you don’t know any words to begin with, is not a simple task.

Moments when physical cues make it clear what a parent is referring to are the most influential word learning moments for children, but these referential ‘gems’ are rare, and the rest of the time, it’s junk,” says Trueswell, who encourages parents to speak about the “here and now” to help their children learn more words, as a child’s vocabulary size at school entry is a predictor of future academic success.

The world offers infants “too little” information, Trueswell says, when it comes to verbs like “give” and “get” and abstract nouns like “idea” or “knowledge.” In these cases, they must infer meanings based on their existing vocabulary and “this is likely why these kinds of words are learned later.”

Trueswell also devotes much of his time to analyzing children’s eye movements as they listen to spoken descriptions of their surroundings. “When you can see where someone is looking in the world as they’re hearing speech about that world, you get a moment-by-moment record of what they think an utterance means,” he says. “This gives us insight not only into what they know about language but also how they process it in real time.”

The Sounds That Matter Daniel Swingley, Professor of Psychology, directs Penn’s Infant Language Center where, like Professor of Psychology John Trueswell, he uses observational studies to assess how children acquire language, including the words they comprehend before they are able to speak.

“Babies are thrown into an environment where everyone is using this very complicated signal to convey information, and they have to figure out that there are words, as well as which sounds are meaningful for telling words apart. A baby learning English has to be able to distinguish similar sounds like bit, bait, bat, and bet—but babies in other environments have to learn other sounds,” says Swingley, who aims to understand how infants come to grasp these features of their language.

Swingley uses “language-guided looking” to evaluate word recognition: Infants and toddlers in his lab watch a screen showing images of two different objects, and as researchers begin talking about one of the objects, children will rapidly look to the 16

corresponding image if they already know the word for it. Swingley says babies as young as six months have shown evidence that they understand the meaning of certain words.

Babies are thrown into this environment where everyone is using this very complicated signal to convey information, and they have to figure out which sounds are meaningful.

Infant Language Center researchers also test children’s knowledge by adjusting the way they pronounce various terms. They have found that changing “dog” to “tog,” for example,

will lead many children—including those who do not yet speak—to reject an image of a dog, indicating that they realize pronunciation matters.

“This is interesting because even when we’re talking to infants, the language adults use is not optimal; we’re lazy, we don’t over-articulate, we make elisions and leave words out.

But amazingly, babies can somehow make sense of these very messy signals,” Swingley says.

By analyzing children’s “language environment”—the way their family engages them in conversation—Swingley also examines how specific features of family talk lead to infants’ learning of particular words and sounds.

“By studying how children turn experience into knowledge, we’re building a picture of how language development works to help us understand why it sometimes seems to go awry. For conditions where language doesn’t operate in the expected way, it’s useful to know about the normal course of development,” he says.

FALL/WINTER 2018

Choosing and Using Our Words Even if they speak the same language, people don’t always understand each other. Delphine Dahan, Associate Professor of Psychology, wants to know why.

“We don’t realize how flexible language is,” Dahan says. Beyond the endless variety of tones, volumes, pronunciations, and emphases that can change the meaning of a statement, “Sometimes it’s the terms you choose that keep you from being understood—the terms you think are most effective to describe something might not be effective for another person at all.”

Dahan’s current studies focus on verbal interactions. Her experiments involve two participants who hold identical sets of cards that picture various objects; one person describes an object from one of the cards, and the other identifies the card in question.

Depending on whether an accurate match was made, Dahan analyzes why a speaker’s communication was successful or unsuccessful.

The game seems simple, but Dahan observes errors even with the most mundane objects. If several cards feature sneakers, she notes, a participant might describe one using its color, its brand, the sport it’s commonly worn for, or some other variable that may or may not resonate with the listener, even if the speaker believes it will. Her goal is to highlight the complexity behind choosing an expression, which relies heavily on perspective-taking.

For example, she explains, you probably wouldn’t describe a pair of shoes in the same way to a child as you would to a teenager, because you assume different things about them.

“I want to see how people use their knowledge both to communicate what they mean and to understand what others mean,” says Dahan, who has found that demographics—particularly education level—factor into participants’ performances and is interested in how communication skills and styles can create inequalities among different groups.

“There’s an assumption that what we are studying is so basic that results will be the same across the entire population, but that’s not true. I want to understand why that is and how it matters in people’s everyday lives, where they are in society, and if we should be doing something about it,” she says.

“People’s ability to express themselves through language and to understand what others are expressing is critical, because verbal communication is the base of everything in our society.”

17

Artificial Languages: The Fruit Flies of Linguistics?

Studying the evolution of language is tricky: Since language change happens slowly, unfolding generation after generation, laboratory research is not an option.

Or is it?

Gareth Roberts, Assistant Professor of Linguistics, examines how interpersonal interactions influence language change by doing experiments in which people communicate using made-up languages.

“In biology, fruit flies are used to study evolutionary processes because they reproduce very rapidly, so you can watch evolution happening. We do the same thing with these miniature artificial languages. They are very small and they are new to our participants, so they mutate faster than language does in the real world,” Roberts says.

Describing language change as a form of “cultural evolution” because it involves socially rather than biologically transmitted behavior, Roberts has recently looked at stereotyping’s influence on language. Participants in an experiment he conducted with Betsy Sneller, GR’18,

played a computer game in which they acted as different alien species who could fight each other, with one of the species designed to look and sound tougher than the second. In that scenario, the “weaker” aliens borrowed language features from the tougher aliens they encountered—but later, when the experiment was repeated with the social importance of toughness eliminated by removing fighting from the game, that effect disappeared.

Meredith Tamminga, GR’14, Assistant Professor of Linguistics, is studying the drivers of these changes to “Philadelphia English.”

“One change nobody notices but that there is strong evidence for is that a long ‘a’ like in ‘plate’ is becoming more like ‘ee,’ so the word sounds like ‘pleet.’ I can’t tell you why this is happening, but we’re interested in finding out,” Tamminga says. She is building on the work of her mentor, William Labov, the retired John H. and Margaret B. Fassitt Professor of Linguistics, 18

Uniquely Human Experts agree that human language is unique—not because it enables us to communicate, but because the combination of vocabulary and grammar permits us to communicate infinite ideas. Many animals can make sounds to warn their peers of looming danger or alert them to a food source, but none can convey thoughts like “That was an amazing nap” or “I really wish this rain would stop.”

These results suggest that people are likely to adopt elements from another group’s language if certain stereotypes applied to that group appeal to them.

Roberts uses studies like this to deduce how language in the real world evolves over time, with pronunciations shifting and new words emerging.

Research duo Robert Seyfarth and Dorothy Cheney, Professors Emeritus in the Departments of Psychology and Biology, respectively, have spent their careers analyzing communication in nonhuman primates and have identified parallels that might indicate how human language evolved from animal signaling.

“In my work, I get to do something that didn’t seem possible to most people until recently, and still doesn’t seem possible to some,” he says. “I create a small chunk of language and get to see it change right there in the lab, watching how it reacts to little prods and pulls to make steps in understanding why language changes.”

“Animal vocalizations can mean very specific things and be associated with very specific events. The alarm calls of monkeys are a classic example. Also, animals can recognize the identity of the animal who is signaling,” says Seyfarth, whose extensive studies of baboons have consistently demonstrated that they comprehend strings of sounds—they respond differently, for example, to a series of vocalizations depending on whether the calls indicate that A is threatening B or B is threatening A. “It’s as if the baboon thinks in terms of a sentence with a subject, verb, and object. This kind of cognition is likely widespread in animals, certainly in socially living primates.”

How People “Tawk” in Philadelphia Philadelphians are famous for their distinct regional dialect. They eat “wooder” ice, drink “cawfee,” and go “daown” the shore. But research shows that many of these well-known variations are diminishing, while new ones are stealthily popping up in their place.

OMNIA

who spent half a century analyzing the evolution of Philadelphia accents, particularly in relation to socioeconomic status.

In her current National Science Foundation-funded project, Tamminga is looking at language use within—rather than across—specific demographics to assess what characteristics cause individuals to modify their speech. Starting with young white women, researchers in her lab are observing friends in casual conversation to see if they use the accent variations already known to be emerging in Philadelphia. They then separate participants and evaluate their phonetic flexibility, or tendency to imitate the speech of others while talking to them. The resulting data will reveal whether there are connections between people’s phonetic flexibility and the likelihood that they will adopt and promote language change. (CONT’D on p.20)

Seyfarth believes language evolved because of humans’ needs to navigate complex social interactions and that human infants infer word meanings the same way nonhuman primates infer the significance of vocalizations: through context.

“Both creatures have to figure it out for themselves by integrating the sound they heard with what’s going on around them,” he says. “This suggests that some of the learning mechanisms we see in human infants who do not yet say words are similar to the ones we see in monkeys.”

FALL/WINTER 2018

19

OMNIA

How People “Tawk” in Philadelphia (CONT’D from p.18) “We’re building a bridge between data from sociolinguistics, which puts a lot of emphasis on natural, conversational speech, and psycholinguistics, which uses controlled, laboratory-based experiments to study how we mentally process language—how we hear sounds and recognize words,” she says.

Tamminga believes her studies can help eliminate the stigma associated with language change, which is often viewed negatively. “People who push language change forward by using certain dialects are seen as lazy or uneducated, but the truth is, all languages are in flux and always have been. This is a natural, inevitable process and not a form of degradation,” she says.

Like Genes, Language Mutates Suspecting that language evolves the same way living things do—through both natural selection and random changes—Joshua Plotkin, Professor of Biology, teamed up with Linguistics Professor Robin Clark and other researchers to test his theory.

The group analyzed more than 100,000 texts dating from the 12th to the 21st century, homing in on past-tense verbs that have evolved from regular to irregular (sneaked/snuck, think/ thought). Most of these changes, they found, appeared to result from random chance rather than selective pressures. Occasionally, though, “survival of the fittest” was at play.

The team identified a pattern: Changes to rarely used verbs were due to chance—but changes to more common verbs were likely driven by selection, including people’s penchant for rhyming.

For example, the “irregularization” of “dived” to “dove” coincided with the invention of cars and the corresponding use of rhyming irregular verb drive/drove. Additionally, expanded use of “quit” instead of “quitted” coincided with a rise in use of “hit” and “split.” However, says Plotkin, “the vast majority of verbs we analyzed show no evidence of selection whatsoever.”

20

Beyond the Tipping Point A Professor of Linguistics and Computer Science, Charles Yang sees the two seemingly disparate fields as inextricably linked. “Language is a machine, and its core engine is in place by the time we are four or five years old. Whatever makes us able to learn language, then, has to be a simple—almost mechanical—system,” he says.

Yang has spent much of his career analyzing exceptions to linguistic rules, such as irregular verbs like “think” and “go” that do not follow the pattern of ending in –ed in the past tense. He ultimately developed a mathematical equation that calculates when children will deem mastering a rule and memorizing its exceptions worthwhile, as opposed to ignoring a rule altogether because it has so many exceptions, the rule itself has no valuable predictive power.

Recently, Yang began applying his equation, which he coined the Tolerance Principle, to the process of counting. Empirical studies from as far back as the 1980s have shown that once an English-speaking child can count to a “tipping point” of 73, he or she can continue counting indefinitely. However, no one understood why—until Yang explained it. “Counting is a process of learning rules of language and their exceptions. Once you figure them out, you can count forever,” he says.

There are 17 exceptions to the rules of counting: The words for numbers one through 10 are arbitrary and must be memorized, and the words for 11, 12, 13,

15, 20, 30, and 50 diverge from any expected pattern. “You don’t say 11 as ‘one-teen,’” Yang notes.

Basic arithmetic skills tend to be predicted by how well children can count. People should talk to children—not to teach them math, but to teach them language.

A B C

Yang is applying his research to other languages, each of which will have its own tipping point.

Determining what that is has important educational implications, he says.

“Basic arithmetic skills tend to be predicted by how well children can count,” he says. “People should talk to children—not to teach them math, but to teach them language. A younger child who knows the rules of counting will be better than an older child who doesn’t when it comes to understanding that if you add 1 to 36, you get 37.”

FALL/WINTER 2018

Thought Without Language Rather than studying language itself, Elizabeth Brannon, C’92, Professor of Psychology and the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Chair in the Natural Sciences, examines the role language plays in human cognition by studying creatures that don’t have language.

“Studying thought without language is an avenue toward understanding how language influences thought and what kind of thought is unique to humans,” says Brannon, who examines whether animals and human infants can comprehend and represent number nonverbally.

To find out how monkeys think about numbers, she and her team train rhesus macaques to use touchscreens so they can respond to pictures for food or juice rewards. Monkeys learn by trial and error to choose the numerically larger of two arrays, even when the numerically larger array

has smaller items. They also test the monkeys’ basic math skills, asking them to choose an array that matches the sum of two other arrays or that indicates what is left if a subset of dots is removed. After extensive training, Brannon gives the monkeys numerically novel problems to make sure they are truly paying attention to number rather than simply learning to choose the response that results in reward.

“The monkeys are very good at these numerical tasks, and in all cases their behavior follows Weber’s Law—their ability to discriminate arrays is dependent on the ratio between the values rather than their absolute difference,” Brannon says. This means that arrays of 18 and 20 dots look much more similar numerically than arrays of four and six dots, even though both pairs differ by the same absolute value of two dots. “They’re clearly using a system that doesn’t have the precision that our symbolic number system allows us.”

With infants, Brannon’s team uses gaze duration and location to measure reaction to numerical changes. They “habituate” babies by showing them an array of dots repeatedly, then switching to a new display that includes that same array alongside one with a different numerical value. If they gaze longer at the numerically novel array—as they frequently do—Brannon infers that they can discriminate between differing quantities. Babies, like monkeys, are also limited by the ratio between the quantities.

“Our findings show us that there are precursors to mathematical abilities in monkeys and babies, which means language is not necessary for basic quantitative thinking,” Brannon says.

“But without language, what animals and babies can’t do is appreciate the value of 1,362. Without a languagebased counting system, they can only get so far.”

21

OMNIA

22

FALL/WINTER 2018

Deborah Thomas embeds herself in communities stricken by violence to chronicle the humanity revealed during the aftermath.

By Blake Cole Photography by Shira Yudkoff

23

OMNIA

The most difficult interviews were the children. It was 2012 and the filming of Deborah Thomas’ documentary, Four Days in May, was underway in Tivoli Gardens, the site of one of the most violent events in modern Jamaican history.

“After talking to the kids, we were all pretty under it. I thought, ‘I can’t do this anymore.

Maybe this is wrong,’” says Thomas. “I mentioned that to one of the people from the community and he said, ‘People are going to break down in the studio, but then on the way home they’re always saying how much better they feel having talked about it. Otherwise we bury it.’”

Thomas is a Renaissance woman by any definition. An educator, author, filmmaker, artist, and professional dancer, she has spent her adult life working with victims of violence, using her expertise and artistry to examine the humanity within tragedy.

decolonization and universal suffrage. And though Jamaica gained independence from Britain in 1962, the scars of colonialism remained, leaving racial tensions high and class transformation stagnant.

Though her parents came from very different backgrounds, Thomas says their outlook and aspirations were very much the same.

Her father was raised in rural Jamaica. After graduating from a technical school he went to work for Shell Oil, and while an employee, applied and was accepted to Marquette University, located in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

There, he met a blue-collar young white woman studying to be a nurse and they soon married—much to everyone’s chagrin, says Thomas.

Thomas, R. Jean Brownlee Professor in the Department of Anthropology, also holds appointments in the Department of Africana “This was small-town Wisconsin. There was Studies, the Graduate School of Education, a lot of misunderstanding and racism, not and the School of Social Policy and Practice. just on my mother’s side, but on my dad’s She is a core faculty member of the Alice side, too,” she says.

Paul Center for Research on Women, Gender, Thomas was born in Milwaukee but her famand Sexuality, and is Editor-in-Chief of the ily relocated frequently during her youth: to American Anthropological Association’s Kingston, Jamaica’s capital and largest city, flagship journal, American Anthropologist. when she was just three, then back stateside Her portfolio of works represents a journey when she was seven. through communities where strife is com“I imagine all the moving around taught me monplace, and healing has only just begun. to be adaptable, which likely prepared me It includes activist performances, books, well for anthropology,” says Thomas. films, exhibits, and a new initiative meant Later, when her academic trajectory began to bring imaginative student research to the to take shape, she developed a new perspecfore. But to fully grasp these projects, you tive on her early years. need to return to her beginnings.

Thomas’ career-long interest in the Jamai- “I realized I could go back as a grown up, not just as part of a family trip back home, but to can people is rooted in the childhood she develop a different relationship that’s my own. spent there. Much like the rest of the CaribI would go to the library and open the ‘J’ in bean, Jamaica has been shaped by its colonial the card catalog and literally just read every past. Slavery was abolished in 1834, and in book that they had on Jamaica,” says Thomas.

1937, workers rebelled, which led to formal 24

Clockwise from left: Deborah Thomas at the “Bearing Witness: Four Days in West Kingston” exhibit. Housed at Penn Museum, it is part art installation, part memorial, and part call to action; Thomas performing in "The Gilda Stories" with the Urban Bush Women; Thomas as a child in her yard in Kingston, Jamaica.

FALL/WINTER 2018

Thomas attended Brown University as an undergraduate, where she majored in semiotics, a film production and theory and linguistic communications degree. Her senior thesis was a dance theater production. After graduating, she moved to New York to dance with several different pick-up companies, also working as a dramaturg at Crossroads Theatre Company in New Brunswick, NJ. While at Crossroads, she received a call from the Urban Bush Women—a New Yorkbased, Afro-modern dance company that galvanizes artists, activists, audiences, and communities through performances, artist development, education, and community engagement—about working on the script for a piece called “Praise House.”

“It was about Black women who were visionary artists in the rural south, early 20th century,” says Thomas. “I couldn’t do it because I was moving to Brazil, but when I got back I called, just to make the connection, because that was one of the dance companies that I really loved and that really spoke to me. In college I had worked from a research-to-performance

methodology, so using the arts as a tool for social change and consciousness raising is what I was passionate about.”

I realized I could go back as a grown up to develop a different relationship that’s my own. I would go to the library and open the ‘J’ in the card catalog and literally just read every book that they had on Jamaica.

In addition to spending 35 weeks out of the year performing, Thomas also participated in the company’s Community Engagement

Projects, which saw her working with different grassroots organizations to realize a program of action.

“I worked in a puppet theater in the Ninth Ward in New Orleans. They were at war with this neighboring gang and they wanted to invite them to a block party at the end of the five weeks of our work together and not have any incidents,” says Thomas. “What that looked like for us was a lot of relaxation techniques: improv, conflict resolution through movement—just trying to chill everybody out. We also worked with their puppets to stage a performative event, but then embody it, too. The block party was super fun and it remained peaceful.”

When time came around to either sign a new contract with the company or move on, Thomas’ parents brought up going back to school.

“I really loved the work I was doing, and I wanted to continue at a larger scale. I had this plan in my head to apply for individual grants and travel all over the world.

25

My dad was like ... right,” Thomas laughs.

“And he said that if I did this in the context of a university, maybe someone would pay me.

It was an ‘Oh’ moment.”

Thomas was accepted to New York University (NYU) and entered into the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Master’s program.

“My first class was with an anthropology professor and I just fell in love because I didn’t know there was a word for what I had been doing all along: learning by participating with people and figuring out what was going on in a hands-on sort of way,” Thomas says.

Thomas was brimming with excitement, but she didn’t have a grasp on how to read like an anthropologist—like an academic.

“I was just excited all the time, so I’d write these one-page thinksheets that were really six pages and totally ramble-y and I didn’t really get the arguments of the stuff we were looking at,” Thomas says. “But my professor, Constance Sutton, really took me under her wing and saw potential and took a long time to kind of shape me and mold me into what could pass for an anthropologist.”

“He rejected it, so I called him back just to get some feedback for improving it and he ended up deciding to send it out after all,” Thomas says.

Thomas started a second project on hotel workers but then a gang war broke out in the Jamaican community where she did her Ph.D. field work. “One of the kids there that I had worked with was killed, and I felt an urgency to figure out why that happened and ultimately this quest became my second

OMNIA

The film chronicles the history of violence in Jamaica through the eyes of its most iconic community—Rastafari—and shows how people use their recollections of violence to imagine new possibilities for the future.

Thomas says that while early anthropologists would have framed Rastafari in relation to millenarianism—the belief in a coming ideal society created by revolutionary action—most today see the movement as a prophetic realignment of Enlightenment racial hierarchies.

Exceptional Violence is an examination of postcolonial state formation in the Caribbean, considered across time and space.

Through an analysis of Jamaica’s national media, works of popular culture, practices of punishment and discipline during slavery, the effects of intensified migration, and Jamaica’s national cultural policy, Thomas argues that violence in Jamaica is the complicated result of a structural history of colonialism and underdevelopment, not “In Rastafari there’s also a strand of Black a cultural characteristic passed from one consciousness from the days of slavery movgeneration to the next. ing forward,” Thomas says. “Putting those two together ends up with it being the most recognizable influential movement in Jamaican history. It’s a rejection of racial hierarchies that exist under the colonial status quo and of the veneration of things white.”

I had this plan in my head to apply for individual grants and travel all over the world.

My dad said that if I did this in the context of a university, maybe someone would pay me.

It was an ‘Oh’ moment.

After earning her Ph.D. and experiencing teaching for the first time at NYU, Thomas accepted a two-year postdoc position at Wesleyan University, in its Center for the Americas. Her first tenure-track position was at Duke in the Department of Cultural Anthropology. Thomas’ debut book, Modern Blackness, an ethnographic exploration of Jamaican identity in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, is a reworking of her doctoral dissertation. Her advisor had suggested she talk to one of the editors at Duke University Press, whom she happened to run into in the halls during a conference she was attending.

26

book, 2011’s Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transnational Jamaica.”

Thomas is also co-editor of Globalization and Race: Transformations in the Cultural Production of Blackness, which includes essays by leading anthropologists and argues that a firm grasp of globalization requires an understanding of how race has constituted, and been constituted by, global transformations.

The incident at the heart of the film happened in 1963 in the Coral Gardens neighborhood near Montego Bay at a moment in time when tension surrounding Rastafari was already high. It centered around a land dispute between local Rastafari men and a British sugar manufacturer and landowner. A confrontation with police left eight people dead, including one officer, and led the Jamaican prime minster to order police to “Bring them in, dead or alive.” The political powers in Jamaica labeled the conflict a “Rastafari uprising,” a smokescreen that allowed it to send in police from all over the island, with the U.S. government providing support.

The aftermath of the incident saw security forces rounding up all Rastafari anywhere, most of whom had no idea about the incident in the first place. The State tortured and tormented hundreds. Men in the documentary recount stories of persecution. One was framed for rape on the sole basis of his long beard matching a description of the assailant.

Listening to Thomas discuss her films reveals a passion that hearkens back to her early academic aspirations. Her debut, 2011’s Bad Friday: Rastafari After Coral Gardens, is a collaboration with her husband, John L. Jackson, Jr. of Penn, who is Richard Perry “Judging merely by the number of casualties, University Professor of Communication and some people wouldn’t constitute it as a masAnthropology, Professor of Africana Studies, sacre, but for Rastafari it really was. And and incoming Dean of the Annenberg School there had never been a formal investigation for Communication. Junior “Gabu” Wedor apology or anything like that,” Thomas derburn, a master drummer and composer says. “The community in western Jamaica who features in Broadway’s The Lion King, started annual commemorations where wrote and edited the music and sound for elders who went through the experience Bad Friday, and was also a co-producer. stood and testified. That’s what we started

FALL/WINTER 2018

Deborah Thomas, R. Jean Brownlee Professor in the Department of Anthropology

following. We tracked down everybody we could find who was still living who had gone through that and recorded their narratives.”

Thomas held a sneak peek of the film at the next annual commemoration.

“It was really amazing being in this open stadium with hundreds of people, including the people who were in the film,” says Thomas.

“We split up and stationed ourselves around some of the men who were in the film just to listen to what it felt like to watch themselves and how they interacted with their friends who they were there. Jamaica’s public defender attended the commemoration, and ultimately agreed to pursue a case for recompense for the sufferings caused by the State.”

There was a more formal premiere of the film later that summer at the Bob Marley Museum, named for the famed Rastafari musician. The film has since been named an Official Selection at the Hollywood Black Film Festival and the Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival. The film’s accompanying soundtrack features Uzalo and Ancient Vibrations and was produced by Wedderburn.

Thomas’ most recent film project, Four Days “This became a huge scandal in Jamaica,” says in May, a collaboration again with Wedder- Thomas. “The concern was that Golding may burn that began in 2012, plus Deanne M. Bell have used party money.” of the University of East London’s School of Ultimately, Golding instructed the Attorney Psychology—who was instrumental in the General to sign the extradition order, and the genesis of the project—led Thomas down resulting incursion lasted four deadly days, another dark path in modern Jamaican hisand saw 1,700 men carted away from their tory, opening a wound in hopes of helping a homes, 75 of which were executed. community to heal.

“He went on TV to say, ‘This is happening on Post-independence, some downtown comMonday. I’m going to send in troops.’ So that munities in Jamaica were ruled by partnerweekend the dons are preparing. And the ships of legitimately elected members of State is preparing. And everybody is getting Parliament and local gang leaders known ready for the war that’s going to take place as dons. The dons guaranteed the votes by on the Monday, which of course does when keeping a strong arm on people in the comarmed forces go house-to-house searching munity, while the government would give for Coke,” says Thomas. out job contracts and other social benefits, One of Thomas’ collaborators on the projand often turn a blind eye on drug circuits. ect, Ken Lum, Director of Fine Arts at Penn In 2010, the U.S. issued an extradition order Design, selected students to travel to Tivoli for Christopher Coke, the don of Tivoli and lead photography workshops for an Gardens, on drug-related charges. Bruce exhibit that would chronicle community Golding, the Prime Minister of Jamaica and members’ painful journeys. They began to Member of Parliament for West Kingston, record the victims’ testimonies. hired a lobbying firm in an attempt to stay The accounts were harrowing. the extradition order.

27

OMNIA

Courtesy of Deborah Thomas

Clockwise from top: The “Bearing Witness: Four Days in West Kingston� exhibit at Penn Museum sheds light on the tragic events in Tivoli, utilizing video, photography, written biographies, and audio accounts; Marjorie Williams and her daughters Diane and Diana Barnes; Alliyah Levy and her mother Maxine Love.

28

FALL/WINTER 2018

Marjorie Williams recalls her two sons being forced outside for questioning where they were made to lie down in a garden as they cried for her before they were executed.

own experiences, then others who talked about the legacy and long-term effects of slavery and imperialism, and what they think it means for Jamaica’s future politically.”

Alliyah Levy, a teenager, recounts the coming of the soldiers: “At that moment, I was sick.

I’m an asthmatic child, and the gunshots were firing, and we were under the table.

My brother started to read his bible and said, ‘God...’” She trails off, before breaking into tears. Maxine Love, her mother, remembers shuffling her and her brother from house to house to stay away from soldiers, with no food for three days.

Thomas’s newest book project draws on her work in Tivoli Gardens as well as the parish of Clarendon, and archival research on surveillance in the British and Jamaican colonial records and the U.S. State Department. The book, Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation, probes some of the questions

The film intersperses shots of the closed community, as well as overhead satellite shots, while offering no-frills close-ups of the victims retelling their raw experiences. Thomas, Bell, and Wedderburn decided the best course was to have the victims concentrate on their own firsthand experience.

“For many of the young men, those discussions involved detailing a series of abuses and torments as they described having been taken from place to place in a truck and being taunted,” says Thomas. “For those who then made it out of that experience alive, there is the uncertainty of what was going to happen next.”

most of all, experimental multimodal work, the Center represents Thomas’ quest to provide others an opportunity to experience research in exceptional ways. In the spirit of her own activism through dance, Thomas also considers building on already-existing connections with visual, performative arts, and documentary institutions in West Philadelphia and beyond, crucial to the Center.

The Center will bring in fellows each semester, provide a postdoc position, and house the graduate student collective CAMRA, which among other activities hosts an annual event called the Screening Scholarship Media Festival. In this way, it is part of a broader embrace of digital humanities, but in this case emphasizes ethnographic research methods.

What does it look like to peer review a photo collage or a long one take film? We need to help develop the tools to evaluate not only the skill of a student, but his or her contributions. that often arise about state violence outside the context of active war: Why does the state crack down on a movement when it does?

When does a threat become unbearable and actionable? What are the entanglements that matter? And what does sovereignty feel like?

“If we have a student who decides they want to do their dissertation as a film rather than as a written product, how do we then make that legible to other institutions when the student is on the market for a job?” says Thomas.

“What does it look like to peer review a project that’s not a journal article, but instead a photo collage or a long onetake film? We need to help develop the tools to evaluate not only the skill of a student, but his or her contributions to scholarly debates and the community.”

Thomas and her collaborators are now enterFor Thomas, these alternative perspectives ing the film into festivals, with the hope of help define how we view the human experiattracting a distributor. A preview was held at a conference for the Association for the ence. “Bearing Witness: Four Days in West “The new book is an attempt to think through Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora, Kingston,” the exhibit Thomas co-curated the current socio-political moment—and and it will officially premiere at the BlackStar that was the genesis of Four Days in May, as the histories that have produced it—in othFestival in Philadelphia. well as the basis for the beginning of her new er-than-normative terms,” says Thomas. “I book, is now on display through December There have been some steps taken by author- wanted to return to the language I know best, 2019 at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia. ities to recognize the bloodshed in Tivoli. that which is embodied, so I could imagine Part art installation, part memorial, and part There was an enquiry and a public apology, these transformations not merely in terms call to action, the installation sheds light on but Thomas says that the power vacuum of political economy, but also as something those tragic events in Tivoli and their aftercreated by Coke’s eventual capture has left more phenomenological and affective. It’s effects, utilizing video, photography, written the community unstable and dangerous. also an attempt, like Four Days in May, to biographies, and audio accounts. encourage us all to understand our own Probably the most important viewing of the entanglements—and complicities—in his- “One of the questions we asked people in the film has already taken place—a grassroots studio was, ‘What do you think has to happen torical processes, so at the end my own story screening in Kingston at the same studio nationally in order for you to move forward?’” is woven through the various narratives in where the team recorded interviews. says Thomas. “At the time, I think people the chapters.”

“It was a phenomenal experience,” says were still too traumatized to really think Another initiative she’s leading at Penn is the Thomas. “There were people there who were about the future. It was dead space mostly. establishment of a new Center for Experiin the film. There were other people who But now there’s a little bit more distance. mental Ethnography. Designed to be a hub were from the community or neighboring Enough has happened that the victims are for faculty across disciplines and schools communities who weren’t in the film, but able to imagine a different kind of future.” who are committed to ethical, engaged, and, also got up spontaneously and shared their 29

OMNIA

30

FALL/WINTER 2018

Researchers across Penn Arts and Sciences are learning from and in Philadelphia.

By Michele Berger When researchers from Penn Arts and Sciences step outside of their lab spaces, off campus and onto the streets of West Philadelphia, they enter a different kind of laboratory, a city with centuries of history, a complicated industrial legacy, and a demographic that’s changing all the time. Researchers across the School are asking important questions, studying lead contamination and abandoned lots, the city’s education system, and its immigrant populations.

“Penn is deeply embedded in the city of Philadelphia,” says Steven J. Fluharty, Dean and Thomas S. Gates, Jr. Professor of Psychology, Pharmacology, and Neuroscience. “As neighbors, and often community members themselves, our faculty and students are committed to taking on local challenges.”

31

OMNIA

Eric Sucar

John MacDonald, Professor of Criminology and Sociology, and Eugenia South, Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine at the Perelman School of Medicine, collaborated on a prior study on environmental stressors and their impact on crime.

Bringing Philosophy Into Philadelphia Classrooms The philosophy of first-graders tends to center around what’s happening on the playground or with their favorite superhero rather than around Philosophy with a capital P. But Karen Detlefsen, Professor of Philosophy, would like that to change, and she’s taking steps to make that happen by bringing the discipline into Philadelphia’s elementary and secondary school classrooms, from kindergarten all the way through grade 12.

“From a very young age, children start asking questions that are fundamentally philosophical,” Detlefsen says. “Our hope is to create a space where they can ask these questions and develop the habits of mind—creativity, precision, tolerance of multiple reasonable points of view—at the heart of philosophical thinking.”

Funded by the latest round of Making a Difference in Diverse Communities grants from Penn Arts and Sciences, the project is in its early days. But Detlefsen has already built the scaffolding. Together with a team of undergraduates and graduate students, she previously taught students at two schools—Benjamin B. Comegys and Penn Alexander—and has partnered 32

with Philadelphia Futures, an area nonprofit focused on prepping low-income, first-generation students for college.

During the fall 2018 semester, Penn Philosophy’s presence in Philly classrooms will expand: Graduate students will continue to mentor middle schoolers at Comegys, and Detlefsen, with a team of undergrads, will work with fifth and sixth graders in a range of schools. Detlefsen will also run a seminar for the district’s literature teachers to offer guidance on integrating philosophy into the educators’ regular curricula.

The project is in collaboration with Eli Lesser of the School of Social Policy and Practice and Janine Remillard of the Graduate School of Education, as well as the Netter Center for Community Partnerships.

Creating a Road Dust Inventory “Road dust is any accumulation of particles on the street in Philadelphia,” says Michael O’Shea, a doctoral candidate in earth and environmental science with a background in geological sciences.

“Almost everything that happens in Philadelphia will be represented in the dust—the local organics in the soil, whatever you’re constructing buildings with,

FALL/WINTER 2018

industrial legacy products. All of this can impact the composition of the sediment itself.”

Michael O’Shea, a doctoral student, uses a handheld vacuum to collect road dust samples around Philadelphia. So far, he has amassed 50 samples and analyzed 30.

It can also affect the health of those around and interacting with the dust, something that greatly interests Reto Gieré, Professor and Chair of Earth and Environmental Science. Gieré, who works collaboratively with several additional Penn researchers, studies the prevalence of lead in the city.

For the dust project, O’Shea has so far collected about 50 samples, using the equivalent of a handheld vacuum during early-morning and other off hours when streets are quiet. Under Gieré’s guidance, he has analyzed a little more than half, with preliminary findings revealing several pollutants in a wide range of concentrations, as well as a wide range of mineral phases.

Courtesy of University Communications Courtesy of University Communications

Reto Gieré, Professor and Chair of Earth and Environmental Science, and Michael O’Shea, a doctoral student, are using sediment samples to better understand the composition of dust, which Philadelphians inhale and come in contact with daily.

The researchers, who presented this work at an international conference in Bari, Italy this summer, plan to gather more samples in hopes of drawing comparisons between different areas of Philadelphia that feature potentially distinct road dust sources.

They will investigate many factors, including demographics in relation to road dust composition.

Assessing the Benefits of Greening Vacant Lots There’s a philosophy in criminology called the broken windows theory, which posits that shattered windows or other visible signs of outward disorder can trigger crime. The idea extends to abandoned lots, which early research from Susan Wachter, Albert Sussman Professor of Real Estate and Finance, showed can hurt property values of places nearby simply by proximity.

Wachter also found that greening these lots reversed the problem, an idea that John MacDonald, Professor of Criminology and Sociology, wanted to test from the

crime perspective. Continuing a long-standing partnership with the Philadelphia Horticultural Society, he teamed up with Eugenia South, Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine at the Perelman School of Medicine, to research whether fixing up these spaces could decrease crime and improve health.

MacDonald and his collaborators undertook a clustered randomized trial of 541 lots—some of which received a complete makeover, others which received a partial makeover or nothing at all. They found that those with the full intervention experienced a 29 percent drop in gun violence, a 22 percent decrease in burglaries and a 30 percent drop in nuisances like noise complaints and illegal dumping. Residents nearby also reported feeling safer, with fewer mental-health challenges and depression.

“The findings are pretty powerful,” MacDonald says. “You can get measurable reductions of fairly reasonable size by remediating vacant land so it can be put to better use in distressed communities. In Philadelphia, that’s an important issue, and it’s important throughout the United States, especially in de-industrialized cities with a lot of vacant land.”

Understanding Health Care in South Philly’s Latino Immigrant Population Through a partnership with a local organization called Casa Monarca and funded by the Penn Center for AIDS Research and a National Institutes of Health grant, work from Emilio Parrado, Dorothy Swaine Thomas Professor of Sociology and Department Chair, and Chenoa Flippen, Associate Professor of Sociology, aims to understand the health risks and needs of Latino immigrants in South Philadelphia, many of whom likely chose the area for its proximity to jobs in Center City.

33

OMNIA The researchers conducted 300 interviews of 18- to 45-year-olds, asking questions not only about health, but also family dynamics, police interactions, and work experience. The answers were revealing. For example, 43 percent of men and 80 percent of women said they had been tested for HIV. A third had been the victim of a crime. Half reported that at some point they had needed to see a doctor but didn’t, primarily because of real or imagined costs.

Such information can inform broad conversations about immigrant groups and simultaneously help those groups, Parrado says. “We want to contribute to the knowledge about these communities in places that are receiving growing immigrant populations, to answer questions about how they’re doing, what’s going on with their children, what socioeconomic progress they’re making. But we also want to participate in the discussion of the policies, programs, and needs that the community faces.”

Though the preliminary data collection has finished, the researchers are still analyzing what they’ve gathered.

Studying Diabetes in West Philadelphia and the Guatemalan Highlands One of the inaugural Making a Difference in Diverse Communities grants from Penn Arts and Sciences aims to change the diabetes narrative for two minority groups. One population is in Guatemala, where Frances Barg and Kent Bream, both of the Perelman School of Medicine, lead the research. The other lives in the neighborhood served by the Dr. Bernett L. Johnson, Jr. Sayre Health Center at 58th and Walnut Streets, where Bream, a family physician, is the Medical Director.

For both sites, Adriana Petryna, Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor in Anthropology, studies the health costs of unhealthy environments and guides students on the ethics of research.

The researchers are combatting a challenge the World Health Organization recently described as one of the biggest global health crises of the 21st century.

Today, about 8.5 percent of the adult population worldwide, or 422 million people, have diabetes.

“The question of how certain communities become more vulnerable to injury, disease, or premature death is never answered with simple explanations,” says Petryna, who is also a medical anthropologist. “The practical breakthroughs needed to effect global change wouldn’t be possible without the kind of close listening and interpretive skills the anthropological imagination provides.”

Such an approach—considering, for example, politics and economics in health care decisions—contextualizes the disease differently than straightforward scientific inquiry likely would, providing a unique vantage point for the 10 Penn undergraduates who participated this past year.

Some traveled to Guatemala to work with patients; others stayed closer to home, doing their part in West Philadelphia.

“In both settings,” Barg says, “we’re listening to local people, hearing from their perspective what the issues are, what their priorities are for addressing health problems.”

Lynn Hur, C'19; Frances Barg, Professor of Family Medicine and Community Health at the Perelman School of Medicine and an associated faculty member in the Department of Anthropology; and Kent Bream, Assistant Professor of Clinical Family Medicine and Community Health.

Eric Sucar

34

An online, Ivy League education designed for busy professionals FALL/WINTER 2018

Penn LPS Online offers courses, certificates and a bachelor’s degree designed to bring the Penn experience to you, wherever you are.

Flexible

Skill-focused

Accessible

Credit-bearing

Visit our website for a list of online events and learn more about how Penn LPS Online programs can help you meet your goals:

www.upenn.edu/lpsonline

The Power of Planning THE POWER OF PENN ARTS & SCIENCES

We all recognize that having a plan is critical to success, and Penn’s Office of Gift Planning is ready to help implement yours.

The Office of Gift Planning can help tailor a bequest or set up a gift that provides ongoing payments to you or a loved one.You can also designate Penn Arts and Sciences as a beneficiary of your retirement plan or life insurance policy.

Planned gifts have benefited all aspects of Penn Arts and Sciences, and continue to support everything from scholarships and professorships to ground-breaking research that sparks new ideas and fuels discoveries. These gifts help to advance knowledge and make a difference in our classrooms, our neighborhoods, and our world.

PLANNED GIFTS HAVE THE POWER TO CREATE EXTRAORDINARY OPPORTUNITIES AND SHAPE THE FUTURE OF PENN ARTS AND SCIENCES. CONTACT US TODAY AND REALIZE THE POWER OF YOUR PLAN!

Lynn Malzone Ierardi, JD Director of Gift Planning Office of Gift Planning Suite 300 2929 Walnut Street Philadelphia, PA 19104-5099 215.898.6171 lierardi@upenn.edu www.powerofpenn.upenn.edu/gift-planning

The Stories We Tell Undergraduates dig into archival records to reframe Penn’s historical ties to slavery.

By Jane Carroll and Lauren Rebecca Thacker

Eric Sucar

(L-R) Brooke Krancer, C’20; Breanna Moore, C’15; VanJessica Gladney, C’18; Dillon Kersh, C’20; Carson Eckhard, C’21; Caitlin Doolittle, C’18

W

hen VanJessica Gladney was growing up, her family moved around a lot, and she noticed that the history books in each state were different.

“In Georgia I learned about the Civil War as the ‘war of northern aggression,’” she says. “In Oklahoma I learned more Native American history than colonial history.

And then I got up to Massachusetts and learned that Boston won the Revolutionary War for everybody and saved the day.”

As a Penn student, that observation came back to Gladney, C'18, as a powerful reminder that when it comes to history, who is doing the telling determines the story being told. Today, she is one of several alumni, undergraduates, and graduate students who are part of the Penn Slavery Project, an effort to retell the story of Penn’s involvement with slavery in the University’s earliest decades.

38

Slavery is often associated with the South, but from the Colonial era until the Civil War, the entire country’s economy was interwoven with and dependent upon the slave trade. Tiny Rhode Island, for example, launched about 60 percent of slave-trading voyages across the Atlantic Ocean. Rhode Island also profited from the export of food and supplies to sugar plantations in the Caribbean, where hundreds of thousands of enslaved people were brought from Africa.

Over the past two decades, there has been a growing public recognition of what historians have long known—that the tentacles of slavery reached well into the northern colonies and states. Laws prohibiting slave-holding in the North were enacted only gradually, and commerce associated with slavery and the products

of slave labor continued well into the 19th century. Monuments to prominent historical figures who owned enslaved people—in both the North and South— have been removed or renamed across the country in recent years, often sparking controversy.

Some of the country’s oldest universities have also reexamined and acknowledged their own ties to slavery and slaveholders.

In 2003, Brown University became the first Ivy League institution to appoint a committee to study the University’s links to slavery. The connections were many and deep, including the fact that an early member of the university’s Board of Trustees had captained transatlantic slave ships, and that the school’s early benefactors, the Brown family, had owned enslaved people.

FALL/WINTER 2018

Other universities followed suit. Most notably, Georgetown University acknowledged a history of slave ownership and has taken a number of steps toward restitution, including offering preferential admission to the descendants of enslaved people it held or sold. Other southern schools, such as Emory University and the University of Virginia, created their own commissions and investigating bodies.

Some of this reexamination has to do with the way people in the field of history are thinking about slavery, not as something separate from capitalism, but as something that really made the economic motor go.

Yale, Princeton, and Harvard have also grappled with their own entanglements, and campus debates have challenged long-held assumptions of northern innocence.

“Some of this reexamination has to do with the way people in the field of history are thinking about slavery, not as something separate from capitalism, but as something that really made the economic motor go,” says Kathleen Brown, David Boies Professor of History, who studies gender and race in early America, slavery, and the transatlantic abolition movement.

Brown had questions about Penn’s public statements regarding slavery, which until recently asserted that it had found no evidence of direct involvement with slavery or the slave trade. She thought more study might be needed to uncover a fuller picture.

“Even though we don’t think of Pennsylvania as being one of the major slave colonies, so much of the North American economy was implicated,” she says.

In 2017, Brown and Walter Licht, Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History, were teaching a course called Deciphering America, which looked at American history through primary documents, historical figures and images, and cultural artifacts. One day in class a side discussion arose about Princeton University’s relationship to President Woodrow Wilson, a former Princeton president who held segregationist views, and the debate about whether his name should be removed from campus buildings.

Gladney, who was enrolled in the class, had mixed feelings. “Honestly, I don’t know how I feel about renaming buildings or tearing down statues,” she says. “I think that in taking away mementos of powerful figures who have done bad things, you run the risk of letting them off the hook. When we stop talking about them, we eradicate a whole group of people who have already

been erased from our history. Instead, we should bring the enslaved people into the narrative rather than just pushing the [slave-holders] out.”

Brown asked if any students from the Deciphering America class would be interested in researching Penn’s connections to slavery as an independent study project, and Gladney, Brooke Krancer, and Dillon Kersh responded enthusiastically.

As a start, Brown introduced the students to Mark Lloyd, Director of the University Archives and Records Center, and put them in contact with the staff of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. That fall, Brown met weekly with the students as they drove the investigation mainly on their own, while she served as a liaison with the University and helped guide the students in working collaboratively.

Some of the student autonomy, Brown says, came from the fact that she already had a full teaching load and administrative duties, and didn’t have the availability to direct them with a heavy hand.

But she also knew that undergraduates had played an important role in some of the projects at other schools. “Graduate students are on a pretty linear path toward degree completion,” she notes, “but undergraduates have the flexibility to do research that’s not necessarily going to be their life’s work.”

Brown says the group also benefited from the guidance of a doctoral student in history, Alexis Broderick Neumann, Graduate Fellow at the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books, and Manuscripts at Penn Libraries. Broderick Neumann had been appointed to the Provost’s Working Group on Penn and slavery, founded in January 2018 to further explore matters brought to light by the undergraduate group.

“My own research focuses on issues related to race, sex, and violence in the U.S. South during slavery and Reconstruction,” says Broderick Neumann. “This project has underscored the importance of uncovering and communicating the history of slavery to a broad audience.”

Into the Archives The students had a wealth of information at their fingertips— archives from the University, the Pennsylvania Gazette, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and the Library Company of Philadelphia, not to mention a database of Pennsylvania tax records. They could pore over legal documents like wills and tax receipts, private papers like lecture notes, and public records, including newspaper advertisements for runaway slaves.

The students realized early on that constructing a story from raw materials would be a huge undertaking.

They started with the University founders and early trustees, men who held economic and political power in the colonial days.

Given the relationship between slavery and capitalism, 39

OMNIA the students speculated that these high-profile men would be directly or indirectly connected to the institution of slavery. Dillon Kersh, C’20, realized that the archive could not answer all his questions and that concrete evidence is difficult to come by.

Kersh researched cousins who were early University trustees: Edward Tilghman, Jr. and James Tilghman. The cousins, from a wealthy Maryland family, practiced law in Philadelphia.

At the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Kersh found records indicating a deed transfer from Edward Tilghman to Benjamin Chew, a relative and fellow University trustee. The deed indicates that Edward’s father gave him a property called Whitehall Plantation, which he then sold to Chew.

This finding was a boon. “The Whitehall Plantation records held by the Historical Society are some of the most detailed records that we found, with names, birth years, familial relationships, and even

clothing sizes of enslaved people,” Kersh says. “It’s a peek into the lives of enslaved people that we haven’t found in any other context.”

But Kersh was frustrated. The deed proved that Edward’s father and uncle held enslaved people, and it proved

In fall 2016, one year after I graduated from Penn, only 751 African Americans were enrolled. This is a direct legacy of slavery and evidence of the inequalities that persist in African American communities.

that with the sale of the plantation, he benefited from the economy generated by slavery. It did not prove that Edward himself was a slaveholder, though Kersh suspected that was the case. “Edward was wealthy in his own right and his family in Delaware and Maryland were some of the largest slaveholders in the mid-Atlantic,” says Kersh.

In summer 2018, Kersh found the evidence he’d been looking for since the previous fall. Letters at the Maryland Historical Society reference several enslaved people held by Edward, and records in Pennsylvania prove that he emancipated at least three enslaved people in the 1780s and 1790s. It took months, but Kersh found his answers in the archives.

Other students shared his experience of discovery—and dead ends.

Brooke Krancer, C’20, focused her research on the wills of trustees. “I was looking for mentions of enslaved people in the wills—were they freed or passed on to family members?” she explains.

“That is definitive proof of the fact these

University Archives

(L-R) Benjamin Chew, University trustee from 1757 to 1791; John Cadwalader, member of the class of 1760 and University trustee from 1779 to 1786; Isaac Norris, University trustee from 1751 to 1755.

40

FALL/WINTER 2018

Courtesy of Dillion Kersh, C’20

<

Records from Whitehall Plantation included the names, birth years, and family relations of enslaved people.

Newspaper advertisements also provide a window into to the medical school and connections to slavery.

Eckhard reports, “The information that we’ve found so far indicates that 30 percent, and some years as many as 60 percent, of medical school graduates were from the deep South. Penn advertised very heavily there.”

The connection between medical schools and slavery is one that many universities contend with. The Medical University of South Carolina, for example, had an endowed chair named for J. Marion Sims, an alumnus known as the “father of modern gynecology.” Less discussed is the fact that he practiced his pioneering surgical techniques, without anesthesia, on enslaved women named Lucy, Anarcha, and Betsey, among others whose names were not recorded. The chair has recently been renamed. men held enslaved people and it starts to show what happened to the people they held.”

he free them before he died, or did he not want to free them anymore? It’s very frustrating not to know,” she says.

Even when wills showed that trustees held slaves, stories were incomplete.

William Allen, a founder of Penn who served as mayor of Philadelphia in 1735, freed the people he held in bondage in his will, but he did not name them, a far cry from the detailed records of Whitehall Plantation. “He referred to them as Negroes,” Krancer says.

Carson Eckhard, C’21, had to turn to other sources to fill in the gaps in the archive.

She joined the project in spring 2018 with a focus on the medical school. When it was founded in 1765, the medical school was only loosely affiliated with the liberal arts school.

Another trustee, John Cadwalader, wrote several versions of his will. In some, he freed a man called James Sampson and his family. But in the fifth and final version of the will that Krancer located, there is no mention of Sampson. “Did

“Things like charter documents of the medical school weren’t always preserved in University archives, because they weren’t as connected,” she explains.

“But there are lots of notes from old students and correspondence between professors and other notable scientists. That does a decent job of filling in the gaps.”

In light of this national legacy, Eckhard knows she has more work to do.

“I’m interested in looking deeper into the medical school, exploring connections to the South, and investigating how the school obtained anatomical specimens,” she says.

For Krancer, Eckhard’s research represents the importance of growing the number of students involved in the research.

“With more people, there are more avenues to explore,” she says. “It’s largely thanks to Carson that we’re exploring the medical school, and that’s resulted in so much information. I want more of that—new people, new energy, and new creative thought.”

41

Biruk Tibebe, C’21

(L-R) Brooke Krancer, C’20; Dillon Kersh, C’20; VanJessica Gladney, C’18; Caitlin Doolittle, C’18; and Breanna Moore, C’15, present their findings at a Department of History event in April 2018.

It’s important to present this research to the greater community, because it is not just the story of Penn, it’s the story of Philadelphia.

The Family Tree Breanna Moore, C’15, knew of some connections between Penn and slavery before the research began. While she was a student, a family member interested in genealogical research discovered a Penn connection: Moore’s great-greatgreat-great grandmother, Binah, and her six children, were enslaved by William Wallace Anderson, a graduate of the medical school’s class of 1810 and father of a Penn alumnus.

“Anderson’s plantation where they were held is only three miles from my grandmother’s house,” Moore says.

“I would pass it every Sunday and I was unaware of its existence and physical proximity, just as I was unaware of my ancestor’s enslavement.”

42

Moore started doing research on her family on her own time, and continued to do so after she graduated. When she heard about the Penn Slavery Project, she reached out to Brown to share what she’d found. Moore joined forces with the team and continued her investigation.

She used census records, Ancestry.com, wills, church baptism records, estate and inventory appraisals, death records, and a sharecropping contract to trace her family tree. Like the other students, Moore found answers and dead ends.

“Sometimes it’s a challenge even to locate wills and other records,” she observes.

“African Americans weren’t named in the federal census records until 1870.

The South Carolina 1868 state census and 1866 tax records that listed freedmen were very helpful.”

FALL/WINTER 2018

The research made Moore realize the extent to which legacies of privilege and discrimination pass through family lines.

“In fall 2016, one year after I graduated from Penn, only 751 African Americans were enrolled. This is a direct legacy of slavery and evidence of the inequalities that persist in African American communities. Dr. Anderson and his son graduated from Penn in 1820 and 1849.

It took over 200 years for someone from my family lineage to attend an Ivy League institution. It took over a century for my family to have access to educational institutions to become literate and obtain high school diplomas. Limited access to education still exists.”

Looking Back to Move Forward In June 2018, Penn President Amy Gutmann announced that as a result of the history uncovered by the Penn Slavery Project, the University had joined the Universities Studying Slavery consortium (USS). As a USS institution, Penn joins universities across the country in confronting not only how the roots of higher education are entangled with slavery, but also how educational inequality remains a persistent issue.

Joining the consortium is an important step for the student researchers, who want the project to grow and the conversation to expand beyond Penn’s campus.

“What happened during colonial times is tied to today,” says Krancer. “It’s important to present this research to the greater community, because it is not just the story of Penn, it’s the story of Philadelphia.”

It’s the connection to today that has motivated the group to pursue this challenging research.

“In addition to the outright suffering slavery causes, there is also a lasting pattern of obstructed opportunity for people of color,” Brown says. “For almost any other immigrant group, you can trace the moment when they became ‘white’ enough to have white privilege. Not so for people of color, who’ve been systematically shut out of things like the GI Bill, mortgages, and even Social Security benefits due to the seasonal nature of jobs they held.”

Gladney, Kersh, Krancer, Eckhard, and Moore see that what they find in colonial-era tax records or legal documents has a direct connection to present-day realities of discrimination and inequality.

“Historical research really comes alive for students when they can see that it has a potential to change a conversation they care about,” Brown observes.

Changing the conversation and tracing complicated legacies means bringing more voices to the table and widening the audience, within Penn and outside of it. Arielle Brown, Public Programs Developer at the Penn Museum, observes that the questions the Penn Slavery Project is asking—about the inextricable links between slavery and the early American economy—are similar to growing trends in the museum world to reflect on collections and ties to the history of enslavement and colonization. The University has a large collection of cultural holdings and a public face—a perfect opportunity to invite community members to be part of reexamining history and telling long-buried stories.

Broderick Neumann hopes to work with the undergraduates to develop an exhibit on Penn and slavery for the Van Pelt Library. She and Kathleen Brown will co-teach a class on the topic this fall—it will no longer be an independent-study

project. “I have been blown away by the work, dedication, and insights of these students,” says Broderick Neumann.

“They are incredibly rigorous, have the utmost respect for the sources and the research process, and they are keenly aware of the importance of this subject.

I’m looking forward to continuing to work with them on their archival research skills.”

When it comes to complicated legacies, VanJessica Gladney, who majored in English, was especially struck by what she learned about Isaac Norris, a University trustee in the 1750s whose family held enslaved people and who selected the inscription for the Liberty Bell: Proclaim LIBERTY throughout the Land unto all the Inhabitants thereof.

“The irony is that the Liberty Bell later became the symbol for the abolition movement,” says Gladney, “so this focus on personal history versus family history and prestige is an interesting thing to look at.”

In February, she published an article about the Penn Slavery Project in 34th Street magazine, and in the spring, the University sent her, along with Broderick Neumann and Arielle Brown, to the Universities Studying Slavery Conference in Virginia. This fall, Gladney began working for Penn on the public presentation of the Project’s research findings. She already has ideas about telling long-buried stories—she’d like to see the University add explanatory plaques to statues and buildings honoring controversial figures instead of removing them.

“As an English major, I’m fascinated by the way we talk about history, by the way we write about history. So I want to be a part of helping the University tell its history in as holistic a way as possible.”

43

OMNIA

LAUNCHING LIBERAL ARTS CAREERS The Penn Arts and Sciences Professional Womenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Alliance connects female students and recent graduates with accomplished alumnae for mentorship and career exploration.

By Katelyn Silva | Photography by Ben Asen

FALL/WINTER 2018

OMNIA

I

n 2014 –15, Katherine Maughan, C’09, was working with the Upright Citizens Brigade writing sketch comedy in New York City. She was five years out of Penn and found herself at a professional crossroads.

“I decided I wanted a more stable path than comedy, but I knew I wanted a career that incorporated elements of what I loved most about it: collaboration, creativity, and analytical thinking,” she says.

As a young alumna, Maughan made a major shift to work in technology product marketing. She credits the Penn Arts and Sciences Professional Women’s Alliance (PWA)­— an organization intended to help female students and young graduates connect with professionally accomplished alumnae for mentorship, professional development, and career exploration—with assisting her during a critical time.

“For me, PWA came along at this perfect moment,” she says. “I was immediately tapped into this incredible network of successful women in the middle of making a creative transition. It’s been invaluable to get unbiased advice from other women at similar stages in their careers.”

Today, Maughan does product marketing for The Knot, an online, all-in-one wedding planner that is part of the XO Group. Though life

46

is busy, she makes time to attend PWA events in New York City and on campus, including a 2017 talk on “Making Behavior Change Stick” by Angela Duckworth, Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Psychology, a MacArthur “genius” grant winner, and author of Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance.

HANDWERKER HAS CHAIRED PWA SINCE ITS LAUNCH, AND NO ONE BELIEVES MORE IN THE NECESSITY OF A PROFESSIONAL NETWORKING AND DEVELOPMENT GROUP TARGETED SPECIFICALLY TO YOUNG WOMEN. “PWA programming is so valuable— particularly the mentoring and networking events—but it’s also fun,” she says. “It’s nice to just sit back, flex different parts of your brain, and have a glass of wine with incredible women after a day of work.”

One of those women is Jamie Handwerker, C’83, PAR’19, Partner at KSH Capital, a real estate private

equity firm in New York City. Handwerker has chaired PWA since its launch, and no one believes more in the necessity of a professional networking and development group targeted specifically to young women.

She explains, “I graduated from Penn in 1983 and worked full time in executive positions throughout the various stages of my life. At that time, there weren’t a lot of women who did that. That’s why I wanted to get involved in mentoring other women at Penn—to create that thing that I had always felt was lacking for women.”

Handwerker leads PWA’s 60-plus members and small advisory board.

Members hold senior roles across a variety of industries, united by their deep appreciation and understanding of the value of a liberal arts education as it relates to the workplace and the importance of exposing young women early to diverse career paths. In addition to their time, these women are also committed to supporting the liberal arts by including Arts and Sciences among their philanthropic priorities.

PWA now offers upwards of six events per year devoted to career exploration, networking, mentorship, and professional development for both students and alumnae. In addition to PWA events, members and young alumnae enhance existing programs, such as the College

FALL/WINTER 2018

Alumni Mentoring Series (CAMS) and Discovery Days, by volunteering as speakers and hosts.

Jean-Marie Kneeley, Vice Dean of Advancement at Penn Arts and Sciences, has been at Penn for more than 25 years and says PWA is different than any program she’s seen and is serving a critical need.

“The gift of a liberal arts education is that students are equipped to embark upon any career path after graduation, but the choices can sometimes feel paralyzing,” she says. “PWA helps make those choices tangible.”

For undergraduate Emma Lu, C’21, W’21, a Discovery Day at the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC) was an opportunity to get a glimpse into a career she imagined she’d enjoy but couldn’t otherwise confirm.

“Often, freshman have limited access to internships and students have to wait until junior year to get a taste of a career they might be interested in,” Lu says. “I find that limiting because you may miss out on alternatives that are better fits, which is why Discovery Days are so wonderful.”

Lu shadowed and had one-on-one access to PWA Advisory Board Member Lola Tsetlin, C’96, Executive Director, Institutional Commodities Sales at CIBC, and experienced firsthand what a career in investment banking might look and feel like. She left with a greater interest in the field.

(Top) Katherine Maughan, C’09, Product Marketing Manager at The Knot (XO Group, Inc.); (Bottom) Jamie Handwerker, C’83, PAR’19, Partner at KSH Capital and Chair of Professional Women’s Alliance

Leah Hess, C’19, attended a mentoring meal through the College Alumni Mentoring Series (CAMS) featuring PWA Member Laurén Robbins, C’04, Global Head of Institutional Banking and Markets at Salesforce, and was so inspired that she applied for a Salesforce internship. During the internship, Hess and Robbins were able to connect in San Francisco.

PWA programming helped Lu and Hess feel they were part of a network of peers who shared similar questions and concerns. Lu says that her participation in the PWA Career Roundtables was a reassuring experience: “I realized that it’s very common for people to not know what they want to do after graduation.”

Career Roundtables provide students an opportunity to learn about a wide variety of career paths and to build relationships with alumnae through a speed-mentoring format.

Alumnae spend a set amount of time with each table of students, sharing a “day in the life” and answering questions about their career and industry, allowing students to learn a great deal in just one evening’s time.

Enriching programming like Career Roundtables might not have come to fruition had it not been for the insights of Liza Johnson, C’15, who was president of the Women in Leadership Series (WILS) as an undergraduate. As the leader of WILS, which connects Penn students with established women leaders, Johnson had a unique perspective on the challenges that female students in the College faced.

“Early on, we asked Liza to help us understand what types of programming would be most beneficial to students in the College,” explains Erinn Carey, Director of Global Alumni Engagement at Penn Arts and Sciences. “With her insights, we came up with the Career Roundtables event, which we now host every semester in partnership with WILS and Career Services.”

Last year, Johnson, who is now Operations Lead for Special Projects at Lyft and a loyal PWA event attendee, returned to campus as a Roundtables presenter. She found the experience gratifying, particularly answering student questions related to interviewing, internships,

47

OMNIA

and her job duties. “Oftentimes, as a student, you don’t know what people do on a day-to-day basis and how they got there,” she says. “PWA makes that transparent.”

Johnson adds that attending PWA events has also resulted in a stronger professional network for her personally. “It’s really nice to have people outside of my current job that can act as advisors and with whom I can be real and honest,” she says. “I particularly appreciate those women who are maybe 20 years older than I am— they have so much more perspective on a career over the longer term.”

OFTENTIMES, AS A STUDENT, YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT PEOPLE DO ON A DAY-TO-DAY BASIS AND HOW THEY GOT THERE. PWA MAKES THAT TRANSPARENT. Seasoned alumna Sofia Chang, C’91, a member of PWA’s Advisory Board, was inspired to become involved because of the group’s mission to assist young women in career development and exploration. As Executive Vice President of Worldwide Digital Distribution and Home Entertainment for HBO, Chang has accomplished a tremendous amount, but remembers often feeling she had to work doubly hard as a woman and particularly as a minority to get where she is today.

Sofia Chang, C’91, Executive Vice President, Worldwide Digital Distribution and Home Entertainment at HBO and Professional Women’s Alliance Advisory Board Member 48

“A man once told me that I didn’t get a job because I didn’t ‘command any presence’ when I walked into a room,” she reflects. “I’m 5'1" and he was 6'8". There is only so much

presence I can command physically, but I had to adapt. I always wear bright colors. I try to wear heels.

You know, there are many situations where I find myself being the only woman—or the only woman of color—in the room, and I never sit in the back. I always sit in the front. I had to learn that.”

Sharing hard-won lessons with young alumnae is something Chang enjoys in and of itself, but she adds, “PWA has not only been a platform to help other women, it’s also been a great platform to expand my own network.”

She adds, “I think women need different networks at different times, and I’m at a stage in my career where I’m looking to build, sort of, my own board of directors to bounce ideas off of. PWA has connected me with some of those people, like Jamie Handwerker, with whom I just recently had lunch.”

Chang and Handwerker both graduated from Penn more than 25 years ago and have successfully built careers in environments with very few women. Yet, they can now step into a PWA event and be greeted by a sea of accomplished students and professionals.

“We more than a hundred people in attendance at every event,” explains Handwerker with pride. “That’s a powerful network for any woman.”

Since PWA launched three years ago, Penn alumnae have gone out of their way to help the next generation, according to Handwerker.

“Our PWA members know that whoever helped them had a meaningful impact on their careers and thus, their lives. They want to do that for others. The fact that we’ve created a structure around it is the immense value that PWA brings.”

FALL/WINTER 2018

PENN ARTS AND SCIENCES combines innovation and

excellence at the intellectual heart of a great university.

The Power of Penn Arts & Sciences Campaign supports our vision for advancing the core that keeps Penn exceptional.

OMNIA

Penn Arts and Sciences is a community of students and scholars engaged in pressing issues locally, nationally, and globally and a cutting-edge institution with a legacy of innovation. Our 27 departments are the intellectual heart that drives inquiry across Penn, and our 21st-century approach to the liberal arts develops the skills and practices that shape our studentsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; careers, and lives.

The Power of Penn Arts & Sciences Campaign will allow us to enhance our foundations and transcend the frontiers of knowledge. With the Campaign, we will sustain and strengthen our faculty and empower our students to realize their full potential. We will foster an inclusive community of faculty and students to ensure the vitality and fresh perspectives that diversity brings.

And we will pursue innovative paths in research and learning to solve challenges that threaten to outrun our readiness to manage them, from creating a sustainable planet and harnessing the power of the brain, to exploring the human experience and driving global change.

FALL/WINTER 2018

Every day, Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m inspired by the innovative and deeply thoughtful work done by our students and faculty. The research, teaching, and learning opportunities the Campaign supports will only amplify those efforts. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m eager to see what lies ahead as the Campaign builds on the extraordinary momentum already growing at Penn Arts and Sciences.

- STEVEN J. FLUHARTY Dean and Thomas S. Gates, Jr. Professor of Psychology, Pharmacology, and Neuroscience

OMNIA

ADVANCING FACULTY DISTINCTION Our faculty are essential to excellence across the University, and we take full advantage of every opportunity to sustain and strengthen a diverse group of dynamic, collaborative scholars and teachers.

We will enhance our resources to recruit and retain the very best, through prestigious endowed chairs and other forms of faculty support.

FALL/WINTER 2018

JOSEPH S. FRANCISCO, President’s Distinguished Professor of Earth and Environmental Science, is an internationally recognized scholar of atmospheric chemistry and chemical kinetics. Francisco has a secondary appointment in the Department of Chemistry and his work spans disciplines, positioned at the crossroads of chemical, earth, and environmental sciences. The President’s Distinguished Professorship was established to support the teaching and research of faculty members who are leaders in their fields.

The research of MARK TRODDEN, Fay R. and Eugene L. Langberg Professor of Physics, lies at the border of particle physics and cosmology. Using clues contained in cosmological data, his work addresses the fundamental physics underlying such phenomena as the nature of dark matter and dark energy and the physics of the early universe.

He maps out viable models of the accelerating universe and has proposed one of the most-studied approaches to the idea that a modification of general relativity may explain cosmic acceleration.

JENNIFER EGAN, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Visit From the Goon Squad, is the School’s latest artist-in-residence.

A member of the College’s class of 1985, Egan will deliver public lectures and teach an undergraduate course. Artistsin-residence enrich campus life and add to the array of voices and experiences that contribute to student learning.

OPPORTUNITIES TO SUPPORT FACULTY INCLUDE: Penn Integrates Knowledge (PIK) Professorships PIK professors hold joint appointments in two schools and exemplify excellence in multidisciplinary scholarship and learning. They are remarkable for their drive to solve complex, real-world problems and deepen the University’s rich tradition of collaboration across disciplinary boundaries.

Endowed Professorships An indispensable tool for both recruiting distinguished faculty and retaining and rewarding current faculty who are among the best in their fields, endowed professorships are held by faculty who are empowered to pursue new inquiry, take risks, and produce groundbreaking work.

Professors of Practice Held by leaders outside of academia, these positions allow departments to tap into a well of expertise not traditionally part of a university education to create powerful collaborations between academic and practical experts.

Artists-in-Residence Based in departments and centers and committed to working with students and faculty, artists-in-residence are outstanding visual artists, actors, musicians, writers, and other creative practitioners who consider academic, social, and cultural questions in light of their creative practices and are vital voices in our community.

OMNIA

REALIZING STUDENT POTENTIAL Penn Arts and Sciences teaches every undergraduate at the University, fostering the traits that distinguish Penn graduates: adults driven by curiosity, creativity, and critical thinking, who understand context and know how to communicate. We will promote access, diversity, and opportunity through expanded resources for scholarships and for curricular innovation that will catalyze learning in every field.

FALL/WINTER 2018

BIANCA REO CHARBONNEAU, a doctoral candidate in biology, channeled her dismay at the destruction wrought by Hurricane Sandy into an academic exploration of the resiliency of sand dunes. Her research, supported by the Department of Defense, investigates how different plant species and types of fencing contribute to erosionprevention and dune regrowth post-storm.

SEBASTIÁN GONZÁLEZ, C’20, says that “oftentimes, when you’re a first-generation student, it feels like you don’t have a niche here on campus. But I want more students to be able to find that niche.”

He’s found his place at Penn: in physics and astronomy lectures, particularly those that deal with astrophysics and dark matter; as a leader in Penn First, a group founded by first-generation, lowincome students; and in the Penn Symphony Orchestra, where he’s the principal tubist.

OPPORTUNITIES TO SUPPORT STUDENTS INCLUDE: Undergraduate Scholarships Scholarships are key to Penn’s commitment to need-blind admissions and grant-funded aid for all admitted students, ensuring that the brightest students can come to Penn and graduate without the burden of insurmountable debt.

Graduate Fellowships Fellowships provide the resources necessary for students to focus on their work and demonstrate our commitment to providing an intellectual home for them at Penn Arts and Sciences.

Program on Opinion Research and Election Studies (PORES) This undergraduate program provides hands-on training in data-driven analysis. Gifts may fund a dedicated PORES space in the new Ronald O. Perelman Center for Political Science and Economics, the PORES directorship, or student fellowships.

OMNIA

CREATING A SUSTAINABLE PLANET The urgent need to revolutionize our thinking about energy can no longer be disputed. Scientific advances, combined with a deeper understanding of human interactions with the natural world, form the path to sustainable solutions to societyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s energy needs. We will invest in a new Science Research Building and a variety of initiatives designed to advance research and convert understanding to policy, and policy to action.

FALL/WINTER 2018

When the PENN PROGRAM IN ENVIRONMENTAL HUMANITIES (PPEH) was launched in 2014, it changed a conversation that was purely scientific into a broader dialogue.

PPEH has expanded programs across the University and built partnerships within Philadelphia. Its new initiative, Rising Waters, is exploring the future of rivers and coastal cities through research in Philadelphia and Mumbai, Indiaâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;two cities where racial and class geography have been and may continue to be impacted by water.

KAREN GOLDBERG, Vagelos Professor in Energy Research, is a renowned investigator who is working to eliminate the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s reliance on fossil fuels and instead produce valuable chemicals and fuels from a range of feedstocks. As the director of the Vagelos Institute for Energy Science and Technology, Goldberg oversees and drives collaboration among researchers who are addressing scientific and technological problems in the areas of alternative sources of energy and energy use and storage.

OPPORTUNITIES TO SUPPORT ENERGY AND SUSTAINABILITY INCLUDE: Science Research Building Dedicated to energy research, this building will be the essential incubator for our scientists and engineers and a place where they will be able to immerse fully in innovative, collaborative work and mentoring in their pursuit of energy solutions.

Penn Program in Environmental Humanities This research and outreach hub integrates scientific and humanistic ways of understanding and encourages members of the public to engage with the natural world. Gifts may endow the program or directorship, or support research fellowships and public programs.

OMNIA

HARNESSING THE POWER OF THE BRAIN New technologies have brought about an unprecedented ability to understand brain activity. The next wave of research holds the potential to unlock insights into phenomena that span from decision making to the fundamental nature of human intelligence and to advance understanding and treatment of brain disorders including Parkinsonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s, Huntingtonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s, and Tourette syndrome. We will drive innovative research and education and create opportunities for students and faculty to move research forward.

FALL/WINTER 2018

Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Psychology ANGELA DUCKWORTH’s research on grit— defined as perseverance and passion for long-term goals—has become a touchstone for teachers, parents, coaches, employers, and others who cultivate success. Duckworth, a 2013 MacArthur Fellow, is the co-founder of the Behavior Change for Good Initiative, a partnership with Wharton that unites dozens of leaders from all disciplines to help improve people’s daily decisions about health, education, and savings. Together, researchers seek to address the question: How can we make behavior change stick?

MICHAEL KAHANA, Professor of Psychology, is leading teams of Penn neuroscientists in developing next-generation technologies to improve memory function. He and his collaborators have constructed the first comprehensive map of electrical connectivity in the brain and demonstrated that precisely timed electrical stimulation to the left side of the brain can reliably and significantly enhance learning and memory performance.

OPPORTUNITIES TO SUPPORT BRAIN RESEARCH INCLUDE: MindCORE MindCORE is a center that integrates knowledge of the mind, the brain, and behavior through the marriage of natural science tools and social science approaches. MindCORE focuses its research in two areas: social and decision sciences and language science. Gifts may endow the Center or directorship or support student research fellowships, faculty research, or educational outreach programs.

Behavior Change for Good This collaborative project, led by Angela Duckworth and Wharton’s Katherine Milkman, unites 38 leaders in the social sciences, business, medicine, computer science, and neuroscience across 16 top research universities to develop a model to improve daily decision making.

OMNIA

EXPLORING THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE Engagement with culture, history, and creativity enriches individualsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; lives and speaks to the essence of what it means to be human.

By combining traditional methods of inquiry with powerful new technology- and data-driven tools, we are opening new horizons in understanding a complex, interconnected world. We will strengthen humanistic inquiry and appreciation of diverse perspectives through cross-disciplinary faculty recruitment, support of centers, and investment in the new frontiers of the digital humanities.

FALL/WINTER 2018

A new undergraduate minor in DIGITAL HUMANITIES is designed for students across Penn who want to augment their studies with advanced digital research techniques and indepth engagement with theoretical and practical questions. It offers a systematic program of study and training in digital research tools and methodologies, encouraging students to develop the insight to be both thoughtful users of technology and sophisticated critics of digital work.

Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, Associate Professor of History of Art, introduced Penn students to the vibrant NGO community arts scene of contemporary Cuba thank to a grant from the Schoolâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Making a Difference in Diverse Communities initiative. Her project, PENN-IN-HAVANA: VISUAL CULTURE AND PUBLIC ART IN CUBA, saw students working directly with artists and activists in Cuba.

OPPORTUNITIES TO SUPPORT ENGAGEMENT WITH CULTURE, HISTORY, AND CREATIVITY INCLUDE: Center for Africana Studies An intellectual leader in scholarship and programming on Africa and the diaspora, the Center supports a broad range of disciplines, interests, and regions of study and engages in vital, forward-looking research. Gifts may endow the Center or directorship, or fund postdoctoral fellowships or student learning and research.

The RealArts Program This program connects qualified students with paid opportunities in arts and culture fields include film and entertainment, journalism and publishing. Gifts may fund internships, prizes, or mentorship programs.

OMNIA

DRIVING GLOBAL CHANGE The forces of globalization give rise to issues that transcend national boundaries. With a wealth of global expertise and perspectives embedded in our faculty, and a community committed to engagement, Penn Arts and Sciences is well positioned to advance both global understanding and solutions. Investments in our faculty and in innovative projects will broaden the horizons of our students and strengthen Pennâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s impact in communities around the world.

FALL/WINTER 2018

The CENTER FOR THE ADVANCED STUDY OF INDIA (CASI)—integral to Penn’s global reputation as a leader in scholarship about India—partners with grassroots organizations to provide unique internship and research experiences for Penn undergraduates and graduate students. Students work with organizations that have a deep commitment to their communities, and focus on a range of development issues including health, rural development, environmental sustainability, education, gender, and social enterprise.

MICHAEL WEISBERG, Professor and Chair of Philosophy, received a Making a Difference in Diverse Communities grant for LAVA: Laboratorio para apreciar la vida y el ambiente. This effort, which builds upon a previous School-funded project, grows community science initiatives in the Galápagos Archipelago. Weisberg’s project trains high school students to collect and understand data about the local sea lion population and works with women in the community to monitor the marine reserve.

OPPORTUNITIES TO SUPPORT GLOBAL RESEARCH INCLUDE: Making a Difference in Diverse Communities These School grants encourage faculty to explore innovative ways of applying their expertise. Through a combination of coursework, research, and service, the projects address issues of diversity and inequality at the local, national, and international level.

Center for the Study of Contemporary China Integral to Penn’s leadership in research and teaching about China, the Center offers faculty grants and funding for postdoctoral fellowships and visiting scholars.

Gifts may endow the Center or directorship, or fund a dedicated space in the Ronald O. Perelman Center for Political Science and Economics or speaker series and annual lectures.

Center for the Advanced Study of India The Center engages in policy-relevant research focused on present-day challenges. Gifts may endow the Center; support visiting scholars, research publications, or student, faculty, or postdoctoral research. Gifts may also be used to fund a dedicated space in the Ronald O. Perelman Center for Political Science and Economics.

Center for the Study of Ethnicity, Race, and Immigration The Center, the first of its kind to address the intersection of narratives surrounding ethnicity, race, and immigration, positions Penn as a leader in progressive research on race and the American experience. Gifts may endow the Center or directorship or support faculty, postdoctoral, graduate, or undergraduate research.

OMNIA

VISIT POWER.SAS.UPENN.EDU

To learn more about the POWER OF PENN ARTS & SCIENCES and ways to support our priorities, contact: Laura Weber, Assistant Vice Dean of Advancement • lweber@sas.upenn.edu PHOTOGRAPHERS: CANDACE DICARLO • KYLE KIELINSKI • ALEX SCHEIN • BROOKE SIETINSONS • ERIC SUCAR • PIETER M. VAN HATTEM

FALL/WINTER 2018

OMNIA.SAS.UPENN.EDU/ONLINE-CONTENT

ONLINE CONTENT

Be sure to visit OMNIA online for exclusive multimedia content that covers all aspects of Penn Arts and Sciences research, including faculty, students, alumni, and events. Below is just a small sampling of recent highlights.

ORIGIN STORIES: DEBORAH THOMAS, ACTIVIST ANTHROPOLOGIST (VIDEO) Deborah Thomas, R. Jean Brownlee Professor in the Department of Anthropology, gives voice to violence-stricken communities. Here, she discusses her journey from artist to academic.

Eric Sucar

OMNIA PODCAST: THE RISE OF WOMEN IN POLITICS IN 2018 (AUDIO) As part of our OMNIA Podcast series, we speak with Dawn Teele, Janice and Julian Bers Assistant Professor of Political Science, who discusses the unprecedented number of women running for office in this year’s midterm elections.

ON THE WATER IN PHILADELPHIA (VIDEO) A summer research seminar by the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities gave students the opportunity to conduct research on Philadelphia’s waterways and collaborate with community partners.

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

FACULTY OPINION

WHY (WOMEN’S) POLITICS HASN’T CHANGED THAT MUCH

By Dawn Teele

Illustration by Mariya Pilipenko

OMNIA

FACULTY OPINION

FALL/WINTER 2018

It is easy, at the moment, to feel like the American political landscape has become unrecognizable. In their headlong race for personal and partisan advantage among a historically polarized electorate, politicians regularly profane the sacred rules and norms that once channeled and contained political energies. Each week brings news of fresh outrages from our elected officials and of new social movements ready to reset the boundaries of the politically possible.

This terrifying uncertainty is not without its opportunities, however, and women seem particularly well-poised to exploit them. Women in every sector of the economy, from academia to the entertainment industry, are speaking out against workplace inequalities and aggressions that were tolerated for too long. Women are stepping up in record numbers to run for office at every level of government.

A century ago, an economic crisis realigned American politics, leaving both politicians and voters scrambling to find their footing on unfamiliar terrain. Then, as now, many women found ways to turn uncertainty into opportunity, demanding and winning rights denied to their mothers and their mothers’ mothers. Then, as now, the differences between women created a formidable organizational challenge and left the movement far from united.

My new book, Forging the Franchise: The Political Origins of the Women’s Vote, explains how in the early 20th century, after decades of struggle, the women’s suffrage movement finally claimed victory. The simple punch line is that women got the vote when they convinced male politicians that female voters would advance the interests that politicians and parties sought to promote. But the deeper narrative is about the how diversity among women presented both suffragists and politicians with a formidable challenge.

To prove that women could be a vital force in electoral politics, suffragists had to form broad and encompassing movements. But the early activists who hailed from white, middle-class backgrounds often failed to connect with women from the working classes, and they generally eschewed association with African American women. Instead of a shared sense of feminist purpose, regional, religious, racial, and class divisions caused many women to identify more closely with their fathers and husbands than with their sisters in struggle.

Yet, the efforts of skilled organizers who worked hard to bridge the divides between women, and particularly between white women, ultimately made all the difference. In the end, by allowing suffragists to tempt and to threaten politicians with the prospect of northern and southern, Protestant and Catholic, wealthy and working-class women giving their support to whatever party endorsed the cause of women’s suffrage, it was cross-class, cross-party coalitions that proved the most influential.

The period and politics my book recounts contains several important lessons for the present.

First, although being a single-issue movement may have tempered the residual influence of the suffrage movement, having one big policy to focus on gave activists a target to shoot at. There were always tensions about whether the suffragists’ agenda should be more diffuse, but coalescing on a particular issue can help a nascent organization congeal and attract funding and converts to the cause.

to decide whether they want to form an agenda that incorporates the concerns of relatively centrist white women, or alienate them in favor of a more diverse coalition. De-centering the white, middle-class, educated, and (in today’s context) urban experience will be key to forming a feminist policy agenda for this century that is more representative of women’s lived experiences.

Third, and more optimistically, we should remember that the suffrage movement was successful because it was a real movement, made up, as my colleague Adolph Reed [Professor of Political Science] would say, of actual people with actual addresses. The extensive networks of suffrage activists were able to picket the White House for months on end, go in and out of jail for public disobedience, and pursue precinct-level mobilization that switched the outcome of New York City’s referendum in just two years. In this moment we too should remember that real people have to do the tough work of educating and mobilizing the next generation of activists.

As we look toward the coming elections and the record numbers of women who have thrown their hats into the ring, we should remember that female politicians are not immune to the baser temptations of the field at large. We cannot rely on women’s presence to get policies passed— promoting gender equality has to be in their interests.

Dawn Teele is the Janice and Julian Bers Assistant Professor in the Social Sciences.

Second, when present-day movements promote a single issue, we should not forget how the suffragists’ shortcomings and compromises continue to haunt us because the vision of womanhood they promoted was not attainable by all. So leaders of the feminist movement have 67

OMNIA

IN THE CLASSROOM

Students at the Maeslant Storm Surge Barrier near Rotterdam. < Simon

Richter, Class of 1942 Endowed Term Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures

SUSTAINABILITY IN ACTION

By Lauren Rebecca Thacker

Photography courtesy of Maria Apiyo Odongo, ENG’21

IN THE CLASSROOM

FALL/WINTER 2018

Sustainability is a complex matter, according to Simon Richter. Working towards it involves science, engineering, policy, city planning, infrastructure, architecture, and design. But it’s more than the sum of its parts. When people put sustainability into action, they quickly realize that it is a cultural practice, distinct from country to country.

For four years, Richter, Class of 1942 Endowed Term Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, has been taking Penn students to Berlin and Rotterdam to see sustainability in action. His summer course, Comparative Cultures of Sustainability, allows students to meet the architects, activists, engineers, and policymakers involved in Germany’s transition to renewable energy and Dutch efforts to adapt to rising sea levels, and to enjoy the public greenspaces in both nations, which invite passersby to celebrate culture and artistic tradition.

“Germany and the Netherlands both link sustainability to their international development missions,” explains Richter, “so there is a very real investment in sustainable practices across levels of government and from different corners of society.”

Lucy Corlett, C’20, realized how central sustainability is to these nations when she saw the range of experts on the syllabus. “Important people were so willing to talk to us and answer questions,” she says. “We met with the representatives from the German Foreign Office, people from Urgenda, and a group of Dutch advocates who successfully sued their government in 2015 for more ambitious climate change policies. Every moment of the trip was packed, whether we were biking across rivers or meeting with local politicians.”

Richter’s students had the chance to explore the two countries’ many sustainability-related innovations. In the city of Nijmegen, for example, the Room for Rivers project demonstrates that approaches to climate change and living with the river can and should adapt: After 800 years of building increasingly higher dikes to keep rising waters at bay, the project coordinates Dutch efforts to remove dikes, deepen flood channels, and eliminate water obstacles, creating more efficient flood defenses and more livable waterfront urban environments.

For Jacob Hershman, C’20, Nijmegen and its changing landscape was the highlight of the trip, for reasons both practical

and inspirational: “Nijmegen is, hands down, one of the coolest places I will ever see, and I was surprised to learn how much faith Dutch water experts have in the capacity of humankind to adapt to the changing environment.”

There’s a spirit of optimism about the future in Berlin, Maria Apiyo Odongo, ENG’21, says. “We all loved meeting with the young team of professionals at Agora Energiewende and Clean Energy Wire.

No one wanted to leave. We just kept diving deeper and deeper into conversations about how the youth are taking over the world by being at the forefront of pushing for a sustainable future.”

That students can see themselves in the future of sustainability is most important to Richter. “Every year students tell me that the course opened their eyes,” he says. “It makes climate change and the massive human effort required intensely real for them, and they go back to Penn brimming with ideas and plans for themselves and for their communities. These are students who go on to become leaders in the struggle for sustainability in the U.S. and the world.”

In Germany and the Netherlands, students took urban cycling tours and relied on bicycles to travel from site to site.

69

MOVERS & QUAKERS

OMNIA

Loraine Terrell

Michelle Tandler, C’08

FROM THE PRINTING PRESS TO ONLINE MARKETPLACES Michelle Tandler’s career in tech has roots in 17th-century innovation.

By Lauren Rebecca Thacker Michelle Tandler, C’08, couldn’t have predicted that a history course covering the ideas of Isaac Newton and René Descartes would draw her into the world of technology. Yet reflecting on her studies and career, she can trace a direct line from the scientific and philosophical developments of the 17th century to the commitment to innovation that drives her. A history major who specialized in intellectual history, Tandler now works as Category Manager at Thumbtack, an online marketplace designed to help consumers find local professionals.

“As a student,” Tandler says, “I learned about technology as a driver of large-scale societal change.

Working in technology today allows me to be part of changes to come.”

MOVERS & QUAKERS

FALL/WINTER 2018

Q: Why intellectual history?

I came to Penn in my junior year and knew the history department was very strong, so I took a couple of courses. I started with 17thCentury Intellectual History and Classical Liberal Thought, both with Alan Charles Kors [Henry Charles Lea Professor Emeritus of History]. After that I was hooked, so I declared history as my major.

I never would have anticipated specializing in intellectual history, but it’s shaped so much of how I think now. At Penn, I became fascinated with how communication and the written word can transform society.

I think about those classes with Professor Kors and how the development of the printing press gave everyday people access to books and other printed texts. Learning about how technology can spur growth, progress, and innovation has had a tremendous impact on me.

Q: What was your path from history major to tech manager?

I found myself spending my free time reading about tech, innovation, and startups. I was so interested in diving into that world that I moved back to my hometown of San Francisco and lived with my parents while I interviewed for roles.

BUSINESS THAT BUILDS COMMUNITY

My first startup job was a learning experience. It was a lot of creative thinking and problem solving. From there, I took some detours—business school, a venture capital firm— that led me to where I am now. Ten years out of Penn, all my experiences have led me to a place that feels like a great fit for my skills and interests. I’m excited to see where I can go from here.

Billy Shore, C’77, is the CEO of Share Our Strength, a national nonprofit committed to ending childhood hunger in the U.S., and host of the podcast Add Passion and Stir. In “The Social Entrepreneur: Business That Builds Community” episode of the podcast, Shore speaks with fellow Penn alumi Neil Braun, C’74, Dean of the Lubin School of Business at Pace University; and Shu Chowdhury, ENG’02, founder and CEO of SALIDO, a restaurant operating system. The episode covers business, technology, and social entrepreneurship.

Q: How does your position at Thumbtack relate to the passion you found as a College student?

My undergraduate self would be thrilled about what I’m doing now.

We’re creating new ways for small business owners to find new customers and make a living. Technology makes this possible, just like the printing press changed how ideas circulated and ships and trains disrupted how goods and services are delivered People from all backgrounds use Thumbtack—caterers, accountants, cleaners. One of the most inspiring parts of my work is hearing stories about professionals who left unfulfilling jobs to pursue their dreams.

They can use our technology to find customers in a way they couldn’t before. It creates possibilities for people to become independent and grow their businesses, which is really meaningful to me. It’s consistent with the ideas about change I found so compelling as a student and that remain important to me.

Courtesy of University Communications

I took a winding path to get here.

As a student, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do but I knew I wanted to be surrounded by smart people and be intellectually challenged.

I ended up going into consulting.

It was fast-paced and stimulating, but I knew it wasn’t going to be my long-term career.

I actually interviewed with Thumbtack during that time, but they were in the middle of raising their Series A funding and I didn’t want to join while that process was ongoing.

Billy Shore, C'77, spoke at the College's 2016 graduation ceremony.

71

OMNIA

STUDENT SPOTLIGHT

ON THE GROUND IN WASHINGTON, D.C. Courtesy of Louis Lin

Louis Lin, C’20

“There’s a gap in representation of Asian-Americans in the government, and the International Leadership Foundation Civic Fellowship helps AAPI students grow into future government leaders,” says Lin, who was elected Judge of Elections in Division 20 of Philadelphia’s Ward 27 in 2017. “This experience bridges vastly different disciplines and will allow me to not only explore more options for careers in government but also to become a better public servant.”

As an ILF Civic Fellow, Lin learned how politics, policy making, and public service can work for marginalized populations, while strengthening his skills as an advocate for low-income AAPI and immigrant communities.

The fellowship includes seminars and workshops on career, personal, and leadership development, as well 72

as civic engagement. The training also offers briefings on policy priorities important to AAPI communities, résumé writing, public speaking, finance, and entrepreneurship.

Alisa Feldman, C’18, spent 13 years in Jewish day school before attending Penn, but never dreamed she would spend the summer before her senior year studying in vitro fertilization (IVF) practices in Israel. Her honor’s thesis project, “Be Fruitful and Medicalize: IVF Risk Communication and the Politics of Assisted Reproduction in Israel,” investigates how providers communicate—or don’t communicate—the risks of IVF to patients and the factors that shape those communications. The project won four prestigious awards and earned her a coveted Fulbright Scholarship to continue her research after graduation.

A health and societies major with a minor in gender, sexuality, and women’s studies, Feldman was intrigued by the pronatalist, or birth-promoting, policies of Israel. It is the only nation in the Courtesy of Alisa Feldman

Thanks to a fellowship with the International Leadership Foundation (ILF), Louis Lin, C’20, spent the summer in Washington, D.C. The ILF fellowships cultivate the next generation of Asian-American and Pacific Islander leaders who want to develop their policy interests.

THE CULTURAL AND POLITICAL ASPECTS OF INFERTILITY IN ISRAEL

For 10 weeks, Lin also served as an intern in the Office of the Chief Counsel at the Federal Aviation Administration.

Although it doesn’t seem related at first glance, the experience connects back to his academic path at Penn.

“My FAA internship ties in with my health and societies and political science majors and my environmental studies minor,” says Lin. “I’m interested in the impact of aviation on the environment and health.”

Lin came to Penn as a pre-med student— the first in his family to go to college— and then he says his world of possibilities opened up even wider. “I found that my true passions were in education and health policy.”

Lin has since has been hired by the FAA Office of the Chief Counsel to serve as a Management and Program Analyst.

Alisa Feldman, C’18

STUDENT SPOTLIGHT

FALL/WINTER 2018

world that pays for unlimited in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments for all women between ages 18 and 45 until they have two children.

Sociological and anthropological literature suggests that Israeli providers tend to downplay the risks of IVF to their patients. Feldman wanted to understand why, yet, she says, there was no existing research on the topic.

Backed by five undergraduate research fellowships and grants, Feldman traveled to Israel. Fluent in Hebrew and armed with a background in Jewish studies and history, she interviewed 21 IVF providers to find out how they communicate with patients.

“You assume that if you’ve been to the zoo or studied an animal a lot, you know what it feels like to see them. But that doesn’t really prepare you for how breathtaking it is to see a wild animal in its natural habitat,” says Madeleine Andrews, C’18. “It was remarkable just how poignant that moment was.”

Andrews, a 2018 Dean’s scholar who graduated with her bachelor’s degree in biology with a concentration in ecology and evolutionary biology, spent two months in summer 2017 in the Argentinian rainforest, where she worked as a research intern with the Owl Monkey Project in the province of Formosa. She and her fellow researchers left their camps before sunrise to catch their nocturnal subjects in action and track their social, vocal, and foraging behaviors.

Her second day in the field, peering high into the treetops through shadows and raindrops, she spied a monkey’s fleeting silhouette. Within 10 seconds, it was gone.

When her internship concluded, Andrews returned home to Philadelphia—for one day.

She then boarded a plane to Punta Santiago,

Puerto Rico, to begin a six-week independent research project involving a different primate, the rhesus macaque. Research has shown that early life adversity, such as abuse and neglect, impedes the ability to manage stress in adulthood for both people and animals. To examine this phenomenon, Andrews collected saliva from rhesus macaques who had been mistreated by their mothers in infancy and prepped the samples for analysis, as elements of saliva can correlate to stress response.

Two days after her project in Puerto Rico ended, Andrews was back in class, kicking off her senior year. She continued her research in the lab of Erol Akçay, Assistant Professor of Biology, where since 2016 she had been studying how social competence—an individual’s ability to adjust its behavior when given an environmental or social cue—can evolve in animals over time.

“It’s like if a kid wants to go get ice cream— he knows to ask his mom when she’s in a good mood, because he’s more likely to get what he wants,” she says.

Courtesy of Madeleine Andrews

Feldman found that IVF providers often used pronatalist language or undertones to encourage patients to undergo IVF treatments. She explains, “Physicians are not immune to the influences of pronatalism, and that became clear through my research.

The Israeli cultural, political, religious, and social pressure to reproduce plays a role in shaping providers’ perceptions and communication.”

CONNECTING—AND DISCONNECTING—IN THE WILD

Feldman will conduct another sociological study on IVF and infertility in Israel next year— interviewing couples who have adopted or experienced infertility struggles—through her Fulbright Scholarship.

“My undergraduate research experience was eye-opening for me,” says Feldman. “I never realized how much my religious studies and linguistic background would benefit me in college and beyond.

It’s been exciting to see it all come to fruition this way.”

Madeleine Andrews, C’18 73

OMNIA

STUDENT SPOTLIGHT

attorneys, and business leaders to explore working across state lines. It was a swan song of sorts for D’Urso; in December he handed the reins of Penn CASE to Ben Friedman, C’19.

BUYER BE INFORMED! Eric Sucar

D’Urso is now preparing for an intense six years. As a 2018 Rhodes Scholarship recipient, he will spend three years at the University of Oxford pursuing a doctorate in public policy. After that, he’s been accepted to Yale Law School. Both stops are benchmarks toward his long-time goals of becoming a federal prosecutor and, ultimately, a policymaker.

THE GENDERED NAVIGATION OF PUBLIC SPACE Shortly after Jana Korn, C’18, arrived in Santiago, Chile, for a semester abroad, she learned to navigate Santiago’s heavily used public transportation system.

“I never had been in a place where trains and buses get so crowded,” says the urban studies major from Washington, D.C.

Christopher D’Urso, C’18, MPA’18

D’Urso’s involvement with consumer affairs dates back to high school, when he worked with the Monmouth County, New Jersey Department of Consumer Affairs.

At Penn, he wanted to study consumer protection in the context of his new city. Joe Tierney, Executive Director of the Robert A. Fox Leadership Program, encouraged him to contact the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Bureau of Consumer Protection.

“What I learned is that even though Philadelphia is the poorest major city in the U.S., there were really no proactive consumer protection programs here,” D’Urso says.

74

D’Urso founded Penn CASE (Consumer Assistance, Support, and Education), a community-service student organization for consumer protection in Philadelphia, that has brought its consumer fraud prevention message to more than 2,600 people through community-based organizations, nonprofits, and schools throughout West Philadelphia.

Courtesy of Jana Korn

Christopher D’Urso, C’18, MPA’18, is an expert in the whack-a-mole-like work of consumer protection. Whether it’s pension poaching tricks, weather disaster scams, or unscrupulous telemarketers, new swindles are always popping up— and D’Urso is always on alert.

“The folks primarily targeted by fraud are seniors and low-income and immigrant communities,” explains D’Urso. “They’re people who might be most afraid to come forward. Penn CASE teaches how to spot and report scams.”

Penn CASE has also led efforts to address cyber security and postal fraud. And in November 2017, with the County and Municipal Consumer Agencies of New Jersey, it co-hosted on campus the first ever Mid-Atlantic Consumer Protection Conference. The event convened 50 government officials, consumer advocates,

Jana Korn, C’18

STUDENT SPOTLIGHT

FALL/WINTER 2018

DIGITAL ARCHAEOLOGY Courtesy of Malkia Okech

“I had to learn to be comfortable squished in with total strangers. I think it’s an experience that any woman or girl can speak to, having to think intentionally about where you’re placing your body.”

This heightened awareness percolated into research questions that formed the basis of Korn’s senior thesis project: How do feelings of vulnerability affect decisions women make about traveling in cities? How does fear restrict women’s mobility, and what are the implications for gender equity?

Working with Penn advisors Alec Gershberg, Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Urban Studies, and Elaine Simon, CoDirector of the Urban Studies Program, Korn devised an online survey for female students in Santiago aged 18 through 32 asking whether they had ever been victims of, or witnesses to, sexual violence while using public transportation.

“I defined sexual violence as anything from verbal harassment to rape,” Korn explains. The survey asked what factors influenced women’s route choices or time of day they traveled, as well as what changes might make them feel safer.

More than 400 students responded, with over 90 percent reporting that they had experienced or observed sexual violence on transit.

Korn’s study outlined three key areas that cities could focus on to enhance safety: infrastructure improvements such as on-time performance, better lighting, and real-time tracking; quick reporting systems that facilitate a direct connection between transit riders and law enforcement; and awareness campaigns that give women the message that harassment and violence should not be tolerated.

Korn summarized her research and recommendations in an op-ed for the online magazine Next City and hopes to publish her thesis as well. The study of urban life will likely remain a focus for her going forward. “I’m always interested in questions like ‘Who is the city for?

Who are public spaces for?’” she says.

“That’s what I think about a whole lot.”

Malkia Okech, C’19

Malkia Okech, C’19, has been interested in ancient Egypt for as long as she can remember. She recalls childhood books aplenty on mummies, the pyramids, and the mystery of ancient civilizations.

The ancient world still holds a powerful allure for Okech. Now, she is a Near Eastern Studies major with minors in digital humanities and fine arts. She focuses on the intersection between archaeology and technology.

“The disciplines are very much intertwined. I am interested in the utilization of technology to make research efforts more transparent and accessible,” says Okech, who began a student exhibition internship at the Penn Museum this fall.

“It’s not to be flashy and entertaining. It’s about being interactive and getting people who visit museums to be part of the archeological process. There’s a place for creating digital immersive experiences.”

Okech traveled to Armenia in June, where she and a research team used technology including a custom app to pinpoint where

artifacts are found, drone photography, and 3-D scanning for pottery shards.

Okech now uses data from the Armenia survey to work on a virtual reality project with Paul Cobb, Professor and Chair of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations.

The objects Okech and the team located have the potential to reveal previously unknown things about a long-gone society, she explains. As she continues her education and training, she hopes to turn her attention to ancient Egypt, the time and place that first drew her to her field, and to investigate what is still unknown.

“A very small percentage of ancient Egypt has been excavated. We know a lot about the elite culture of Egypt, but what about the other classes, the common life of Egypt?” she asks. “The nuances of social stratification are difficult to define because of a lack of artifacts. They weren’t covered in gold! One thing we do have is pottery, studying ceramics. You can see artisanal value, everyday life.”

75

OMNIA

PARTNERS & PROGRESS

PENN ARTS AND SCIENCES PROFESSIONAL WOMENâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S ALLIANCE: SUMMER NETWORKING AT BUZZFEED Penn Arts and Sciences alumnae and students gathered at BuzzFeed in New York City for a summer networking reception.

A brief presentation on networking tips, along with designated industry tables, made for an evening filled with meaningful conversations and lasting connections.

1

2

3

The Professional Womenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Alliance (PWA) connects professionally accomplished Penn Arts and Sciences alumnae, united by their deep appreciation and understanding of the value of a liberal arts education as it relates to the workplace, with students and young alumnae of the College. PWA hosts programs in New York City and on campus to facilitate networking, mentorship, career exploration, professional development, and intellectual engagement.

For more information, visit the PWA website at www.sas.upenn.edu/pwa.

ROUNDTABLE DINNER: ENTREPRENEURIAL CAREER PATHS The College Alumni Mentoring Series (CAMS) hosts a variety of programs throughout the year, including small mentoring meals and large themed roundtable dinners to give students an opportunity to learn from College alumni and understand how their academic paths correspond to career possibilities.

4

76

College alumni who have made their careers as entrepreneurs or working for start-ups led roundtable discussions with students, sharing their career journeys, advice, and a glimpse into a day in the life.

5

PARTNERS & PROGRESS

FALL/WINTER 2018

6

7

COCKTAILS & CONVERSATION WITH PENN ARTS AND SCIENCES OVERSEERS

8

9

1 Holly Buechel, C’07, Soonia Wahi, C’13, Rachel Cooper, C’04, Alexa Fecca, C’16 (L – R) 2 Suzie Cohen, C’04 (host), Danielle Love, C’04, ENG’04, Carolyn Grace, C’16 (L – R)

4 Chip Gross, C’92, Director,

Digital Product Portfolio, Hearst Autos (R) 5 Jennie Ripps, C’03, Founder of Owl’s Brew (R) 6 Katie Stitch, C’04, W’04, Mathias Stitch, WG’04, and Shirin Green, C’05 (L – R) 7 Matthew Herbster, C’07, ENG’07 , Ian Seltzer, C’09, Alexandra Wu, C’01, W’01, Steven Nichtberger, C’83, W’83, Wade Podlich, Swapna Podlich, C’01 (L – R) 8 Kristin Sahradnik, C’04, Jane Silfen, C’07, Marina Field, C’96 (L – R) 9 Raph Osnoss, W’08, Adam Levin, C’05, WG’09, Kimberly Osnoss, SPP’14 (L – R)

PENN ARTS AND SCIENCES AT WORK Penn Arts and Sciences at Work is a photoblog project where we tell the story of the extended Penn Arts and Sciences community. Through images and personal vignettes, we aim to capture the diverse paths of our alumni, focusing on their daily work life. To see more, visit sas.upenn.edu/at-work.

Loraine Terrell

3 Lisa Thompson, C’87, Krista Saunders, C’01, Leslie Koch, C’01 (L – R)

Alumni gathered at the NoMad Hotel in New York City for an opportunity to meet volunteer leaders and learn about the Power of Penn Arts & Sciences Campaign.

Guests heard remarks from Michael Price, W’79, Penn Arts and Sciences Overseer and Power of Penn Arts & Sciences Campaign Chair, and Adam Levin, C’05, WG’09, Penn Arts and Sciences Ambassador Council Chair, about ways to get involved and have an impact during the life of the campaign and beyond.

“I had no idea that I was going to end up working in movies when I was a freshman.

I didn’t realize there was actually a place where my passion would be something I could do every day.”

- BABACAR DIENE, C’04 Vice President of Acquisitions and Development, Voltage Pictures Los Angeles International Relations Major

77

INSOMNIA

OMNIA

INSOMNIA

FALL/WINTER 2018

Alex Schein

ARCHIVAL ENCOUNTERS

By Lauren Rebecca Thacker Illustration by Brian Edward Miller

Kate Dorsch is interested in aliens— but not really. Instead, she studies what different people, from so-called experts to everyday observers, say about reported UFO sightings in the Cold War era.

Dorsch, a doctoral candidate in the Department of History and Sociology of Science, researches UFO encounters reported in Project Blue Book, an Air Force program that investigated more than 12,000 claimed UFO sightings between 1952 and 1969.

Her dissertation covers a finite period of time—from the first “flying saucer” report in 1947 through the release of Steven Spielberg’s film Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1977. But UFO sightings have continued to capture the attention of both the general public and the federal government, most recently making the headlines in 2017 when The New York Times revealed the existence of a Pentagon program investigating unidentified flying objects.

The continued investigation of UFOs came as no surprise to Dorsch, because, as she says, it’s about so much more

than aliens. It’s about national security, the creation of scientific knowledge, and how this knowledge is communicated to the public.

In her research of the Project Blue Book archives, held at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, she has come across boxes of letters and photos sent by people who claim to have sighted UFOs, along with Air Force Press releases and university communications. This mix of experiential and professional expertise is unusual, and it raises academic and practical questions about what type of knowledge is valued in different contexts.

“The academic community has been incredibly enthusiastic and supportive of my project,” Dorsch says. “Because, I think, it’s rooted in ideas about who gets to make decisions, who gets to say what’s real. If there’s a better way to gain trust and communicate scientific knowledge to the public, that will have real effects on the lived experience of many people.”

Kate Dorsch, Ph.D. candidate in history and sociology of science; a depiction of the UFO sighting known as the "Washington Flap" in July 1952; an encounter between a Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet and an unknown object released by the Defense Department's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program in 2017.

79

OMNIA

INSOMNIA

THE SOLE OF THINGS: SOCIAL AWARENESS AND SUCCESS THROUGH FOOTWEAR Courtesy of Fernando Rojo

Clockwise from left: Fernando Rojo, C’18; Rojo works with his team of local artisans in Peru to design and manufacture sneakers using traditional methods; a pair of PATOS sneakers in production.

During a trip to visit family in Argentina, Fernando Rojo, C’18, met a shoemaker and designer named Rafael at an artisan fair. Then a freshman, Rojo teamed up with Rafael to create a line of shoes that used traditional Peruvian textiles.

PATOS Shoes now employs a dozen

Peruvian artisans selling products in 15 countries and includes a partnership with J.Crew. PATOS aims to empower artisans across Latin America through its network, allowing them to work under fair conditions and maintain their centuries-old handcrafting techniques while creating a platform for their products to enter the international markets.

Here, Rojo tells the story of why PATOS is different from other brands and how Penn helped get him where he is.

80

The idea for PATOS came up when I was actually visiting my grandparents back home in Argentina.

I was walking through the streets of Belgrano, the neighborhood where my family lives, and I came across this artisan fair in a flea market where all these local artisans were selling their handcrafted products.

There was one stand that completely stood out to me. This man named Rafael was selling amazing shoes with these incredible, bright patterns on them. There was a line of tourists coming and I immediately felt like I had to work with him somehow. So I just asked him if I could buy some and take them in a suitcase and bring them home, and that’s exactly what I did, and that’s where PATOS began.

We sell handcrafted, authentic footwear made by Latin American artisans. Every single pair is made by hand using authentic Latin American textiles that are sourced from locals around Peruvian villages.

There’s no question that historically a lot of brands have been able to exploit the labor in Latin America and the talent of the workers there, and a big part of PATOS is tackling that. You know, our whole dynamic of how we collaborate is very familial. Something that’s really unique about getting to work with a company like this is that it’s more than just making a product and selling it. It’s creating family connections across the world both for me and for my customers.

Without a doubt Penn’s ecosystem for entrepreneurship is spread across the way that the school works. You know, I study math and economics and the fact that everyone’s working to create something better is really amazing, and the people that I’ve met studying in my major and minor have always shared these passions.

So I think the fact that I’ve been able to be here and push this idea has really been phenomenal for me.

FALL/WINTER 2018 Sophia Simon, C’19

Galápagos sea lions and the 8,000 residents of Puerto Baquerizo Moreno, San Cristóbal Island, often compete for space on local beaches and along the waterfront. As part of a pilot project, funded by Penn Arts and Science's Making a Difference in Diverse Communities program, Professor and Chair of Philosophy Michael Weisberg’s research group has placed three floating platforms in the bay adjacent to this Galápagos town. The sea lions seem to be enjoying their new home.

LAST LOOK

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 AND SCIENCES GRADUATE DIVISION COLLEGE OF LIBERAL AND PROFESSIONAL STUDIES Stay in touch with Penn Alumni.

Join QuakerNet, your key to connect: quakernet.alumni.upenn.edu

EMPOWER

IDEAS “MY CLASSMATES AND PROFESSORS INSPIRE ME— WITH THE KNOWLEDGE I’VE GAINED, THERE’S NOTHING I CAN’T DO.” Sebastián González, C’20 Physics and Astronomy major

Your gift to the Arts & Sciences Annual Fund empowers intellectual inquiry across Penn.

Everyone can be a part of the Power of Penn Arts & Sciences fundraising Campaign with a gift to the Annual Fund.

WWW.SAS.UPENN.EDU/GIFTS/ANNUAL WWW.POWER.SAS.UPENN.EDU