Omnia Magazine: Fall/Winter 2023

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FALL/WINTER 2023

A Race Against Time

F FL LO OW W MOTION MOTION

Courses across Penn Arts & Sciences show how immersion enhances a liberal arts education. PAGE 18

Emily Wilson’s Epic Life

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Cultivating Discovery

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Life in China After Lockdown

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OMNIA

FEATURES

26 A Race Against Time Hopeful solutions to the climate crisis.

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COVER STORY: Flow Motion

Emily Wilson’s Epic Life

Courses across Penn Arts & Sciences show how immersion enhances a liberal arts education.

The classicist on the power of translation.

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Cultivating Discovery

Life in China After Lockdown

Building on Success

A deep dive into Biology’s “plant group.”

Three experts on what it’s like there now.

Cinema & Media Studies is now a department.

CONTENTS

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

SECTIONS

EDITORIAL OFFICES School of Arts & Sciences University of Pennsylvania 3600 Market Street, Suite 300 Philadelphia, PA 19104-3284 P: 215-746-1232 F: 215-573-2096 E: omnia-penn@sas.upenn.edu STEVEN J. FLUHARTY Dean, School of Arts & Sciences LORAINE TERRELL Executive Director of Communications MICHELE W. BERGER Editor SUSAN AHLBORN Associate Editor

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SCHOOL NEWS

FINDINGS

OMNIA 101

New faculty, honors, and more

Notable faculty research

On UNESCO sites and conflict

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IN THE CLASSROOM

MOVERS AND QUAKERS

STUDENT SPOTLIGHT

Fieldwork in West Philly

Theatre producer Tim Bloom, C’17

Ballet, better batteries, and more

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INSPIRING COMMUNITY

INSOMNIA

LAST LOOK

New Ambassadors, Penn at Work

Three questions on laughter

The iconic Mary Frances Berry

JANE CARROLL Staff Writer LUSI KLIMENKO Art Director LUSI KLIMENKO KATE MIRAGLIA DREW NEALIS Designers CHANGE OF ADDRESS Alumni: Visit MyPenn, the Penn alumni community, at mypenn.upenn.edu. Non-alumni: Email Development and Alumni Records at record@ben.dev. upenn.edu or call 215-898-8136.

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

Cover Illustration: ANDREA MONGIA

OMNIA Lisa J. Godfrey

DEAN’S MESSAGE

A Message from Dean Steven J. Fluharty

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ot long ago, as the University was in the midst of the COVID lockdown, I wrote in these pages about the power of connection. I reflected then on how the fabric of the Penn community had been stretched and tested. But I also shared my belief that the connections that bind our community are what keep us strong. Today, I am reminded again that community and connections help make Penn the great university that it is.

*** It’s not possible for me to tell my story without centering it around Penn. This university has been a part of my life starting with the Philadelphia Eagles games that my father took me to as a child, when they played at Franklin Field. As an undergraduate and then as a graduate student, I enjoyed tremendous opportunities that shaped my path in science. As a member of the faculty, I had 10 rewarding years teaching undergraduates in what was then the Biological Basis of Behavior major.

When I moved into administration, I continued to derive enormous professional and personal satisfaction from seeing Penn move forward as a world-class research university. Somewhere along this path, I became a proud Penn parent. And so, I write to you today from the perspective of someone who has spent his entire adult life within the fold of this great university.

I have seen the campus rise to great heights.

From time to time, I have also seen it rise to the challenges presented by adversity. *** As I write this note, the Arts and Sciences community is experiencing a period of division as students, faculty, staff, alumni, and friends react to the terrorist attack on Israel, the Israel-Hamas war, and the Palestine Writes Literature Festival that was held on campus prior to these horrific events.

The School of Arts and Sciences categorically condemns the evil attack on Israel.

We mourn with those who have lost loved ones in Israel and in Gaza. We are appalled by acts of antisemitic vandalism here on campus and reject any form of antisemitism or Islamophobia. And we share in the pain that so many in our community are experiencing as a result of these tragic 2

events, embracing all members of the Arts and Sciences family of Jewish, Israeli, Arab, Muslim, and Palestinian identity.

We are hearing many diverse opinions representing all sides of a complex set of issues, bringing into stark relief the challenges inherent in balancing our commitment to belonging and community with our equally strong commitment to the free exchange of ideas. I would not have spent my career at Penn if I was not personally committed to academic freedom. But I would also not have spent my career at Penn if I did not feel an equal obligation to community, belonging, and empathy. As dean I am deeply proud of the diversity of our community. *** At any great university, including Penn, we recognize that there is a delicate balance between supporting open expression, dissent, and protest and upholding communal values of civility and mutual respect. If we are to reach across cultural and campus divides, a willingness to work collectively is more important than ever. It’s essential for us to bravely engage with ideas and commit to discussing them respectfully and authentically.

This is why the School of Arts and Sciences is launching a dialogue series, “Living the Hard Promise,” to create spaces in which the Penn community can begin working through the tremendous challenges of this moment.

The series will engage the campus community and beyond through small-group community conversations that will bring

students together with facilitators, talks by faculty experts that speak to the complexity of current events, and larger public programs to encourage open reflections.

We know that these conversations will not solve the world’s problems, but they will surely help us deepen our understanding and engage empathetically with one another as we process global events. The School is uniquely suited to fostering this kind of dialogue. This is the core of the hard promise we make to our community of open expression and respectful dialogue. *** Our thoughts go out to the members of our community who are impacted directly or indirectly by the painful events of these last weeks, and by ongoing conflict around the world. We continue to offer our full support to every one of them. As a lifetime member of this community, I know very well the incredible things that we can do when we work together. We are a great university that benefits from the strength and support of all of our communities, and we will move forward as we always have with lessons in hand and in continual pursuit of institutional excellence. I look forward to sustaining connections across our entire community as we work through these challenging times.

Steven J. Fluharty, C’79, GR’81, PAR’07 Dean and Thomas S. Gates, Jr. Professor of Psychology, Pharmacology, and Neuroscience

EDITOR’S NOTE

FALL /WINTER 2023

BEHIND THE COVER

Our Brand of Learning

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We asked illustrator Andrea Mongia to come up with a visual concept that could convey the idea of immersion, the subject of our cover story, written by Karen Brooks. Here’s what he said about his thought process: “When I started working on these sketches, I was moved by how an immersive experience, primarily through virtual reality, could put you in a totally different state of mind, a new way to explore and feel new sensations. The chosen idea, the more abstract one, leads directly to this, a walk through a parallel universe, where the overlap and intersections of the colors guide the eye to an infinite and constantly changing center.” —Lusi Klimenko, Director, Graphic Design

ou may notice that my name isn’t familiar or perhaps you’ve seen it sporadically in these pages. For the past eight years, I’ve had the privilege of sharing Penn’s inspiring and amazing stories as a science writer in the University’s central communications office.

Now I get to continue that tradition as Omnia editor.

It is truly an honor. This is my first full issue, and there’s a whole lot to show off.

make a real difference in everything from the fight against cancer to the one against climate change. Speaking of climate change, given the weather extremes this past summer, we felt it crucial to ask for some answers from the Penn Arts & Sciences faculty studying this subject. The good news is, as “A Race Against Time” (p. 26) makes clear, they’re all optimistic that we’re not too late to turn the tide.

Like our cover story, “Flow Motion” (p. 18), which digs into what immersion—in a digital detox, a theatrical production, fieldwork in the Puerto Rican rainforest— means in the context of a liberal arts education, why it’s really at the heart of our brand of learning.

In “Emily Wilson’s Epic Life” (p. 34), we delve into the mind of the classicist whose star rose after she translated Homer’s The Odyssey five years ago.

She’s at it again with a new translation of The Iliad, which published in September.

We celebrate Cinema & Media Studies becoming a department in “Building on Success” (p. 52), and in “Life in China After Lockdown” (p. 48), learn from three experts on contemporary China what life is like there following the pandemic.

In “Cultivating Discovery” (p. 40), we take you inside the Department of Biology’s self-described “plant group,” scientists not just innately curious about the natural world, but who also believe that the cutting-edge techniques they’re employing have the potential to

Plus, we have great student stories (p. 56), like one about Ayesha Patel, C’25, who interned with Philly’s contemporary ballet company BalletX thanks to a new Summer Humanities Internship Program partnership; Mia McElhatton, C’26, who worked with philosophy professor Kok-Chor Tan researching the ethics of wildlife conservation; and Andrew Ahn, C’26, ENG’26, who, as part of the Vagelos Integrated Program in Energy Research, is working in the lab of chemistry professor Eric Schelter trying to green the

Eric Sucar

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process of mining metals for electric car batteries.

You may notice some other small changes throughout the magazine, like brief bios of our writers and the explanation of our cover art (to the left on this page) from illustrator Andrea Mongia.

That’s because we want you to get a better sense of our process, what’s going through our heads as we put together a product that we believe you’ll enjoy. But we also want to get inside yours, to understand what you like about Omnia, what you’d like to see more of, who you’ve enjoyed getting to know. For that reason, we have a quick request: Scan the QR code to the left and take our brief, two-question survey. It will help us understand which stories you’re reading and why. We’ll send the first 300 people who fill it out a Penn Arts & Sciences winter hat.

Thanks for reading!

Michele W. Berger, Editor

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OMNIA

SCHOOL NEWS

For Sociology, Anniversaries Offer a Time to Celebrate and Reflect Courtesy of the Department of Sociology

At a September event, faculty, staff, and students in the Department of Sociology and the Graduate Group in Demography gathered to celebrate and reconnect. Clockwise, from left: Hocine Fetni, assistant dean for academic advising in the College and adjunct assistant professor, Aiasha Saalim Graham, department administrator, and Jerry Jacobs, professor of sociology; Ph.D. students Yasmin Mertehikian, Raka Sen, and Niiaja Wright; and David Grazian, professor, with Ph.D. student Alexandra Casison.

For the Department of Sociology, 2024 marks a time for both celebration and reflection. “It’s a marker for three events,” says Professor Jerry Jacobs, who has been a member of the department for 40 years.

“In 1874, 150 years ago, the first professor of social science was appointed at Penn.

His name was Robert Ellis Thompson.

That puts us right up there with the beginnings of the field of sociology,” Jacobs says. A hundred years ago, in 1924, sociology became a major as part of the Wharton School, and then “50 years ago, we moved out of Wharton, along with economics and political science, becoming a department in the newly created School of Arts & Sciences,” he says.

A few aspects have remained remarkably consistent over the past century. For instance, since 1896, some form of Social Problems, a course Jacobs teaches, has been offered almost every year. So, the faculty felt the trio of anniversaries offered a nice excuse to laud the department’s historical strengths, like the 10 of its scholars who have served as president of the field’s biggest association, and the 4

Ph.D. students who have gone on to fill positions in top academic departments across the country.

It’s also a moment to remember the department’s influential scholars, like Erving Goffman, Dorothy Swaine Thomas, E. Digby Baltzell—and of course, W.E.B. DuBois, who penned his famous Philadelphia Negro here. DuBois was never made standing faculty during his time at Penn, but after a campaign led by Tukufu Zuberi, Lasry Family Professor of Race Relations, he received the designation posthumously in 2012, more than 100 years later.

“DuBois was one of the most important sociologists of all time,” says Melissa Wilde, Professor and Chair. “Not hiring him was one of our glaring mistakes. We can’t rectify that now, we but can call attention to it.”

In the past several decades, Wilde says the department has made a real push to diversify its faculty and student population. “When I first arrived at Penn as an assistant professor, of the department’s 25 standing faculty, only one female was

a full professor. Today, more than half of our faculty are women.” She also notes that the department continues to expand its expertise in up-and-coming areas like sexuality and environmental sociology.

“We’re always concerned with making sure we’re contemporary and relevant, at the cutting edge of issues in society,” she says.

Zuberi, who has been in the department for 36 years, has seen progress made, and says he still hopes for more. “It’s always important to look at the past as you go forward, hopefully as a pointer to an even brighter future,” he says.

These important milestones in the department’s history inspire its faculty and students to keep the momentum going, creating a welcoming home for the sociologists of tomorrow that is both informed by the past and focused on future advances in the field. “I hope we can continue to hire the most rigorous, innovative, and publicly engaged sociologists who exist,” Wilde says. “It’s an honor to be chair of a department that’s been so important and visible for so long.”

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FALL /WINTER 2023

New Faculty

Faculty Book Honors

Penn Arts & Sciences welcomed 18 new faculty members for the 2023–24 academic year.

Jared Farmer, Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History, received the American Philosophical Society 2023 Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History for his book, Elderflora: A Modern History of Ancient Trees.

Marco Aresu, Assistant Professor of Francophone, Italian, and Germanic Studies Parrish Bergquist, Assistant Professor of Political Science Vaughn Booker, George E. Doty, Jr. and Lee Spelman Doty Presidential Associate Professor of Africana Studies Sarah Bush, Associate Professor of Political Science Marcia Chatelain, Penn Presidential Compact Professor of Africana Studies

Hardeep Dhillon, Assistant Professor of History

Leticia Marteleto, Penn Presidential Compact Professor of Sociology

Zehra Hashmi, Assistant Professor of History and Sociology of Science

Emily Ng, Assistant Professor of Anthropology

Timothy Hogue, Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations John Kanbayashi, Assistant Professor of History and Sociology of Science Sara Kazmi, Assistant Professor of English Bakirathi Mani, Penn Presidential Compact Professor of English

Carlos Santana, Associate Professor of Philosophy Andrew SantiagoFrangos, Assistant Professor of Biology Daniel Smith, Assistant Professor of Political Science William Sturkey, Associate Professor of History Andrew Zahrt, Assistant Professor of Chemistry

Dorothy Roberts, George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology, received an Honorable Mention for Distinguished Scholarly Book from the American Sociological Association for her book, Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families— and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World.

Grace Sanders Johnson, Associate Professor of Africana Studies, won the 2023 Haitian Studies Association Book Prize for White Gloves, Black Nation: Women, Citizenship, and Political Wayfaring in Haiti.

For his book Wild Experiment, Donovan Schaefer, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, won the 2023 Ludwik Fleck Prize from the Society for the Social Studies of Science and an award from the International Society for Science and Religion.

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

BENCONNECT.SAS.UPENN.EDU

For more information, contact Chrissy Bowdren, Senior Associate Director of Volunteer Programs, at cbowdren@sas.upenn.edu.

OMNIA

SCHOOL NEWS

Transforming Asian American Studies Scott Spitzer, University Communications

Panda Restaurant Group Chief Brand Officer Andrea Cherng, C’99, WG’13 (center), with Asian American Studies program co-directors David L. Eng and Fariha Khan at a welcome-back lunch and panel in September.

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When Panda Restaurant Group Chief Brand Officer Andrea Cherng, C’99, WG’13, was growing up, she didn’t see many people who looked like her on television. In high school in California, she had learned about the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II—something that really stuck with her—but when she got to Penn as an undergraduate, her classmates were uninformed about the historic mistreatment of Asian Americans.

American Studies (ASAM) program, started during her sophomore year at Penn. More than two decades later, ASAM is thriving, and it continues to grow, helped in part by a cluster of new hires across Penn Arts & Sciences who bring a range of expertise to the program, and by the new Panda Express Postdoctoral Fellowship, a grant from the Panda CommUnity Fund that will support five postdoctoral positions over the next three years.

These experiences were part of what led her to become a fierce advocate for what was then the newly created Asian

At a September welcome-back lunch, Cherng and ASAM program directors David L. Eng and Fariha Khan spoke

about the evolution of the Asian American Studies program at Penn.

Eng, Richard L. Fisher Professor of English, began by reflecting on the importance of Asian American studies, especially following the anti-Asian hate and misunderstanding in the wake of COVID-19, and why a program like ASAM is important both as a way to broaden horizons and as a show of support. “There is no amount of money that you can throw at racism to make it go away. The only thing you can do is use education,” he said. “Two and a half years ago, I could have never anticipated that we would

SCHOOL NEWS

FALL /WINTER 2023

be standing here today celebrating the incredible growth of the Asian American Studies program.”

At ASAM’s 25th anniversary celebration last year, Khan had said she believed the program was poised to become the most robust on the East Coast. “Today, looking around, I know this to be true,” she said.

Here she referenced the fellowship, the first of its kind in the Ivy League; Weirong Guo, who received a bachelor’s degree from China’s Fudan University and a Ph.D. from Emory University, is the inaugural recipient, appointed for the 2023-2024 academic year.

whose research focuses on the history of immigration to the U.S. and the laws and legal practices that shape immigrant lives; Bakirathi Mani, Penn Presidential Compact Professor of English, whose work examines the possibilities and limits of Asian American representation; and Tahseen Shams, Assistant Professor of Sociology, who studies how migration and global inequalities affect immigrants, particularly those from Muslim-majority countries in the West. New affiliated faculty include Emily Ng, an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology, and Linda Pheng, an assistant professor in the Graduate School of Education.

ASAM also recently hired three new faculty members who will deepen the Asian American Studies offerings: Hardeep Dhillon, Assistant Professor of History,

When it was Cherng’s turn to share, she spoke about the story of her family’s journey from a single restaurant 50 years ago to nearly 2,500 today. She talked

about how, when asked to come help with the family business, she planned to stay three months but has now been there for years, and about why it’s important for a company like Panda Express to support academic pursuits in this area.

“Food often expresses a sense of identity,” she said. So, it was a natural extension for the company to engage in a way that could help others understand what’s distinct and special about Asian American culture. “In the same way that Panda Express has been built on a foundation of bridging flavors and cultures to bring people together,” Cherng said, “the Panda Express ASAM fellowships are dedicated to honoring and uplifting identities that, by definition, bridge cultures to promote greater understanding and belonging.”

— MICHELE W. BERGER

OMNIA

FINDINGS

AI-Guided Brain Stimulation, Memory, and Traumatic Brain Injury A collaborative study shows that targeted electrical stimulation in the brains of epilepsy patients with TBI improved memory recall an average of 19 percent.

BY ERICA MOSER

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any people with a traumatic brain injury (TBI) struggle with short-term memory. Now a new study in the journal Brain Stimulation shows that targeted electrical stimulation could help, boosting word recall in such patients by 19 percent, on average.

A team of neuroscientists led by Michael Jacob Kahana, Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Psychology, studied TBI patients with implanted electrodes, analyzed neural data as patients studied words, and used a machine-learning algorithm to predict momentary memory lapses. Other lead authors included Wesleyan University’s Youssef Ezzyat and research scientist Paul Wanda, formerly in the Kahana lab.

“The last decade has seen tremendous advances in the use of brain stimulation as a therapy for several neurological and psychiatric disorders including epilepsy, Parkinson’s disease, and depression,” Kahana says. “Memory loss, however, represents a huge burden on society. We lack effective therapies for the 27 million Americans suffering.”

Study co-author Ramon Diaz-Arrastia, director of the Perelman School of Medicine’s Traumatic Brain Injury Clinical Research Center, says the technology Kahana and his team developed delivers “the right stimulation at the right time, 8

informed by the wiring of the individual’s brain and that individual’s successful memory retrieval.”

This new study builds on previous work of Ezzyat, Kahana, and their collaborators. In a 2017 Current Biology paper, they showed that stimulation delivered when memory is expected to fail can improve memory, whereas stimulation administered during periods of good functioning worsens memory. The stimulation in that study was open loop, meaning it was applied by a computer without regard to the state of the brain.

In a study with 25 epilepsy patients published the following year in Nature Communications, the researchers monitored brain activity in real time and used closed-loop stimulation, applying electrical pulses to the left lateral temporal cortex only when memory was expected to fail. They found a 15 percent improvement in the probability of recalling a word from a list.

The latest work specifically focuses on eight people with a history of moderateto-severe TBI who were recruited from a larger group of patients undergoing neurosurgical evaluation for epilepsy.

Seven of the eight are male, and DiazArrastia says 80 percent of people who get hospitalized for traumatic brain injury overall are male.

Kahana emphasizes the importance of addressing TBI-related memory loss.

“These patients are often relatively young and physically healthy,” he notes, “but they face decades of impaired memory and executive function.”

The researchers’ primary question was whether stimulation could improve memory across entire lists of words when only some words were stimulated, whereas prior studies only considered the effect of stimulation on individual words.

Ezzyat says this development is important because “this suggests that an eventual real-life therapy could provide more generalized memory improvement—not just at the precise moment when stimulation is triggered.”

More work remains before this kind of stimulation can be applied in a therapeutic setting, and scientists need to study physiological responses to stimulation to better understand the neural mechanisms behind improved memory performance, Diaz-Arrastia says.

“These are still early days in the field,” he adds. “Eventually what we would need is a self-contained, implantable system, where you could implant the electrodes into the brain of someone who had a brain injury.”

Erica Moser is a science writer in University Communications at Penn.

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Near-Perfect Communities In the new book, Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life, Kristen Ghodsee, Professor of Russian and East European Studies, explores utopian communities past and present.

BY KATELYN SILVA

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ir Thomas More published Utopia, about an ideal fictional island, in 1516, but the concept of a perfect or near-perfect place existed long before.

In the 6th century B.C.E., progressive philosopher Pythagoras—most recognized for his famous triangle theorem—founded a utopian seaside community where the inhabitants lived as equals, shared property, and together considered life’s mysteries, mathematical and otherwise.

Experimental societies like those imagined by Pythagoras, More, and many others make up the crux of Kristen Ghodsee’s new book, Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life.

“Utopias can’t be perfectly right,” explains Ghodsee, professor and chair of the Department of Russian and East European Studies. “Utopia always has to be on the horizon, the place that we’re aiming for but are never really going to reach. None of the utopias I explore are perfect, but the point is to keep working toward better and more perfect societies that connect us.”

Ghodsee became intrigued by utopias while on tour for her 2018 book, Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence. The book discusses why capitalism is damaging for women and why socialism, if done correctly, can lead to more economic independence, better work-life balance, and improved personal relationships. Around the world, she would speak to young people intrigued by the tenets of socialism, such as equality, community, and shared property—ideals often shared by utopian communities.

“While I was not suggesting we should replicate the socialist governments of the past, I explained to these young people that there are ways in which certain aspects of socialism could improve all of our lives,” Ghodsee says. “I would consistently hear the same jaded response: ‘It’s great in theory, but it will never work in practice.’ That got me thinking about ways we could apply aspects of utopian socialist ideals and other examples of utopian communities to the present. And then the pandemic hit.”

During that time, Ghodsee dug into examples of experimental bottom-up “utopic” ways of living from around the world, past and present. Unlike her previous book, which focused on more state-driven solutions, Everyday Utopia explores the long history of small, autonomous communities geared toward a more contented and connected society through shared property, child-rearing, and domestic responsibilities, as well as more expansive ideas about who constitutes “family.”

Examples include co-housing communities in Denmark that share chores, matriarchal Colombian ecovillages where residents grow their own food, and laws in Connecticut to grant rights to “alloparents,” people beyond two legal guardians who provide parental-type care to children.

The timing of Ghodsee’s book is apt, she says, because often utopian ideas arise in the aftermath of great political or societal upheaval, like, say, a global pandemic.

History provides many examples, including More’s Utopia, written as a veiled criticism of the English government in the wake of the “discovery” of the Americas in 1492. “Plato’s The Republic, which was partly modeled on the Pythagoreans,

was published in the aftermath of the Peloponnesian War, which completely upended Ancient Greece and ended Athenian democracy,” she adds. “Now, because of the pandemic, we are seeing radical changes to society that would not likely have occurred otherwise, like the acceptance of remote or hybrid work.”

Everyday Utopia is specifically interested in small-scale changes to the private sphere, which sets it apart from other books on the topic. “I’m not writing about universal basic income or shorter work weeks, which are all positive,” Ghodsee says, “but rather about making changes in the way that we live with other people, where we dwell, how we raise and educate our children, how we share or hoard our property, and what constitutes our families.”

Ghodsee notes that in her survey of 2,500 years of utopian experiments in different cultural contexts and across many diverse historical epochs, almost all share a set of values and policies that “bring us together in community with one another.”

In a world beset by increasing inequality, climate change, and housing insecurity, Ghodsee says she hopes that her book can provide examples of a better way forward that will lead to greater contentment and less loneliness. “Without hope, what do we have left?” Ghodsee concludes. “I still believe in the possibilities of the good life.”

Katelyn Silva is a freelance writer based in Providence who covers a wide range of topics for colleges and universities including Penn Arts & Sciences, Northwestern, Johnson and Wales University, and the University of Chicago.

Illustrations by Nick Matej

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OMNIA

FINDINGS

Using Deep-Sea Microbes to Detoxify Asbestos Ileana Pérez-Rodríguez and Reto Gieré from the Department of Earth and Environmental Science have shown that marine bacteria from extreme environments can reduce the mineral’s toxicity.

BY LIANA WAIT

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sbestos materials, a group of naturally occurring minerals once widely used in a range of industries for their strength and heat resistance, are notorious for being a health hazard. Though their use has declined substantially, asbestos isn’t banned in the United States, meaning exposure is still possible when renovation or demolition disturbs an asbestoscontaining building. Better remediation options are needed for dealing with the minerals.

Recently, researchers from the Department of Earth and Environmental Science have shown that bacteria from extreme marine environments have the potential to detoxify asbestos. Their study, published in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology, suggests that the marine microbes may be better candidates for asbestos bioremediation than previously tested fungi and soil bacteria.

“We wanted to explore ways to lower the toxicity of these minerals for safer disposal or reuse as secondary raw materials,” says Assistant Professor Ileana Pérez-Rodríguez, lead study author.

To do this, Pérez-Rodríguez, who specializes in studying extremophilic deep-sea microbes, teamed with Professor Reto Gieré, who has a long history characterizing asbestos minerals.

They thought that these extremophilic microbes might be good candidates 10

for asbestos bioremediation because they use inorganic compounds and interact with a variety of minerals in their natural environments.

the chemical reactivity that comes with the iron, but you still have that fibrous structure, so the next question is, ‘How do we break down the shape?’”

Specifically, the team focused on a pair of bacteria, Deferrisoma palaeochoriense and Thermovibrio ammonificans, to target two aspects of asbestos minerals that make them dangerous when inhaled: their iron content, largely responsible for the material’s carcinogenic effects, and their fibrous structure, which causes inflammation.

Asbestos minerals are composed of a silicate backbone, and previous studies have shown that removing silicon and magnesium ions from this can disrupt its fibrous structure. This is where the second bacteria, T. ammonificans, came in.

To test the microbes’ ability to detoxify asbestos, the researchers incubated them for seven days at 60 or 75 degrees Celsius— the microbes’ preferred temperatures— in small liquid-filled bottles that also contained asbestos minerals. Across this period, the researchers took samples of the liquid media to track cell growth and changes in chemical composition and used electron microscopy to look for changes in mineral structure.

They found that D. palaeochoriense, which uses iron as part of its metabolism, could effectively remove some iron from asbestos while using it to grow. However, this did not change the mineral’s overall fibrous structure, which is partially responsible for its toxicity.

“This is a gradual process of taking a highly hazardous mineral and making it less hazardous,” Pérez-Rodríguez says. “You can make the mineral less toxic by eliminating

“We can see through microscopy that these microbes incorporate silicon into their biofilms,” Pérez-Rodríguez says.

“Usually when we think about biofilms, we think about a sort of slimy goo, but in this case the biofilms are actually quite rigid; they’re basically creating little houses made out of rocks.”

Microbial-based asbestos treatments are a desirable alternative to current asbestos treatment methods, which involve either heating it to very high temperatures and pressures or by treating it with strong acids or bases. However, more research is needed to test how these methodologies could be used to remediate asbestos on a large scale.

“This was just a first lab test, and of course there are still questions,” Gieré says. “We would have to do much more research, but hopefully we can take it to the next level.”

Liana Wait is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Penn Today, Cell Press, and elsewhere.

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Illusions and Inequalities In his new book, Assistant Professor Brent Cebul explores the history of public-private partnerships to rethink how liberalism has served businesses over underprivileged people.

BY MATT GELB

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s a kid, Brent Cebul was a sports fan in suburban Cleveland, captivated by the city’s construction of the first major sports stadium in almost 60 years. He even assembled his own model of Jacobs Field, the home of Cleveland’s baseball team beginning in 1994.

Cleveland’s renewal, fueled by publicly funded stadiums, prompted national media outlets to flaunt it as the epitome of American cities returning to prominence. “But then,” Cebul says, “I would be driving from my comfortable suburban community through most of the city and saying, ‘This doesn’t seem to be trickling down.’”

This stuck with Cebul, an assistant professor in the Department of History. He wanted to know why these narratives of progress and growth didn’t always play out as promised: There was an urban revival, but not for everyone.

It’s a thread that led Cebul to his first book, Illusions of Progress: Business, Poverty, and Liberalism in the American Century, which published in March.

Cebul studied his hometown of Cleveland and Rome, Georgia, from the 1930s through the 1990s, to look at how, in two very different places, liberalism sought to structure markets and use businesses to accomplish social initiatives through public-private partnerships—often at the

expense of the underprivileged people who were supposed to benefit.

“These logics played out in largely the same way in very different areas, and the common throughline there is the federal policy and federalism itself as a constitutional structure,” says Cebul, who is interested in urban history and the inequalities that have persisted because of policymaking. “This isn’t a Southern model. This isn’t a Northern model. This is a federal, local, public-private model that ends up looking structurally very similar everywhere.”

Cebul coined this model “supply-side liberalism.” He meant it as a way to describe how the government would rather influence markets to achieve social progress than work toward the social progress itself.

In the book, Cebul focuses on the shortcomings of public-private partnerships in solving poverty during the 20th century. A compelling

dynamic emerged in his two concurrent case studies.

“We’ve thrown an awful lot of money and resources and tax benefits at the private sector to do things like deliver affordable housing or provide a jobs program for poor people or incentivize community centers,” Cebul says. “Often what ends up happening is that businesses find a way to turn this into a profit motive first and whatever social benefit trickles down is far more meager.” The programs are called into question only when the underserved people who were supposed to have been benefiting realize it’s not happening.

A maddening cycle follows, according to Cebul. When those programs fail to deliver the social benefits they promised, the inclination is to blame the state. A public program is scrapped and even less regulation on corporations follows.

“We all of a sudden need to bring the private sector back in to manage community development again,” Cebul says.

The large, subsidized labor programs that started in the 1930s self-consciously did not create national bureaucracies; instead, Cebul believes, they extended the faith that local elites could act in the broader interests of the community.

He sees parallels to the current political dynamic: The Biden administration has made certain types of investments safe for private capital through various banking mechanisms.

It’s an old model, Cebul says, just with the backing of a huge amount of federal dollars.

“We’re recreating the system of a publicly secured, private-profit system without guaranteeing downstream social benefits for regular people,” Cebul says. “So, we may get the green transition and we’ll probably get it in some form or fashion, but it may be less efficient and consumers may have less purchasing power because we haven’t supported the creation of unionized jobs.

Had there been a little bit more meat on the regulatory bone, you might get more of that.”

As Illusions of Progress reveals, that pattern is seen for as long as these public-private partnerships have existed.

Matt Gelb is a Philadelphiabased sportswriter whose work has been featured in The Athletic and The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Illustrations by Nick Matej

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Illustration by Melissa McFeeters

WORLD HERITAGE SITES AND CONFLICT Archaeologist Lynn Meskell, Richard D. Green University Professor of Anthropology, discusses UNESCO and why places designated as cultural touchstones often signify much more.

By Katelyn Silva

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he aim of UNESCO—the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization—is to promote world peace and security through international cooperation in education, arts, sciences, and culture. It aims to do this through its World Heritage List, which provides legal protection to areas, landmarks, or sites deemed as having cultural, historical, scientific, or other forms of significance. But have these cultural touchstones come to signify more than culture, history, or science?

How and why are the sites selected?

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Lynn Meskell, Richard D. Green Professor of Anthropology, Historic Preservation, and City and Regional Planning, has studied UNESCO sites for more than a decade. Of late, she’s concluded that rather than the peace the World Heritage sites claim to foster, they’re actually exacerbating international conflict. We spoke with Meskell, also a curator at the Penn Museum, about her research on UNESCO, which informed her recent book, A Future in Ruins: UNESCO, World Heritage, and the Dream of Peace.

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Eric Sucar, University Communications

Archaeologist Lynn Meskell, Richard D. Green University Professor of Anthropology

Why was UNESCO created?

UNESCO was formed in 1945 because of World War II. The idea was that the world needed rebuilding morally, educationally, and spiritually after the war ended, and UNESCO’s focus was on instilling peace and tolerance. The victors of the war came together with the mandate to “change the minds of men.”

And of course, that’s why it seems so prescient now, 70 years on, that we are still grappling with intolerance and conflicts that target cultural heritage.

Has UNESCO been able to “change the minds of men”?

Sometimes it seems like we’ve learned little from UNESCO’s mission of world peace through shared culture and mutual understanding. UNESCO was initially focused on European civilization, but it quickly expanded because the destruction of heritage is everywhere. Unfortunately, there are plenty of conflicts to choose from around the world—Ukraine, China, Cambodia, Mali, Afghanistan, the Balkans—in which cultural heritage is being destroyed. Some of my current work looks at how cultural heritage is, in fact, targeted and weaponized in current and emerging conflicts.

How are World Heritage sites selected?

Individual countries strategically put forward sites for inclusion and today they are rarely, if ever, turned down.

UNESCO has evaluators from all over the world, but all those evaluators can do is advise because this is an assembly of the United Nations, and it is state-party driven. A country like Myanmar or Thailand can nominate a site they think is on their land, or Rwanda can decide to nominate sites of genocide, even though that might create further tensions. It may take a year or two of lobbying, but nominating countries will often align with others and overturn expert decisions when it suits them.

Has a nominated site ever been denied?

At a minimum, the sites are meant to have “outstanding universal value.”

A couple of years ago, evaluators decided that a site put forth by Saudi Arabia didn’t meet this threshold, yet it still ultimately got listed. Why? Because when the U.S. withdrew from UNESCO and its funding obligations, Saudi Arabia and other nations provided more money. And now, looking toward a post-oil future, Saudi Arabia is investing in heritage, heritage branding, and increasing tourism.

How does UNESCO approach conflicts around the world?

In the early years of the organization UNESCO was quite outspoken about occupied territories and protecting heritage, identifying those guilty of destructive acts. Unfortunately, now the organization has become more tentative about naming and shaming, although some might say they are bound by the constraints of diplomacy.

The fact is that UNESCO has been operating as a financially decimated organization since 2011 when the U.S. withdrew and took 22 percent of the budget with it. The U.S. is now formally back after a long absence and plans to slowly pay back its arrears, but the politics have really changed.

How are World Heritage sites being used as weapons in disputes between nations?

When UNESCO adds a site to the World Heritage List, it is legitimizing the nation or regime that “owns” that site. Cultural and archaeological heritage sites provide a means of making territorial claims or sovereignty claims, for example, in the South China Sea. There have also been disputes between Japan, China, and South Korea with regard to WWII sites or between Turkey and Armenia with contested territories. We’ve already had some inflammatory sites—sites of forced labor, for example—enshrined on the World Heritage List and we can expect more of that.

Why did UNESCO recently lift a moratorium on inscribing conflict sites?

Hiroshima and Auschwitz had been on the World Heritage List as sites of negative memory that should never be repeated. But then a moratorium was placed on adding any others. That’s changed recently, largely because Rwanda and other African nations want to enshrine sites of recent conflict and negative memory.

Where do you see UNESCO heading in the next decade?

There is still power in the brand.

Despite the program’s shortfall in funds and staffing, almost every nation in the world still wants UNESCO recognition.

The conversation with Professor Meskell took place before the start of the recent Israel-Hamas war.

Katelyn Silva is a freelance writer based in Providence who covers a wide range of topics for colleges and universities including Penn Arts & Sciences, Northwestern, Johnson and Wales University, and the University of Chicago.

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Brooke Sietinsons

IN THE CLASSROOM

THE ITEMS LEFT BEHIND In an undergraduate anthropology course, students learn archaeological fieldwork skills and unearth the story of a historic Black neighborhood in West Philadelphia.

By Michele W. Berger

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nder a blue open-sided tent tucked up close to the brick Community Education Center (CEC) on Lancaster Avenue in Philadelphia, a half dozen people—mostly Penn undergraduates but also at least one grad student and one community member—remove layers of dirt from a 1x2-meter rectangle cordoned off with white string. The September day is hot, 90-plus degrees, with rain threatening and a warm breeze.

Using trowels and shovels and scoops, the group painstakingly works to level off the inner part of the rectangle, dumping all material they collect onto a waist-high sifter. As Sydney Kahn,

C’24, gingerly moves the sifter’s wooden handles forward and back, forward and back, small particulates fall through the screen, leaving behind larger bits. Anything notable gets flagged and set aside, and in just a few short hours, the team has bagged pieces of coal and pottery, glass, a button.

They’ll come back the following week, and every Friday through Thanksgiving, to do it again, as part of the course Archaeology in the City of Brotherly Love, taught by Megan Kassabaum, Associate Professor of Anthropology, and Sarah Linn, Assistant Director of Academic Engagement at the Penn Museum, in collaboration

Sydney Kahn, C’24 (left), and Qi Liu, C’24, look through particulates they’ve sifted from the dig site at the Community Education Center in West Philadelphia, part of the class Archaeology in the City of Brotherly Love.

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with the CEC and other partners. The goal is to teach students the fundamentals of fieldwork at a site close to home and to work closely with the community, all with an eye toward uncovering the stories of those who lived in the Black Bottom neighborhood of West Philadelphia.

“Through this class and this project, we want to make archaeology—both being trained in it and viewing it—open to a much larger audience,” Kassabaum says.

Heritage West, as the project is now called, has been in the works for several years, formally launched in 2021. It began by engaging with the local community to build an interactive, collaborative timeline of the neighborhood, once a thriving spot for Black families. “In the recent past there’s a lot of memory. As you go deep into the history, there’s a lot of understanding,” Kassabaum says. “But there’s a period from the late 1800s through the 1930s or so where there’s not a lot written on our timeline.”

Archaeology, Kassabaum and the others hoped, could try to fill in some of those holes. So, they built out a course during which students could help unearth what archival maps and census data had shown once stood in the area: the remains of seven homes, including some built in the 1840s.

Guided by the results of a geophysical survey the team conducted, the researchers and colleagues spent two weeks in August doing a preliminary excavation, selecting the actual spots where the nine undergraduates and community volunteers would eventually work. “We needed to be sure that when they got here, they weren’t going to dig in a place where there was nothing or where they would spend a significant amount of time on something that we couldn’t easily interpret or explain,” Kassabaum says. “That sense of mystery we have at the beginning of a dig is important, but frankly that mystery period can last for a lot longer than most people want it to.”

Although the course runs the full semester, it only amounts to a total of 10 excavation days—half the time most archaeologists consider the minimum for what they call a field season. Linn and Kassabaum intentionally left the class open to students of all archaeological experience levels to avoid a chasm between them and the community members they had invited to join the dig days.

That’s because interacting and communicating with neighbors is one of the key pedagogical facets of the course, according to both instructors, and it’s the part that Kahn says most excites her. “Each

student signs up for two days as a community liaison so we can talk to people about what we’re doing, what we’re trying to learn, answer any questions they have,” she says. “I’m hoping to find a career in informal education after I graduate, and this kind of experience is interesting and important to that path.”

Kahn is one of a handful of students who had conducted previous fieldwork, once in Azerbaijan, another time in rural Illinois. She appreciates how what she’s doing now represents something different from those experiences and a kind of learning that’s much more hands-on than most classroom-based courses she’s taken to this point. “I was excited to get some of that tactile experience back into my day-to-day,” she says.

By the end of the semester, the students will have completed weekly field journals and reading reflections, as well as a final project focused on an artifact or feature from the site. Kassabaum and Linn aim for these processes, in conjunction with the dig itself, to give the undergraduates at least a sense of what this kind of fieldwork entails. In the spring, members of the Heritage West project and additional volunteers will analyze what the students and community members have found.

Alex Schein

“For Penn students, fieldwork opportunities almost always take place in the summer. Having something during the academic year, for class credit, felt important in terms of their training,” Linn says.

Beyond that, “archaeology in the city of Philadelphia is not usually an academic enterprise or it happens in places like Old City. We wanted to redirect some of that energy to a historic Black neighborhood.”

Back at the site, Kahn and classmates continue leveling off their rectangle, guided by sixth-year anthropology Ph.D. student Autumn Melby. “Let’s not go any deeper here,” she says. “See how there’s some yellowish soil popping up over there? We might be seeing something different.” Which is, after all, the point, for the students taking the class and for the communities they’re partnering with.

Megan Kassabaum, Associate Professor of Anthropology (above), leads this course with Sarah Linn of the Penn Museum. Their goal is to teach students fieldwork fundamentals, work closely with the community, and uncover the stories of those who lived in the Black Bottom neighborhood.

Michele W. Berger, director of news and publications for Penn Arts & Sciences, has written about science for more than two decades for outlets like The Weather Channel, Audubon magazine, and Penn Today.

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FROM THE CLUBHOUSE TO THE TONYS Commercial theater producer Tim Bloom, C’17, reflects on the art of making people laugh and the chance opportunities that shaped his path from Penn’s premier musical comedy troupe to Broadway.

By Ava DiFabritiis

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f his aspirations at Penn, Tim Bloom, C’17, recalls, “I thought I was going to be a theater nerd who worked in politics, but I ended up being a political nerd who works in the theater.” During his first week on campus, he followed an impulse to apply for a position on the business staff of the musical comedy troupe Mask and Wig. Eventually becoming the group’s chairman, he sensed his career interests shifting from politics to entertainment.

Through a RealArts@Penn internship the summer after his junior year, Bloom gained perspective and made connections with Penn alums that launched him into commercial theater production. As an associate to acclaimed producer David Stone, C’88, Bloom has assisted with productions including Wicked, Topdog/Underdog, and Kimberly Akimbo—winner of the 2023 Tony Award for Best Musical. Here, he reflects on the art of making people laugh and his journey from Penn to Broadway.

Tim Bloom, C’17, outside the theater showing Tony Award winner Kimberly Akimbo. The musical is produced by Stone Productions, where Bloom is a producing associate.

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Have you always liked theater?

I enjoyed musical theater at summer camp and in high school, but I wasn’t a theater person until Penn. I tagged along to the interviews for the business staff of Mask and Wig because one of my Quad hallmates was doing it. Mask and Wig became an important part of my Penn experience; without it, I wouldn’t have ended up where I am now.

How did your career interests shift during your time at Penn?

I was a double major in political science and ancient history. Electoral politics are my hobby, and I follow them closely. But as I became a more senior member of Mask and Wig, I decided to pursue entertainment.

I was dead set on moving to the West Coast to do film and TV. Junior year, I got an internship in Los Angeles through RealArts@Penn.

It was very exciting. I worked for a couple of Penn alums at Management 360, now called Entertainment 360.

While there, I connected with Alison Greenspan, C’94, who worked at Di Novi Pictures; she gave me a second job that summer and became a great mentor. But as an East Coaster, I was surprisingly homesick.

After graduation the first job I got in New York in entertainment was in theater. My college roommate and fellow theater producer, Ryan Solomon, ENG’17, introduced me to David Stone. Staying in the musical comedy lane, Mask and Wig’s bread and butter, helped me figure out that theater wasn’t just a path to what I want to do; it actually is what I want to do.

What does being a theater producer entail?

A producer is the CEO of a theater company. Every commercially produced show is, at its heart, a small business. Producing in theater is

seldom a full-time job; many theater producers have another source of income to keep them afloat. When you have a really successful show, you can do it full time.

At Stone Productions, I work as a producing associate. I’m lucky that my day job is in producing while I strive to be a producer in my own right. To that end, I’m always looking for the next artist or the next property to adapt into a stage piece. I’ve just started securing rights and setting up relationships with artists and producers.

Tell us about a typical day at work.

I deal with a lot of box office reports and numbers. They’re the lifeblood of the theater. As a commercial producing office, we’re in the business of keeping shows open, not just opening new shows. Data drives the way tickets are sold and shows are produced, and I’m slowly learning how to take advantage of that.

After finishing the box office reports and checking in with David, I’ll pop between my responsibilities here and the other shows I’m working on.

I’m co-producing two shows this fall.

Maybe I’ll have a call with an investor or the playwright whose audiobook I just optioned. Then I might hear from the director’s agent. We might argue about a deal point and come to an agreement so we can continue working on the show.

You’ve been a part of three highly successful shows at Stone Productions.

What have you learned?

They’re wildly different, and that’s really valuable. Wicked is a huge operation, a multinational brand and an international sensation. From Wicked, I’ve learned how to work as a team player and most effectively within an institution. I’ve been working on Wicked for six years, but in some ways I’m still the new guy.

Kimberly Akimbo, on the flip side, is a small show with a nine-person cast. I got to watch that show from step one all the way to the Tony Awards. I was on the ground for tech and creative development, got to know the players and minds who crafted it.

Putting up a new, small musical is like mapping uncharted ground. You don’t know how people will react, so every step is a risk. I learned a lot about courage and how to calculate and correct missteps. Everybody was extremely cool-headed and clear-eyed about what they wanted to see on stage.

Topdog/Underdog, as a Broadway revival, was already a masterpiece when our office started working on it. The people on the team for that show are like sages of the theater.

Watching them work was like watching geniuses play.

What do you look for in potential productions?

Really good comedy. I believe it’s harder to make somebody genuinely laugh than genuinely cry. Sure, I love to walk out of a theater in tears, but what I want to do is make people laugh. I don’t care if it’s highbrow, lowbrow, or in the middle.

What’s on the horizon?

This fall, I’m co-producing Gutenberg!

The Musical! and Merrily We Roll Along. In development, along with an audiobook I’ve optioned, I’ve spent a year kicking around ideas with a comedian I’ve always wanted to work with. I was just happy that he took my call. When you find collaborators who intrigue you, you keep a dialogue open.

Ava DiFabritiis, C’13, associate director of stewardship for Penn Arts & Sciences, is a frequent contributor to Omnia.

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F FL LO OW W MOTION MOTION Courses across Penn Arts & Sciences show how immersion enhances a liberal arts education.

By Karen Brooks Illustrations by Andrea Mongia 19

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ast fall, Joe Anderson, C’23, tried something new: He eliminated music from his daily run. Without that distraction, he focused solely on his movements—his lungs filling with each breath, the rhythm of his sneakers hitting the pavement—and soon, he found his fatigue dissipating, miles passing more easily, and time falling away.

There’s a word for what Anderson experienced: flow.

Introduced in the 1970s by Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and recognized for its effects on personal wellbeing by Martin Seligman, Zellerbach Family Professor of Psychology and director of Penn’s Positive Psychology Center, flow is often referred to as “being in the zone.” It occurs when an activity so completely absorbs someone that common concerns like time, hunger, self-consciousness, and surrounding sounds and motions get shelved.

Anderson, who majored in political science and history, didn’t ditch his running soundtrack by choice. Eschewing electronics was required during a monthlong commitment to ascetic practice as part of the course Living Deliberately: Monks, Saints, and the Contemplative Life, taught by Justin McDaniel, Professor of Religious Studies and Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Endowed Professor of the Humanities.

Like McDaniel, Penn Arts & Sciences faculty spanning a range of disciplines, from cinema & media studies to environmental studies and theatre arts, have designed courses that engage students in experiences outside the classroom, offering something different than what lectures and discussions alone can accomplish.

Research has shown that “immersive learning”— instruction involving intensive exposure to highly specific surroundings, topics, or conditions—benefits scholars in all subjects, providing greater fulfillment and enhancing their capacity to process and retain information. This is also a fundamental part of a liberal arts education, which seeks to challenge students’ preconceptions, improve their communication and problem-solving, and cultivate their adaptability and sense of social responsibility. Unconventional learning opportunities in diverse, “real-world” settings are crucial for developing these skills, McDaniel says.

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Opportunities like adhering to basic tenets of monastic life for a month.

“Across the board, my students get better grades, lower their anxiety, and connect more deeply to themselves and others,” McDaniel says, noting that Positive Psychology Center researchers have formally measured these improvements. “This wouldn’t happen without the immersive aspect of the course, without students making fundamental changes in their day-to-day lives.”

The Sound Sound of of Tires Tires The McDaniel, who has offered Living Deliberately at Penn approximately every third semester since 2010, conceptualized the class when he was teaching at Ohio University more than two decades ago. Students frequently asked him why followers of so many religions would self-impose restrictions on pleasures like eating, socializing, and sex, and he struggled to explain the draw of deprivation.

“I could give psychological reasons, economic reasons, and sociological reasons, but those never fully captured why every religion on Earth, for as long as human history has been recorded, has promoted some form of ascetic practice, whether it be fasting or celibacy or the way they dress,” he says.

handwrite all communication, including papers for other classes. And on day one of the vow of silence, McDaniel confiscates students’ cell phones, which remain in a lockbox until the end of the month.

“I’m not anti-technology. I have a smartphone and a car that’s full of computers. I teach a class online. I like TV and YouTube. It’s just that there’s a time and place for these tools, and what often happens is the tools control you, instead of you controlling the tools,” he says. “Giving them up shows you what you’re missing when faced with incessant distractions.”

In other words, McDaniel believes plunging his students into the monastic lifestyle teaches them to pay attention.

And he has plenty of stories to back that up. His favorite, he says, involves a young woman who came to him in tears because her car was making an ominous thump-thump-thump noise, and she could not afford to visit a repair shop.

There is great value in approaching problems in the kind of hermetic space of a classroom.

But it’s important to be immersed in the field as

So, he devised a set of restrictions for students to try—and as the experiment proved successful, he gradually expanded the list to what it includes today. For one month, both inside and outside of the classroom, his students are not permitted to speak, gesture, make eye contact, touch other people, wear makeup or colorful clothing, spend more than $80 per week, or eat processed or seasoned foods. They must be up by 5 a.m., log a journal entry every half-hour, meditate, and perform at least one act of kindness each day.

Ultimately, the student realized she was simply hearing the sound of her tires against the road. “She had never been in a car without the radio on, without conversation going on. And she said to me, ‘I’m in the car all the time. If I wasn’t aware of what my car naturally sounded like, what else am I missing every day?’” McDaniel recalls.

Perhaps the toughest rule of all, he says, is no technological devices. Computers count, meaning students have to

Anderson guesstimates that if Living Deliberately had relied exclusively on lectures and readings without the

well, with all of the challenges and variables that come with that.

immersive component, he’d have gotten “maybe 12 percent of what I did out of it.” Since completing the course in December 2022, he still hasn’t introduced music back into his running routine, and he continues to pursue a slower-paced life, sitting “crisscross applesauce” during his routine meditation breaks.

“I loved this experience because it’s not what people associate with Penn, which I think is mostly seen as a pre-professional school that exists only to optimize your skills for graduation and employment,” Anderson says.

“But this class is not for building your resume. It’s for becoming a better and happier person.”

Virtual and Actual Reality Reality Actual While McDaniel immerses his students in quiet introspection, Peter Decherney—a professor in a very different discipline, cinema & media studies—plunks his directly into dynamic, collaborative environments.

An award-winning documentary filmmaker, Decherney, Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Endowed Term Professor in the Humanities, spent much of last academic year establishing an umbrella program that now houses several immersive education initiatives.

Launched with support from Penn Global, Decherney’s Penn Global Documentary Institute puts students to work “in the real world” and also uses immersive media, or media that allows viewers to interact with content.

Over the past six years, Decherney has incorporated virtual reality (VR) filming into multiple programs. In Philadelphia, students in his Virtual Reality Lab course partner with a community organization whose work they document using 360-degree cameras, microphones, and editing software.

Most recently, during spring 2023, they detailed the intricate transformation 21

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Eric Sucar, University Communications

of the Penn Museum’s Ancient Egypt and Nubia galleries through VR films featuring conservators, curators, and a senior archivist.

“The excitement for students is experimenting with trial and error, trying techniques that might be mistakes with flat media but turn out to be really effective using immersive media,” Decherney says, explaining that VR technology allows filmmakers to create environments that users can explore freely for an embodied experience and higher emotional engagement.

“They’re used to thinking in square frames, with certain limitations and a limited set of tools.”

They have to unlearn all of that, says Maya Pratt-Freedman, C’23, who took the course in her final semester before completing her bachelor’s degree in sociology

and cinema & media studies. “It was about setting new conventions and discovering new ways of storytelling, checking things like if the camera is up high versus low, how does the viewer feel? How do they feel if I put the camera in the middle of a circle of people versus on the perimeter?” she says. “The class hit on all points of immersive learning.

We got to learn new technology by actually using it while working with amazing experts on-site and seeing artifacts from this vast collection up close. And then the final product is itself a piece of immersive media that captures this entire phenomenal space, without boundaries.”

Pratt-Freedman had prior exposure to VR filming when she participated in another of Decherney’s field-based experiences: a summer abroad course held in a refugee camp in Kenya. Since 2017, with

In the Virtual Reality Lab course taught by Peter Decherney, Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Endowed Term Professor in the Humanities (top right), students use 360-degree cameras, microphones, and editing software to create immersive experiences, like one they did recently of the Penn Museum’s Ancient Egypt and Nubia galleries.

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Sally Willig

backing from the Penn Arts & Sciences Making a Difference in Global Communities grant program and the SNF Paideia Program, Decherney has taken students to Kenya three times in a partnership with FilmAid Kenya, a nonprofit that trains refugees in filmmaking and other media skills. In 2022, Pratt-Freedman and other Penn students partnered with the organization to turn its training program into a massive open online course.

At first, Pratt-Freedman remembers, FilmAid students and Penn students struggled to navigate cultural differences and find common ground. Then, when she grabbed a soccer ball and started juggling it, a group formed around her, and everyone worked together to keep the ball in the air.

“That moment showed us we could collaborate effectively,” Pratt-Freedman says. “We realized, if you take one person out, this whole game will fall apart, just like our projects would if we didn’t have all hands on deck. It was a moment that opened a door you couldn’t have opened sitting in a classroom.”

Of course, classroom meetings provide important opportunities to read, speculate, and exchange ideas, Decherney says, but the activities he facilitates are essential in a different way.

“There is great value in approaching problems in the kind of hermetic space of a classroom,” he says. “But it’s important to be immersed in the field as well, with all of the challenges and variables that come with that, and to engage community and global partners. The stakes are raised when someone depends on you.”

A Walk Through the Clouds Sometimes, a fieldwork experience influences someone so profoundly that the student goes on to make sure the opportunity endures for others. That’s what happened with a Penn course involving ecological field study in Puerto Rico.

As a doctoral student in geology, Sally Willig, Gr’88, participated in field trips to Puerto Rico led by Professor of Earth and Environmental Science Arthur Johnson—and promptly fell in love with everything about the island territory. When Johnson, who taught Field Study of Puerto Rico’s Soil for many years, retired in 2014, Willig, now a lecturer in Penn’s Master of Environmental Studies Program, took over and created Field Study of Puerto Rico’s Ecology.

Offered every other spring, the course begins with in-depth classroom study of Puerto Rico’s ecosystems and ends with students presenting a comprehensive research project.

During spring break, they spend a week exploring the varied ecosystems in Puerto Rico in person. A highlight of the trip,

As part of the course Field Study of Puerto Rico’s Ecology, students like Eden Harris, ENG’19, LPS’23 (top), explored the Northeast Ecological Corridor and a rocky headland called Cabeza Chiquita (bottom).

Willig says, is hiking through El Yunque National Forest, the only tropical rainforest—as well as one of the most biologically diverse regions—in the U.S. National Forest System.

Progressing through El Yunque, elevation and landscape change significantly. “You move through four different forest types, and my very favorite is at the top, the elfin cloud forest.

These dwarf trees are literally in the clouds. You’re up there walking through clouds, and everything is always wet and covered in green and you see so many beautiful plants and hear so many birds and frogs calling,” Willig says. “It’s a full sensory experience you cannot get anywhere else.”

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Field Study of Puerto Rico’s Ecology was one of many fieldbased courses Alison Fetterman, G’16, a bird conservation specialist at Willistown Conservation Trust in Newtown Square, Pa., took while pursuing her master’s degree in environmental studies at Penn. She, too, became enamored of the territory’s rich biodiversity; after graduating, she returned to Penn to co-teach the course with Willig, which she continues to do today.

Discussion and analysis can only take you so far; you need to feel theatre in your body to process it. And unless you’re part of bringing a piece to life, you’ll never fully understand it.

An avid ornithologist, Fetterman calls her first visit to the rainforest “life changing,” as she encountered so many endemic birds she’d previously seen and heard only in pictures and on

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film. “The Puerto Rican lizard cuckoo, the Puerto Rican oriole— they’re amazing,” she says. “The Puerto Rican tody is one you can find easily there, but I could still talk all day about how exciting it is to see them.”

Last spring, Fetterman recalls, Penn students were walking single file through the Guajataca State Forest when a Puerto Rican tody called out with its signature nasal voice. Everyone got quiet, and the tiny, round, bright green bird flew right up to the group.

“It was doing its little meep sound as it traveled down the whole line, one by one, about two feet away from us,” she says.

“I watched it make an impression on each student in real time— it felt like a setup, like this was our planned guest tody for the lesson. You just can’t get that kind of impact from a book.”

Because Willig and Fetterman have been visiting Puerto Rico together since 2015, they’ve established connections with many local environmental professionals. Nowadays, they’re familiar with enough resident experts that at every itinerary stop, students get to meet and learn from one.

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“To hear from people who live there, who do this work all day as their life and their passion, it’s invaluable,” Fetterman says. “That kind of energy is contagious. The people we have built relationships with down there are just as important as the wildlife and plants we see. Being in the field just gives students the whole package.”

Creatively Critical, Critically Creative Of all disciplines, theatre arts may seem among the best suited for an immersive experience; after all, preparing for a performance often means getting lost in playing the role of someone else.

In reality, says Jennifer Thompson, a lecturer in theatre arts, many college-level theatre courses are either academic or creative, and few culminate in the performance of a full-length stage piece. Thompson has a doctorate in theatre and performance, a master of fine arts in acting, and a bachelor’s degree in history and theatre studies, yet she never took a course like the one she’s leading at Penn this fall.

“Often, my creative classes were fun and playful and spontaneous, and my more academic classes were about critical thinking,” she says. “I felt like there were two parts of my identity being used, whereas what I want is to bring those pieces together so students can immerse their whole selves in the work and be critically creative and creatively critical, and to think as artists about the way that theatre can shape and influence society.”

In the class Theatre Rehearsal and Performance, Thompson’s students are examining Twelfth Night, William Shakespeare’s celebrated romantic comedy about deception, gender confusion, mistaken identity, and unrequited love. They have simultaneously been rehearsing the play—auditions

were held this past March, requiring those selected as actors and assistant directors, stage managers, dramaturgs, or designers to register for her course— and Thompson will direct them in a public performance that will take place the weekend before Thanksgiving.

Engaging with a single work for an entire semester has enabled students to bring together the knowledge and skills they gain in other courses, from theatre research and history to onstage presence, she says. Students began the course by posing a research question related to their involvement in the piece; someone playing a grieving character, for example, studied Elizabethan practices of mourning and assessed how those customs related to their own sense of self.

In our lives there’s this nonstop train of obligations and conversations and distractions. Immersion basically gives students permission to get off.

“We have them frame the question in such a way that it’s historical in scope, but it also ends up telling them something that informs their artistic practice,” Thompson says. “The opportunity to do a research-driven yet creative project is why it’s so valuable to focus on one play and learn everything it has to offer.”

Emily Maiorano, C’25, an English major with a concentration in drama who has the role of Maria in Thompson’s Twelfth Night production, evokes the concept of flow when contemplating the power of immersion in theatre.

“To immerse yourself in a character means expanding your imagination and getting lost in that character.

You are constantly world building, exercising the muscle of spontaneity. That requires the ability to be completely present, to have the ability to transfer the cerebral to the physical,” Maiorano says. “Discussion and analysis can only take you so far; you need to feel theatre in your body to process it. And unless you’re part of bringing a piece to life, you’ll never fully understand it.”

Self-Expansion In his book Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote that “the self expands through acts of self-forgetfulness.” Courses that incorporate hands-on activities, new environments, and foreign cultures provide Penn students with opportunities to step out of their routines and comfort zones, beyond the paths they set for themselves.

“I’ve seen students literally transform after an immersive experience,” Decherney says. “The first time I took a group to Kenya, one student’s main reason for coming was that she had never left the United States. She recently graduated from law school and plans to be an immigration lawyer—a decision inspired directly by her experience working with us in refugee camps.”

Relying largely on auditory and written skills, traditional classroom-based instruction imparts important knowledge, but McDaniel says students need a chance to apply that knowledge in practice without competing stimuli.

“We need, in a sense, a reminder of why we’re doing things,” he says.

“In our lives there’s this nonstop train of obligations and conversations and distractions. Immersion basically gives students permission to get off.”

Karen Brooks is a Philadelphia-based writer/editor who does her best work before dawn with an enormous cup of Earl Grey tea.

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A RACE AGAINST TIME Faculty from Penn Arts & Sciences are confronting the climate crisis and contributing to solutions. They say there’s still time to act.

By Judy Hill Illustrations by Sam Chivers

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cross the world and in Penn’s backyard, Arts & Sciences faculty are tackling challenges that touch directly or indirectly on climate change. In Hawaii, for instance, biologist Katie Barott is studying how corals respond to heat stress, while 5,000 miles northeast in Greenland, biogeochemist Jon Hawkings is looking at the impacts of environmental stressors on glacier ecosystems. Closer to home, in Philadelphia’s Fishtown neighborhood, a team that includes researchers from the Departments of Biology and Earth and Environmental Science (EES) is using fungus-derived materials to build bio-walls and playscapes that trap carbon and pollution from the atmosphere.

What makes the School’s climate-related work distinct is that much of it focuses on the effect on humans, says Michael Weisberg, Bess W. Heyman President’s Distinguished Professor. “Of course, we do interesting and important physical science,” he says. “But beyond that, the fact that much of our hiring and research has developed around the impacts to human societies is pretty unique.”

That includes the efforts of climate scientist Michael Mann, who joined Penn last fall as Presidential Distinguished Professor in EES and leads the newly launched Penn Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media (PCSSM). It also encompasses the Environmental Innovations Initiative, established in 2020 and for which archaeologist Kathleen Morrison, Sally and Alvin V. Shoemaker Professor of Anthropology, is currently the faculty lead. The Initiative fosters collaboration through interdisciplinary research and, among other projects, has worked with each Penn school to establish Academic Climate Commitments.

On the heels of a summer marked by unprecedented flooding and sweltering heat, with ocean temperatures swelling to unheard of heights—reaching 101 degrees Fahrenheit off the coast of Florida in late July—this work is more pressing than ever. Penn Arts & Sciences faculty are collaborating, often across disciplines, to advance knowledge about the global crisis and develop solutions. They all agree the problem is real and present, but amid the challenges and seemingly intractable hurdles, they see pockets of hope.

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‘Urgency and Agency’ Michael Mann has been at the center of the fractious debate over human-caused climate change since at least 1998.

That’s when he and his colleagues at Penn State—where he taught before coming to the University of Michael Mann, Presidential Pennsylvania— Distinguished Professor in Earth published the and Environmental Science now-famous “hockey stick” graph that plotted the Earth’s temperature for the past millennium and showed how dramatically it had risen in the 20th century. On the receiving end of countless attacks by climate deniers, Mann didn’t shy away from the controversy but instead embraced the role of climate science communicator.

Underpinning Mann’s climate communication is his ongoing scientific research. One strand explores the underlying physics of the Ice Ages over the past several hundred thousand years. “It’s one of the stillto-some-extent unsolved problems in climate science,”

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he says. “These huge ice sheets came and went with a hundred-thousand-year periodicity, and our ability to reproduce that phenomenon is critical to establishing confidence in the climate models we’re using to predict the future.” The behavior of the Greenland ice sheet over time, and the implications for its stability today, are of particular interest, he adds, “because if it goes, that could give us three, four meters of sea-level rise right there.

It’s critical to know how close we are to that.”

If we reduce our carbon emissions substantially within the next decade, we can prevent worsening these effects. And it’s important that people understand that, because if it’s hopeless, then why do anything? There’s no agency.

Mann is also trying to understand the factors behind the 2021 Pacific Northwest heat dome, an intense fourday June heatwave that caused hundreds of deaths.

“Part of what made that event so extreme was a decrease in soil moisture related to a locked jet stream pattern,” he says, noting that current climate models don’t accurately capture the way the jet stream changes in the summer in response to warming.

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Perhaps his most visible area of study is climate anxiety and what he calls the “gloom and doom” response to climate change, which is especially prevalent among young people. Mann hypothesizes that two factors contribute to this. One is the belief that there’s no way left to help a climate spinning out of control. The second is the cynicism young people feel about today’s American political process.

“The science doesn’t indicate that we’re out of options,” says Mann. “If we reduce our carbon emissions substantially within the next decade, we can prevent worsening these effects. And it’s important that people understand that, because if it’s hopeless, then why do anything?

There’s no agency.” He adds that better information can counter that anxiety, as can improving our understanding of why people feel disengaged and what interventions might lead them back to active engagement.

PCSSM, which Mann leads, focuses on communicating about climate and environmental sustainability to the public and policymakers. A lively roster of events has already featured a conversation with former Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, a political conservative who is also a climate advocate, and panel discussions on topics including geoengineering, the impact of dark money on the politics of climate change, and green investment.

Mann also has a new book out. Our Fragile Moment: How Lessons from Earth’s Past Can Help Us Survive the Climate Crisis takes a sweeping look at the entire paleoclimate record, going back 4 billion years to when

life first emerged on Earth. It draws lessons from every major climate episode since. “I came to the conclusion that we’ve got a little bit of a margin of safety, but not a huge one,” he says. “And so it comes back to this underlying theme of both urgency and agency. It’s not too late.”

Tracking Coral Reefs Though coral reefs cover less than 1 percent of the ocean floor, a quarter of all marine species interact with them at some point in their life cycle, making them “hugely important for biodiversity,” says Assistant Professor of Biology Katie Barott, Katie Barott. If the Assistant Professor of Biology reef structure gets compromised, that destroys the habitat of the fish, urchins, lobsters, oysters, and other creatures that a billion or so people count on for protein, she adds. What’s more, coral reefs absorb a huge amount of storm surge energy—the waves break

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on the reef instead of the shoreline— helping to protect coastlines from erosion and flooding.

conducted experiments to explore how resilient corals are to extreme high temperatures and how exposure to heat stress affects their growth and development.

Corals are also particularly sensitive to additional temperature stress because they live at the upper edge of their heat tolerance. “When summer temperatures go 1 degree Celsius above normal, that’s when we get bleaching,” says Barott.

“And when corals bleach, they lose their symbionts—the algae that live inside their cells—so they’re effectively starving.”

Barott plans to check on her corals in Hawaii this fall to see whether an expected bleaching event played out and to analyze coral growth rates.

Back in her lab at Penn, she will measure tiny fragments of coral brought back from the reef to look at factors like the tissue biomass and lipid count.

When Barott started studying corals in 2007, she was interested in the challenges caused by overfishing and coastal pollution. Once coral bleaching events caused by heat waves became more common, she realized the effects of climate change had to be at the center of her research. “It’s really an existential threat to these ecosystems,” she says. Corals can, however, recover from bleaching if the heat stress goes away. In fact, Barott says they have a remarkable capacity to bounce back.

For almost a decade, Barott has traveled to Hawaii to follow individual corals on a reef, tagging and numbering them to track how they respond to repetitive heat waves. She’s found, for instance, that some corals that had bleached during one heat wave in 2015 did not bleach again during another in 2019, yet other species fared worse. “We think that they have some ability to regulate their heat stress response factors,” says Barott.

Her lab is working to understand how long different corals take to recover from heat stress, why some recover better than others, and how heat stress affects the corals’ ability to create a reef’s three-dimensional structure. “With the corals that don’t bleach,” she says, “are they still calcifying and growing their skeletons well and how does that change over time with these heat waves?” This past summer, students in Barott’s lab

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Despite the problem’s urgency, underscored by the record-breaking ocean temperatures in Florida and the Caribbean this past summer, Barott sees reason for optimism. “If we look globally,” she says, “we see the bleaching threshold—the temperature that corals bleach out—has actually been going up over the last 10 or 20 years, and there are signs that corals are increasing their temperature tolerance.” Whether they can keep up with the rate of temperature increase, she says, remains to be seen.

Public Will and Policy Action Parrish Bergquist, an assistant professor of political science who joined the Penn faculty this summer, approaches climate change through the lens of public opinion and policy. “I want to understand what drives the way the public thinks about this issue and what the relationship is between public will and policy action,” she says. “How do people who are concerned about this problem engage with the political system to enact the kinds of policy changes they want to see?”

Parrish Bergquist, Assistant

One area of Bergquist’s research has Professor of Political Science investigated whether climate change mobilizes voters in the U.S. Typically, she says, the environment does not tend to be a salient issue, though a field experiment she ran before the 2020 election targeting registered voters who were both concerned about climate change and members of a faith community showed the opposite: For that particular election year, climate change spurred people to vote. When she replicated the experiment for the 2022 midterms, the effect was much less significant.

Bergquist is still analyzing the data from that study, but she postulates that the Inflation Reduction Act—the government’s action to boost clean energy during the period between the two elections—actually reduced the importance of climate change for voters. “Climate change can be a mobilizing issue, but its potency and politics are very contingent,” Bergquist says. “On top of this,

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people received a lot more political text messages in 2022 compared with 2020, and it could also be that this mode of communication has lost its effectiveness as a voter mobilization tool.”

democracies, because we just haven’t had good survey data for lots of other parts of the world, including some of the countries that are most susceptible to the impacts of climate change,” Bergquist says.

The public wants governments to address this problem. That’s an important thing to know, and it’s an optimistic signal.

She is working on ways to bring more of those voices to the debate, using Facebook to field surveys that capture responses from people in small island states and other vulnerable places. She and colleagues have also compiled almost 100 datasets from survey firms that have asked people about climate change since the year 2000—what they’re calling a “super survey”—to estimate climate change concern over time across the world.

More recently, Bergquist has turned her attention to measuring concern about climate change around the world.

“Global climate debates totally leave out the question of how the public is thinking about this issue except in wealthy

Though more evaluation of those results is forthcoming, one finding is abundantly clear, she says: People have become more concerned about climate change. “The public wants governments to address this problem,” she says. “That’s an important thing to know, and it’s an optimistic signal.”

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And that concern is not restricted to wealthy countries or driven by self-interest, she adds. Although petroleumexporting countries in the Middle East have decreased in their levels of climate concern since 2010, that is not the case in parts of the European Union that either have continued to produce coal or have higher levels of CO2 emissions per capita. “Climate concern isn’t just restricted to places whose economies are decoupled from fossil fuel. This is a much more widespread concern,” says Bergquist.

Underneath the Ice Sheets As a biogeochemist who studies glaciers and ice sheets, Jon Hawkings has a front row seat to the spectacle of our warming planet.

“It’s a very interesting environment to study because they are such responsive indicators of climatic change,” says Hawkings, Assistant Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science.

Some of these metals are present in extremely low concentrations but are vital for the ecosystem, such as the ice algae that bloom on the Greenland Ice Sheet surface every summer or the phytoplankton in the oceans surrounding Greenland. And because these elements dissolve into the meltwater from the rock beneath the ice sheet, they can also shed light on “where the water is coming from, where the water has been flowing, and how long it’s been at that icerock boundary, which is like a large wetland we cannot see,” says Hawkings.

Several years ago, Hawkings and his colleagues measured significant amounts of the toxic element mercury in their meltwater samples, an important finding because the toxic metal could be transported downstream to the ocean, where it could bioaccumulate in fish and marine mammals. “It’s quite a complicated cascade of processes that could be acting to deliver this mercury into meltwaters,” Hawkings says.

Jon Hawkings, Assistant Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science

Though much of the current scientific focus on glaciers relates to sea-level rise, Hawkings is studying the chemical and biological impacts of glaciers and ice sheets. “These are sensitive environments being perturbed very rapidly and aggressively by warming,” he says. “We want to know the consequences of that rapid change for those ecosystems on, underneath, and in front of the ice, including environments that are either directly connected to ice sheets and glaciers or that are receiving meltwaters and sediments from them.”

Hawkings conducts most of his fieldwork in Greenland, home to the second largest ice mass on Earth, where he and his team set up camp for two to three months every year to collect water and sediment samples. They measure what they can in the field with sensors and preserve other samples for further testing back at Hawkings’ lab at Penn.

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Much of the measuring is similar to a typical water quality study, but Hawkings is particularly interested in the water’s metal composition.

It’s one thing to look at the ocean levels as a whole but that doesn’t necessarily tell you how the extreme weather...will all come together and connect with the physical infrastructure to determine how you will experience climate change.

Hawkings’ current National Science Foundation-funded project aims to develop that line of research and more clearly establish whether it is a matter for concern. “We’re also trying to tie down the connection between ice melt and marine ecosystem productivity and how more meltwater getting into the coastal environment due to climate warming could change these systems,” he says. “It’s a big open question and one that could have significant impact, particularly on communities in Greenland who rely on these marine ecosystems for subsistence and income.”

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An Integrative Approach As a philosopher with a scientific background, Michael Weisberg, Chair of the Department of Philosophy, brings an integrative approach to the climate issue. He is also interim director of Penn’s Perry World House (PWH) and has served as a senior negotiator in United Nations Climate Conferences, bringing his expertise to international decision-making around climate issues.

Weisberg and his team started by interviewing community members about their experience in past extreme storms.

Where did the water go? Where did the flooding occur?

Have they seen changes in those patterns in recent years?

The Penn team then trained community members to do their own research, determining the questions they wanted answered and collecting the data. “The idea is to try to help bring these tools to the community,” says Weisberg.

The Galápagos has often been called the laboratory of evolution, and rightly so, says Weisberg. But he also hopes it can become a laboratory to study climate change and a model for successful approaches to climate adaptation on a broader scale.

Michael Weisberg, Bess W. Heyman President’s Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy

For many years, Weisberg has headed Penn’s research programs in the Galápagos, where his climate-related work focuses on adaptation. “It’s an unfortunate term, really,” he says, “because it sounds like it means just living with climate change. What it really means is learning how to reduce the risks that climate change poses toward people and ecosystems.”

Those risks are real for the 37,000 inhabitants of the Galápagos, where increased rainfall, higher temperatures, and more intense storms are expected in the future. Weisberg and his team are trying to parse those risks at a pretty finegrain level, he says. “It’s one thing to look at the ocean levels as a whole but that doesn’t necessarily tell you how the extreme weather—sea-level rise, El Niño, and then a storm on top of that—will all come together and connect with the physical infrastructure to determine how you will experience climate change.”

The existing models, says Weisberg, are large scale, with every square in the grid covering 60 square miles, far larger than the entire town of Puerto Baquerizo Moreno, where Penn’s Galápagos projects are centered. “We have to take that very general information and understand what it means for this specific community,” he says.

In his role as senior advisor to H.E. Aminath Shauna, the Maldivian Minister of Environment, Climate Change, and Technology, Weisberg helped develop national positions and advise on strategies in line with the priorities of this particularly climate-vulnerable small island state.

Perhaps most significantly, Weisberg and Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, a PWH Professor of Practice of Law and Human Rights, joined the Maldives delegation at the U.N. Climate Change Conference, COP27, held in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, in November 2022. Shauna played a key role in what the U.N. has described as a “breakthrough agreement” on loss and damage that establishes funding for particularly vulnerable developing countries to aid in their response to the challenges of global warming. Her breakthrough ideas were discussed and developed in consultation with Weisberg, Ra’ad Al Hussein, and other faculty, postdocs, and staff at PWH. Weisberg also contributed to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s “Sixth Assessment Report,” which provides an updated global overview of climate change. Working on that massive document, he says, honed his ability to act as an effective intermediary. “I can help the scientists understand what the policymakers need. And for the policymakers, either I’m already familiar with what the scientists are saying, or I know where to look or who to ask.”

Judy Hill is a writer and editor who covers a wide range of topics. Recently, she has tackled artificial intelligence, immigration, bio-design, rural poverty, and smart materials.

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Emily Wilson’s

Epic Life

The Classical Studies professor on the power and responsibility of translation, the allure of ancient worlds, and the value of the strange.

By Susan Ahlborn Illustrations by Jordan Kay

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ix years ago, Emily Wilson became somewhat famous. Not Kardashian famous, but famous for a classical scholar, following the publication of her translation of Homer’s The Odyssey. Wilson was the first woman to translate the ancient epic into English, and she made the unusual and challenging choice to use a poetic meter, combining that with straightforward English and her distinctive point of view.

The result was lauded from the Bryn Mawr Classical Review to The New York Times Book Review, and even The Financial Times,

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which wrote, “She scrapes away at old, encrusted layers, until she exposes what lies beneath.” The translation sold thousands of copies and was added to college and high school syllabi.

Wilson, College for Women Class of 1963 Term Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Classical Studies, was profiled in The Times, The New Yorker, and elsewhere.

She’s been invited to speak across the United States and Europe. She was awarded two prestigious fellowships, the MacArthur “Genius Grant” and the Guggenheim, and was chosen to judge the Booker Prize competition. She has 44,800 followers on the social media site formerly known as Twitter.

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Emily Wilson, College for Women Class of 1963 Term Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Classical Studies

“I was astonished,” she says about the book’s reception. “Nobody had ever heard of me before that book came out.

My editor had warned me that most re-translations of ancient texts sell a thousand copies. So, I felt extremely lucky that it seemed to hit with a lot of readers, and then took on a life of more and more people responding in different ways.”

This fall Wilson published her translation of Homer’s other epic, The Iliad—now with her name above the title. While the circumstances and expectations were wildly different, her goals remained the same: to illuminate the text in a new way, make it metrical, not render it boring, and share both the strangeness and familiarity of an ancient world that fascinates her.

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Getting From There to Here It’s easy to assume that translation “is just a transparent window,” Wilson says, a literal adjustment of words from one language to another. Some works are even published without the translator’s name on the cover.

But translations are so much more than that, she says. “I don’t want to go into any project thinking, ‘My job is to look up all the words in the dictionary and plunk them down.’ My goal is to think through the effect of the original, including the sonic, musical effects and the emotional effects. It’s a very complicated act of interpretation, which involves all this interplay between the interpretive, scholarly, creative, and so on.”

One challenge is the gulf between languages. When one Greek word can have three different meanings in English, students pass exams by putting them all down. A translator must decide on just one in the same way she must also think through each character thoroughly.

(Homer has multitudes and gives each a distinctive voice.)

Brooke Sietinsons

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All that work is in service of outreach on behalf of an ancient world, Wilson believes, and it’s a mission to which she is fully committed. During the pandemic lockdown, she created an Odyssey-a-Day video series in which she dramatically read a condensed version of each book of her translation. She put on a gold laurel wreath to become the goddess Athena, a backward baseball cap for Odysseus’ son Telemachus, a vivid red wig as Calypso, and then posted the videos online.

My goal is to think through the effect of the original, including the sonic, musical effects and the emotional effects.

It’s a very complicated act of interpretation.

On Twitter, now X, Wilson shares the pain and exhilaration of her process. In an 18-tweet thread on translating one line of The Iliad—a scene where the Trojans analyze the omen of an eagle dropping a snake— she concludes, “I will noodle with this and a few thousand similar lines and phrases for as long as they let me. It is a privilege to spend so much time

confronting this kind of insoluble problem, exploring the crannies between two languages, fighting to save a beautifully elusive bird.”

But Wilson also believes that mission of bridging two worlds may be part of the reason translation has been undervalued in academia. “There’s a confusion about whether it can be both truthful and responsible, and also that the translator’s own work and identities and opinions might be relevant.”

Some of the prejudice goes even further, she says. “There’s been this idea that translation doesn’t involve independent or original thinking or research, or that it might be of interest to the general public but of no interest to a serious scholar.” But it requires a serious scholar to fully understand the text of the original— and all the possibilities available in the translation language. “There can be a tendency to underestimate the need to think about the language you’re translating into and to have a really clear and deep knowledge of what’s possible.”

Wilson does say this mentality is changing, and she feels fortunate to be at Penn. “My colleagues, my department have been extremely supportive about my work as a translator.”

Strange New Worlds That work inherently involves something alien: a different language. It also can take us to another time and place and to new ways of thinking about life.

“You get a different vision of the world if you can think in a different language” or comprehend aspects of an ancient culture so different from our own, Wilson says. “It’s always this delicate balancing act: How do I present this poem so that it feels alive to you and you can understand it and understand the themes, characters, feelings, sounds, narrative arc? It shouldn’t be more difficult than the original, but you should see clearly what is alien.”

It’s easy to recognize strangeness in animal sacrifice or slavery, but what about how we conceive of our bodies? There is a trope for heroes in The Iliad, Wilson explains: “It’s a set of limbs tied together when you’re alive, and then it falls apart,” she says.

“Death is an untying. I shouldn’t put in a different metaphor. I should make that metaphor clear to you so you can get into that alien mindset. That’s at the center of the poem, both the emotional and physical unraveling of the human.”

That introduction to a different way of seeing makes Wilson believe every child should have access to learning a foreign language from a good teacher. “I don’t want the study of ancient languages to die. I want there to be some people— and not just people who are privileged—to have the ability to learn those languages. But ancient [language] or not, all kids should have an opportunity to engage” in this way.

Courtesy of Emily Wilson

Wilson in her Odyssey-a-Day video project, as (from left) Helen of Troy, Calypso, Athena, Polyphemus, Demodocus, and a Siren.

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From The Odyssey to The Iliad Wilson spent five years in the world of The Odyssey as she translated it. Shortly after she finished, she agreed to translate The Iliad, thinking perhaps she was on a roll.

“Once I started, I thought, ‘Actually, no, I’m not on a roll. This is completely different, and I need to stop and rethink everything.’”

Though both works are composed in the same archaic Greek language and emerge from the same poetic world, Wilson had to adjust to the different atmosphere of this poem. “The Iliad is such a deeply painful and tragic poem,” she says. “You constantly have to think about the style and specificity of this text and how it is different from another, even by the same author.”

There were new technical challenges as well. Homer’s originals are in a poetic meter, where the syllables are arranged to create repeating units of sound. One of Wilson’s primary goals with both translations was to do the same, though because of the language change, she used a different meter. To feel the rhythm, she read the originals 38

Wilson as Athena in her elementary school production of The Odyssey.

out loud multiple times and did the same with her drafts.

“Meter does something for the ear and for the body,” she says.

With The Odyssey, she even kept the same number of lines as the original by choosing English words with the number of syllables she needed. But The Iliad is full of names. “It’s about powerful men who form networks with each other,” says Wilson. “And their power is contingent on, ‘I’m the son of so-and-so, I’m the companion of so-and-so.’

Their patronymics [father’s names] and comrades need to be named at every turn, as well as their epithets—the things they’re associated with.

That seems to me so essential to the poem’s meaning, that names are what live on after they’re all dead.”

She spent months working on pacing and line length.

The result “felt so stodgy in a way that the original wasn’t, so then I went back

to pentameter, and I threw out my first two books and started again,” she says. “After many, many drafts, I felt I was starting to get it.”

A Classic Path It takes stamina and love for the classics to put that much heart and soul into translating Homer. Wilson’s passion likely got its start with an early chance to inhabit Athena (whom she’s called “the most kick-ass goddess of them all”) during a dramatic production of The Odyssey in grade school.

“There are ways that I’ve been very, very lucky,” says Wilson. The daughter of an Oxford English professor and a writer, she says, “I grew up in a very bookish household where there was an assumption that everyone was going to be reading all the time.”

In high school she was able to take both Latin and Greek. “I was very interested in literature and languages, but I was also shy about talking,” Wilson says. “And there was something great to me that you can get access to these very, very exciting stories which are so full of violent and emotional things happening, but you also don’t have to open your mouth in class.”

That’s not the right path for everyone, and Wilson is glad for the current discussion about pedagogy in ancient languages and for some pushback against the old ways, including movement toward teaching them more like living, spoken languages.

“Different people have different learning styles.

But for me as a teenager, it was exciting to have that oldschool model. It opened up an awareness of the structure of language.”

Courtesy of Emily Wilson

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Wilson went on to read classics at Oxford, studying ancient Greek and Roman literature, philosophy, and history. Because of her interest in how antiquity can be reinterpreted in later periods, she earned a master’s degree in English literature before traveling to Yale for her doctorate in classics. “Getting to be a translator of these texts has been a way of actively participating in that tradition,” she says.

Translation and engagement with language, engagement with big difficult books and thinking through questions about form and poetry and sound—those shouldn’t just belong to me, they should belong to everyone.

Homer should belong to everyone.

She has written six other books, including translations of tragic plays by Euripides and Seneca and a verse translation of Oedipus Tyrannos that she managed to produce between The Odyssey and The Iliad. Her other work includes The Greatest Empire: A Life of Seneca; The Death of Socrates: Hero, Villain, Chatterbox, Saint; and her first book, Mocked with Death: Tragic Overliving from Sophocles to Milton.

She’s also been the classics editor of two Norton Anthologies since 2012 and edited Bloomsbury’s A Cultural History of Tragedy in Antiquity. At Penn, she chairs the

Program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory.

“A thread running through it all is an interest in the complexity of ancient texts and ancient concepts,” she says, “the history of philosophy as well as of literature, the diversity of these texts. Even if you look at just one, there are so many different ways to interpret, so many different voices within this text, so many different possible responses.”

The Classical Future Wilson is taking full advantage of the opportunities for engagement brought by her success and by talking to people beyond her students and colleagues about the Homer poems. “It’s exciting just seeing the cultural engagement,” she says.

“That’s really invigorating.”

For generations, children have been introduced to the ancient myths through kid-sized versions, like Wilson’s grade school play or now, Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson books. There’s clearly an enduring interest, judging by the success of Wilson’s books and reimaginings like Madeline Miller’s Circe. Yet the number of classics majors and departments have both been declining, and the field of classical studies itself has been experiencing upheaval and self-examination.

“There’s so much more recognition now than even five or 10 years ago about everything that’s wrong with the history and the existing structures of the field in terms of access and privilege and the weird way ancient learning is set up,” Wilson says. “Why do we put Latin and Greek together rather than Greek and Hebrew or Latin and Sanskrit? I don’t think you can defend it, but that history has happened. What do we do with that?”

Wilson’s answer: be honest about it, keep grappling with it, and get creative about how to study the ancient world. She’s excited for the challenge.

“There’s been an enormous enrichment of classical studies over the last century,” she says. But “there needs to be more change, largely in terms of who gets to be in the room.”

Wilson put some of her MacArthur grant toward creating the Elsie Phare Fellowship—named for her grandmother, who would not have been able to attend college without a scholarship—to support post-baccalaureate students in classical studies. The fellowship committee is particularly interested in funding students from groups underrepresented in the classical studies community.

Courtesy of Emily Wilson

“I want to be thinking about my work beyond me,” she says. “I’d like to see the sort of name recognition I have be a gateway to younger scholars, more diverse demographics of people realizing that classics is for everyone.

Translation and engagement with language, engagement with big difficult books and thinking through questions about form and poetry and sound— those shouldn’t just belong to me, they should belong to everyone.

Homer should belong to everyone.”

To hear Wilson read and reflect on passages from The Iliad in the original Greek and from her translation, visit vimeo.com/pennsas/emilywilsoniliad.

Wilson on Chios, at the rock traditionally connected to the School of Homer.

Omnia Associate Editor Susan Ahlborn has worked as a communications professional in healthcare and academia, and loves learning cool things and writing about them.

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Cultivating Discovery Within the Department of Biology, the self-described “plant group” is employing cutting-edge techniques to explore everything from cancer and developmental biology to how agricultural crops might withstand a changing climate.

By KATHERINE UNGER BAILLIE Photography by ERIC SUCAR

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any scientists looking for a cancer cure use cells lines or animal models to ply their trade. The same goes for researchers interested in how organisms develop or respond to stress. But what if they want to observe these processes over and over, in a whole, living organism that’s inexpensive to maintain and bears similarities to human biology?

Then they might look to plants.

In the Department of Biology, the selfdescribed “plant group”—seven current faculty and numerous grad students and postdocs—knows this well. Though the group’s strength, breadth, and depth distinguish it from most of its peers, its research has stayed under the radar.

With plans to accelerate work in stress response and centralize efforts to wield plants as tools in the battle against climate change, however, the plant group’s quiet strength may not stay quiet for long.

“During the food crisis of the 1970s, plant science took off,” says Scott Poethig, John H. and Margaret B. Fassitt Professor of Biology. “It was all about, how can we help the world feed itself? And that’s still one way plant biologists justify their work.

But now I would argue, it’s less in terms of our impact on the food system and more in terms of our impact on the environment. What we do is relevant in terms of climate change, too.”

At Penn, plant biologists are leveraging the latest scientific techniques and high-tech growth facilities to elucidate the inner workings of plants. The insights they’re developing not only satisfy researchers’ love of discovery and their innate curiosity about and appreciation of the natural world—they may just save humanity.

than Gregor Mendel. When Kimberly Gallagher, Professor and Chair, teaches her introductory molecular biology and genetics course, she always returns to an original line in Mendel’s publications.

“He was convinced that the same essential laws that apply to plants apply to all organisms,” she says. “Every time I read that and think about the time he was coming from, I just think, ‘That guy was my man.’ How audacious that he thought he was going to be able to figure out essential laws of all organisms by studying plants. And to my mind, he was largely correct. Maybe it’s my bias, but I see plants as a superior organism for studying plasticity, development, for pursuing these kinds of questions.”

Biased or not, some members of the plant group have a deep and abiding love of plants. Others came upon them as a useful biological model. What unites these researchers is a sense that plants, though they cannot move of their own accord and lack the recognizable features that mammalian model organisms possess, nevertheless harbor the keys to unlocking a plethora of scientific mysteries.

Doris Wagner has a seemingly innate passion for plants. The DiMaura Professor of Biology launched her scientific career after apprenticing on a farm, and today enjoys timing hikes to the emergence of certain flowering spring ephemerals, native species that bloom for a brief period before dying back and making way for other species’ growth.

The Power of Plants

“I never even considered studying anything else,” Wagner says. “I feel that plants are, as multicellular terrestrial organisms, the most adaptable—they can live in so many different environments, from no light to extreme heat to extreme cold. Almost anywhere you go you will find plants. I’ve always thought that was fantastic, and that’s still something we study, this amazing plasticity and ability to reprogram themselves.”

It’s no accident that numerous seminal biological discoveries have occurred in plants. The concept of heredity emerged, famously, in the 19th century from experiments in pea plants by none other

That pull of plants and the natural world is shared by Addison Buxton-Martin, a fourth-year graduate student in the lab of Assistant Professor Corlett Wood. “I was one of those kids who had all these bug 41

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collections,” he says. In college, he says he found himself gravitating toward plants.

“Imagine if you had to stand in one spot day in and day out and experience all of these changes in your environment,” he says, like the comings and goings of other organisms or the whims of the weather. “Asking the question, in some sense, of ‘What is it like to be a plant?’ sparked my interest and led me down a path of realizing that plants are really cool.”

Plants also hooked Professor Brent Helliker during college, when the then-English major found himself excelling in a biology course he’d taken on a whim. “The plant part of the course just blew me away,” he says. “I became fascinated by these strange organisms.” For 42

I never even considered studying anything else. I feel that plants are, as multicellular terrestrial organisms, the most adaptable— they can live in so many different environments, from no light to extreme heat to extreme cold.

Professor Brian Gregory, plants appeal on a more practical level. “We’re able to study these processes of interest in a growing, developing, responding organism on a whole-organism scale,” he says.

Anyone who has ever grown plants from seed can understand their suitability as a model for studying development. “For mammals, you’re in utero and you make these organs and you’re done,” says Aman Husbands, Mitchell J. Blutt and Margo Krody Blutt Presidential Assistant Professor of Biology. “But in plants, you can study how they produce leaf after leaf after leaf and then how they switch to make flowers. It’s just a really powerful system.”

Carrying Forward a Legacy In many ways it’s appropriate that Penn is a hub for important plant biology research, as Philadelphia’s reputation for plant science dates back three centuries, to a time when the city was emerging as an intellectual center for botanists.

Plant collectors like John Bartram and William Hamilton established famed gardens with robust collections, while Thomas Jefferson had plant specimens from Meriwether Lewis and William Clark’s expeditions sent back to Philadelphia, where they still reside at the Drexel University Academy of Natural Sciences.

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Using molecular methods, Doris Wagner, DiMaura Professor of Biology (left), investigates how plants—like the one above, in red, which produces a new flower bud every two days, or the hundred young plants in a single petri dish—integrate environmental cues to adapt their anatomy to changing conditions. At bottom right, postdoc Shalini Yadav looks at plant images on a confocal microscope.

At Penn specifically, the late 18th and early 19th centuries saw noted figures like botanists Benjamin Smith Barton and Thomas Nuttall greatly expand plant knowledge in their time.

The origins of the Department of Biology itself have roots (pun intended) in plant biology. In the 1950s, the departments of botany, microbiology, and zoology merged to form the Department of Biology, spurred by plant physiologist David Goddard, a professor of botany and biology.

A few decades later, around the time that scientists developed techniques to genetically engineer plants, Penn’s department expanded by nearly a dozen faculty. One hired in that period, Professor of Biology Andrew Binns, now retired, wrote a white paper proposing a new initiative in plant biology. The resulting Penn Plant Science Institute launched within the department in 1986 and was directed for two decades

by Anthony Cashmore, today an emeritus

professor, whose work focused on light signaling and circadian rhythms in plants.

While the Plant Science Institute no longer formally exists, the entity’s residual strength lingers in the plant group.

Tight-Knit Community Like a healthy forest or a vibrant garden, the group thrives in part due to the diversity and distinct niches of its members and the complementary nature of their expertise. “Most people would tell you that the plant group is the strongest and most cohesive group in the department,” says Gallagher.

Not only do nearly all of them have office and laboratory space on the first floor of Lynch Labs, but they hold weekly seminars during which students and postdocs can present their work. Wagner launched a weekly journal club for the

plant group during COVID. “There’s an ethic of collaboration as opposed to competition,” says Gallagher. “I mean there’s some healthy competition, some healthy criticism. But there’s a sense of, let’s work on this together.”

Informal collaboration happens constantly, one researcher popping into the office of another or discussing a finding in their shared lunchroom. Husbands, who joined the department in 2022, shares laboratory space with Wagner, and the two hold joint lab meetings. “We’ll be presenting on a new study and Doris, who has been thinking about transcription factors and chromatin for years, will give us really good advice on how to make the statistics stronger,” Husbands says.

Formal collaborations exist as well. Wood and Gallagher, for example, recently had a grant funded to study how conflict plays out between microbes that dwell in plant roots. “Kim has all this amazing expertise 43

on how resources and defensive molecules move through plants,” says Wood, “and can pair that with my studies of competition between microbial species to understand how the movement of resources may impact the eventual composition of a microbial community.”

This closeness pays dividends for students and trainees, too. “For a trainee who is just starting to work on research proposals, we can present them and get a lot of feedback,” says Tian Huang, a fourth-year doctoral student in the Wagner Lab. “Basically, if you have a question, you can get it answered. You can always find an expert right here in the department.”

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Applications Broad and Deep This broad-based expertise and robust collaboration, within the department, around the University, and outside it, has laid the groundwork for the department’s scientists to address big questions in biomedicine, ecology, and more.

No plant biologist will argue that plants make a perfect system for studying topics that touch on human biology, where relatedness to humans is often prized.

Yet a surprising number of important discoveries made in plants have relevance to humans. Counterintuitively, it’s the relative simplicity of plants that facilitates these connections.

“If you work on a microRNA in animals, any gene will be regulated by many different microRNAs,” says Poethig, referring to a type of RNA, or ribonucleic acid molecule, frequently involved in controlling gene expression.

“But in my field, a single gene will be regulated by a single microRNA, which makes for a much simpler situation and can allow you to learn, one at a time, how each of these might be operating.”

Poethig is interested in plant development, particularly in the genetic regulation of the juvenile-to-adult transition which, just as during human puberty, is characterized by a host of physical changes in plants. Husbands also focuses on the process of development.

His studies ask about reproducibility and robustness, or

the tendency of a plant to produce similar components time and time again—flat, broad leaves, for example. “If you’re a plant and you get this wrong, you’re going to have issues with photosynthesis,” he says.

These processes, and the regulatory mechanisms that control them, have implications for development beyond plants. A postdoctoral researcher in Husbands’ lab, Ashton Holub, has a whole side project looking at how a lipid-binding domain that the lab studies in plants, but which exists in all kingdoms of life, functions in a cancerassociated gene.

Gallagher’s work has leveraged genetic and molecular biology tools to explore the movement of transcription factors between cells in plant roots, a

Eric Sucar, University Communications

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Eric Sucar, University Communications

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Aman Husbands, Mitchell J. Blutt and Margo Krody Blutt Presidential Assistant Professor (left page, center), with postdoc Sarah Choudury, lab manager Nicole Callery, and Ph.D. student Courtney Dresden. Husbands’ lab studies plant reproducibility and robustness, or the tendency of plants like those seen here to produce consistent forms and structures time and time again.

communication network that can affect plant health. Her findings have enabled insights into parallel networks in animals.

As one example, her lab has investigated a transcription factor—a protein that acts as an on-switch for genes—called SHORT-ROOT that shuttles between root cells in the small flowering plant Arabidopsis. Her team has found that SHORT-ROOT appears to relocate to a cell’s nucleus in order to move, a feature of protein transport also seen in some unusual cases in mammals and one that has been associated with developmental abnormalities and even cancer.

Not all such revelations emerge from within a lab. Wood, who joined the department in 2020, spends her summers at the Mountain Lake Biological Station, conducting fieldwork and collecting samples for later analysis. An ecologist,

For mammals, you’re in utero and you make these organs and you’re done. But in plants, you can study how they produce leaf after leaf after leaf and then how they switch to make flowers. It’s just a really powerful system.

Wood probes the relationships between plants, nematode parasites, and beneficial bacteria, with implications for how plant and microbial communities grow and change. The work also dovetails with a hot area in animal biology: the microbiome, or the complex community of microbes that dwell in guts and on skin and have been linked with a wide range of health and disease states, from obesity to neurodegenerative conditions.

Wood likes to think about the plant root as akin to the human gut. “It’s primarily designed to absorb nutrients,” she says. “If you look at a microscopic scale, you’ll see hairs, like microvilli.

The roots support an incredibly diverse microbial community. Plants are doing all sorts of cool things to recruit and benefit microbes. When I think about the emerging insights in host-microbe interactions, the power of plants is really underappreciated. And it’s much easier to manipulate a root than a gut.”

Plants must contend with and adapt to not only other living elements in their environment, but a variety of non-living stressors as well, such as heat, drought, and poor soil conditions. And they do so with genomes that are in many cases far smaller than those of mammals. Therefore, their gene expression is under tight control, allowing for flexibility to respond to the changing conditions around them.

That regulation, which can involve a variety of types of molecules and processes, is a focus for several in the department, like Gregory, who is using pioneering new techniques to rigorously address how RNA molecules help regulate gene expression. For example, his team has employed high-throughput sequencing, a powerful tool that can read out millions of DNA or RNA segments in parallel, to catalog the interactions between particular RNA molecules and proteins that bind them, ultimately seeking to understand how those interactions correspond with plant characteristics and behavior, such as their response to stress.

Until recently most of Gregory’s work used Arabidopsis, too—it’s a classical model in plant biology—but he’s looking into plant species that may have more relevance to society. “There’s a lot of focus right now on directly researching crop species, to potentially translate it into something that can improve food security globally,” he says. To that end, he’s recently begun exploring how RNA modifications in rice and sorghum alter in response to heat and drought.

Others in the department are also doing work with direct connections to agriculture, such as Wagner, who studies the developmental transition to reproduction in plants. In particular, she is interested in how plant cells are reprogrammed to form flowers or to protect themselves from detrimental effects of changing environments. She examines how environmental cues like light, temperature, or drought trigger molecular cascades that drive plant behavior.

Key to this work is epigenetics, an area of research also important for human health that has profited from pivotal first discoveries in plants, Wagner says. Epigenetics concerns itself with chromatin, a layer of proteins that constrain which parts of the blueprint or genome of an organism are “open for business.” Her research aims to identify key players in chromatin and gene expression that can be precisely manipulated to optimize flower timing and stress resiliency, she says, and therefore help in growing more productive crops for either biofuels or food.

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Linda Wu, C’24, W’24 (pictured), spent a summer in the lab of Assistant Professor of Biology Corlett Wood, whose work probes the relationships between plants, nematode parasites, and beneficial bacteria. This research has implications for how plant and microbial communities grow and change.

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Eric Sucar, University Communications

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A Big-Picture Focus The ability to precisely tune such variables could help plants survive the stresses of a changing climate as well, crucial not only for growing food but also for plants’ role in mitigating the impacts of this human-caused challenge by absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Helliker, who studies how the physiology of different plant species have adapted to various climate scenarios, has focused on climate change for the length of his career. Grasslands have been a special interest.

As much as technology may help navigate the future, a world without plants is not a livable one.

“When you hear about climate change and plants, people are often talking about the carbon-storing potential of forests, but grasslands are really good at it, too—and have the distinct advantage that they store most of their carbon underground,” Helliker says. If a forest burns, carbon does, too, but grasslands can burn and still hold onto most of their carbon in the root systems, which can rapidly regenerate, he adds.

All of this has implications for both growing food and protecting the environment. Helliker is studying adaptations, like microscopic tissue structures adept at short-term water storage, that make native grasses “masters at dealing with an unpredictable environment,” he says. In contrast, domesticated

grassland crop species, which meet something like 60 percent of the global population’s caloric needs, have often lost such traits, bred to thrive under predictable conditions, using irrigation and fertilization. Identifying which characteristics wild grasses have that domesticated species lack could increase the resiliency and productivity of crop plants, decreasing the amount of land required for agriculture and increasing what could be left to sustain biodiversity and store carbon, Helliker says.

Wagner and others in the department are planning some institution-level moves that could further this kind of broadly focused, societally vital work.

They’ve begun discussions to launch a new center focused on how plant biology can contribute to adaptability and resilience in the face of climate change. “It will require a lot of people with a lot of different expertise,” Wagner says. “We want to tackle these questions in a way that will lead to smart solutions to sustainability problems and will require a village of plant scientists and others.”

Ultimately, she and departmental colleagues envision a center that will encompass not only different schools, centers, and departments at Penn, but that will also support national and international collaborations in sustainable agriculture, resilient crops, carbon capture through plants, and more. There would also be a role for education and outreach, and likely connections with industry to advance insights to a translational level. “The dream is to make substantive contributions from fundamental research to sustainability,” Wagner says.

Such work requires a precise understanding of the biology. If you’re engineering a plant that is resistant to drought, for example, it’s important to be aware of

unintended side effects, says Gallagher. “Maybe doing so could make it more sensitive to pathogens. We need to have a lot of fundamental knowledge to design effective solutions for real-world challenges.”

As the department looks to the future, a revamped greenhouse and the beloved James G. Kaskey Memorial Park “BioPond,” where renovations have begun this year, will support that progress. So will the development of “smart” plantgrowth facilities that enable testing plant behavior in conditions that can replicate any climate, a priority of the planned center.

The department envisions a future that involves broadening investigations to include more species— not just Arabidopsis—and more complexity, in both the lab and the field. “The vision is to study life in its natural context, and to do that we need to move outside of the laboratory,” Poethig says. “I personally don’t think we can understand the significance of what we study if we don’t understand how it is happening in the real world.”

Because as much as technology may help navigate the future, a world without plants is not a livable one.

“If I talk to colleagues about why this work is important, I simply remind them, plants sustain all life on Earth, they generate oxygen for us to breathe, and many studies have shown that plants play important roles in emotional and mental wellbeing as well,” Wagner says. “When I think about how important plants are, not just for food but being able to sustain us in all ways, I feel even more strongly about pursuing this work.”

Katherine Unger Baillie, associate director of Penn’s Environmental Innovations Initiative, is a science writer whose work has appeared in Science Magazine, New Scientist, Penn Today, and elsewhere.

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Life in China After Lockdown Three experts on contemporary China discuss what it’s like there after several tumultuous years of zero-COVID policies and changing public opinion.

By Lauren Rebecca Thacker

Antonio Rodriguez

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ock & Roast, a standup comedy show popular in China, came out with a new season in the fall of 2022, after more than five months of lockdown in Shanghai. At the end of his performance, a comedian named Hu Lan joked, “A lot of things happened this year. But it feels like nothing happened.”

“I really feel like that captures how people are processing the experience of COVID and lockdown: Pretend nothing happened,” says Chenshu Zhou, Assistant Professor of Cinema & Media Studies, whose work focuses on China. “I see the same happening with protests against COVID policies, some of which were really radical. But now the protests are just gone.”

Teemu Ruskola, Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations and Professor of Law, brings up the same idea. Largely, he says, people in China endured lockdowns due to a sense of national pride and communal obligation. “Suddenly restrictions were just lifted, and everybody went on as if nothing had happened,” he says. “I think a lot of people wondered, why all the sacrifice? And I think there is a kind of lingering resentment for which there is no public forum.”

The quick changes in attitudes and behavior don’t surprise Guobin Yang, Grace Lee Boggs Professor of Sociology and Communication, whose expertise is in social movements, digital culture, global communication, and contemporary China.

His latest book, The Wuhan Lockdown, uses an archive of more than 6,000 diary entries to uncover how residents of the city coped with the state’s management of COVID-19.

“If we think about the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and ’70s or protests in the 1980s, those

Diaspora and Film were periods of huge political and national turbulence,” Yang says.

“And people suffered. But there was still so much adaptability and resilience, and I see something similar happening now. Ordinary people are managing radically disruptive situations in the way they always have.”

Today, a busy street in Beijing might appear similar to a scene on that same street in 2019. But even if people would prefer not to think about what happened in the interim— death, family separations, economic uncertainty—things have changed in the aftermath.

The Expansion of State Power Ruskola, a scholar of Chinese law and society in a comparative and global context, says that one of the biggest changes in China since the advent of COVID is the expansion of state power. At the pandemic’s start, he wondered whether the Communist party would weaken.

After all, he says, a virus is not a political enemy.

“But the Chinese state turned it around in an ingenious way,” he says.

“Even in today’s China, people are willing to sacrifice for the collective.

So, what emerged was a sense of national pride that China was more effective than others in managing this disaster. State surveillance is not new to China, but with COVID it became even more entrenched.”

He’s quick to point out that the rise in state power came with a corresponding rise in distrust from the general public, something China has not fully reckoned with. What happens next, he says, will have a lot to do with the economy. “An aspect of the social contract in contemporary China is that the government is

Filmmakers in China have produced few filmic representations of lockdowns, says Chenshu Zhou, Assistant Professor of Cinema & Media Studies.

However, within the diasporic Chinese filmmaker community, several documentaries were produced, starting in 2020.

Coronation, by artist and activist Ai Weiwei, uses footage filmed by people in Wuhan.

6 Days, directed 7

by Wu Hao, focuses on the hospital rooms where COVID patients were kept and as a result, “presents the lockdown almost like a continuing present with no progression of time,” Zhou says.

River Runs, Turns, A Erases, Replaces,

by Zhu Shengze. “It focuses on Wuhan as a city, but interspersed with fragments of diaries that people wrote during and after COVID lockdowns, remembering their families or talking about their experiences,” Zhou says.

“It’s very poetic.”

“The chance of any of these being watched by people who were personally impacted by the lockdowns that they depict are very low,” Zhou says.

“When analyzing such films, we should ask ourselves, ‘Who are they made for?’”

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Migration Aspiration During the pandemic’s early days, Lingyi Zhang, LPS’24, noticed something unusual happening on a popular Chinese app called Red. The multipurpose tool allows users to upload photos or videos, share reviews, and make purchases. But when COVID and lockdowns began, Zhang observed that users shifted the app from its original fashion-oriented content to a site about information sharing.

Locally, that meant sharing and seeking content relevant to daily life, such as unfiltered looks at living under lockdown and tips on dealing with food shortages. Zhang says the app cultivates a feeling of community and has become a space where users feel comfortable posting about personal matters. In addition to hosting conversations about daily lives within China, Red became a platform that allowed users to imagine their lives outside of the country.

Zhang’s capstone project investigates what she calls “migration aspiration” and how social media facilitates it. Her research involves observations of migration content on Red and ethnographic interviews with users, creating the opportunity to understand individual perspectives in the framework of a large-scale social analysis. “On a closed social media platform, you can learn from people in your community and get real, concrete details,” Zhang says.

The Red community includes a sizable group of Chinese citizens who have emigrated elsewhere like the U.S., Canada, and Australia.

“On other major platforms in China, migration is not a positive word. People might be accused of not being loyal to the country” says Zhang.

“But on Red, people are more likely to share their experiences of leaving China, including their struggles and what might be possible.”

She is still considering why Red emerged as the platform for such discussions and how accurately users depict their experiences, but suspects the relative openness is due to a user base that skews young and female. What’s not up for debate, Zhang says, is what motivates all this talk: “After COVID and lockdowns, people have different expectations about what their lives could be.”

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competent and will deliver economic growth,” he says. “COVID has shaken people’s faith in this.”

Yang adds that people’s distrust of government is situational and may not be consistent—they might have faith in one policy or government structure but be suspicious of another. Particularly in rural areas, where popular local leaders may have the ability to bend rules to better serve the local population, citizens may have faith in government structures familiar to them even as they distrust the central party in Beijing, or vice versa.

Turning Inward This embrace of the local relates to an overall inward turn that Yang says came out of pandemic experiences, especially in the scholarly community. “There is less openness to the outside world,” he says. “Certain universities and conferences have become difficult to access. It has been framed as China being less open, but it could also be defensiveness or wariness from the pandemic experience of being under global scrutiny.”

Zhou sees this inward turn reflected by Chinese moviegoers, too, who had waning interest in Hollywood films even before COVID. “Hollywood movies used to occupy all the top slots in the Chinese box office—Fast and Furious 7 was once number one,” she says. “But now there is a disconnect between what’s coming out of Hollywood and what people want to see. Hollywood’s attempts to diversify fall flat.

When the new Mulan film was shown in China, it was widely ridiculed. People were like, ‘Girl, that’s not authentic makeup!’”

Now, all the top slots are taken by domestic films. The Battle at Lake Changjin, about the Korean War, came out in 2021 and is currently the highest grossing movie of all time in China and the highest grossing war film of all time, anywhere.

I don’t want to draw a direct connection between the rise of feminism and the pandemic, but I do think that lockdowns cultivated an awareness of women’s issues and feminist criticism.

“It is what we call a main melody film—one that reflects official ideology,” says Zhou. “War films typically do well at the box office, as do middlebrow movies with medium budgets that reflect on social issues because they are so rooted in the contemporary reality of China. In addition, I’m seeing a lot more genderconscious cultural criticism.

I don’t want to draw a direct connection between the rise of feminism and the pandemic, but I do think that lockdowns cultivated an awareness of women’s issues and feminist criticism.”

There’s also a new tension, she says, between the inward cultural turn and a growing interest in migration. “Last year, people on social media began using the English word ‘run’ as shorthand for talking about leaving or running away from China,” Zhou says. “I attribute this to general frustration about life in China and the prospect of economic and social mobility.”

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(L–R) Chenshu Zhou, Assistant Professor of Cinema & Media Studies; Teemu Ruskola, Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations and Professor of Law; Guobin Yang, Grace Lee Boggs Professor of Sociology and Communication

What Comes Next When considering how experiences of COVID and lockdowns affected those in China, Yang urges people to embrace the tensions and complexities, using protests against zero-COVID policies as an example. People may have moved on quickly, he says, just as they did after major protests in 1989. Outside observers should not be surprised when protests happen again, nor should they expect that protesters necessarily want total change.

“The recent protests were remarkable expressions of people’s frustration and resentment. However, I wouldn’t be surprised if some of these same people supported China’s COVID policies in 2020, simply because the circumstances have changed,” he says. “Like people elsewhere,

Chinese citizens will always protest when they’re unhappy and we shouldn’t be surprised by that. Instead, we should recognize their activism and creativity in navigating their political circumstances.”

move around freely. But the virus remains.

After all, Ruskola reminds us, “COVID is not going anywhere. It’s going to be with us the way zoonotic diseases have been with humans ever since the first agricultural settlement.”

Like people elsewhere, Chinese citizens will always protest when they’re unhappy and we shouldn’t be surprised by that. Instead, we should recognize their activism and creativity in navigating their political circumstances.

Rather than thinking about distinct preand post-COVID experiences, Yang says, “we need this experience to transform our understanding of the broad ramifications of infectious disease and public health issues to deal with continuing COVID and potential future epidemics.” In this way, experiences of lockdown, illness, and protest will shape our collective future.

Many people in China would happily say that COVID is behind us, Yang adds.

Lockdowns are over and citizens can

Lauren Rebecca Thacker is a Providencebased higher ed writer who covers topics from poetry and politics to energy science and ocean engineering.

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Pennʼs program in Cinema & Media Studies becomes an academic department.

By Jane Carroll

Photography by Brooke Si

etinsons

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V

iewing an exclusive movie premiere at the world-famous Cannes Film Festival.

Studying documentary filmmaking in Kenya. Interning at a top Los Angeles movie studio. For two decades, students in Penn’s Cinema & Media Studies (CIMS) program have had access to such experiences, and this year, the program takes a big leap forward, becoming Penn Arts & Sciences’ newest academic department.

Why the change? “One of the major catalysts to form a department revolved around Ph.D. students,” says Karen Redrobe, Elliot and Roslyn Jaffe Professor of Cinema & Media Studies. Redrobe served as program director this past year and oversaw the process of transitioning CIMS to department status. She explains that prior to the change, graduate students interested in cinema and media studies needed to enroll in other departments such as English, history of art, or anthropology to pursue an Arts & Sciences doctoral degree.

“It was hard to feel a sense of community when grad students were based in different departments,” she says. “They had to fulfill the requirements of their various disciplines while developing their training in cinema & media studies at the same time. It was almost like doing two Ph.D. programs, especially at the coursework level.”

Equally important, becoming a department makes it possible to hire dedicated CIMS faculty. As with

Rahul Mukherjee, Dick Wolf Associate Professor of Television and New Media, is graduate chair of the new Department of Cinema & Media Studies.

graduate students, professors teaching in the CIMS program have been hired through other departments—including Redrobe, whose position previously fell under history of art.

Ian Fleishman, Chair and Associate Professor of Cinema & Media Studies, agrees. “We’re proud to have drawn on our colleagues in the humanities across the University, but with this change we’ll gain more independence in how we set our own hiring priorities.”

Built From Scratch Film studies gained traction as an academic discipline in the 1960s.

Timothy Corrigan, Emeritus Professor of English, Cinema & Media Studies, and History of Art, joined Penn in 2003 as founding director of what was then called the Cinema Studies Program, which initially offered only an undergraduate minor.

During Corrigan’s first year, he advised the search committee in recruiting Redrobe for the Jaffe Chair.

Peter Decherney, today Professor of Cinema & Media Studies and Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Endowed

Term Professor in the Humanities, came on board through the English department. “We fairly quickly got up to speed with three dedicated cinema studies scholars,” Corrigan says. “The challenge for me was that, in order to build the program, we needed to find more people with not only an interest in film but also experience teaching it.”

The fact that we got so many majors so quickly is not just because we had a good program, but because

young people really res

pond to

film, they respond to

media.

Corrigan says CIMS’s long-time associate director Nicola Gentili, who joined the staff in 1998, has been instrumental in managing and developing the program. He helped to recruit instructors from across the University and worked with Corrigan to streamline the curriculum and launch the undergraduate 53

major in 2004, which quickly attracted dozens of students. Today CIMS has 37 declared majors and 38 minors.

“A Student-First Enterprise” Ask Corrigan what the CIMS program’s foundational strength is and he’s quick to answer: providing undergraduates with a discipline they longed to study. “The fact that we got so many majors so quickly is not just because we had a good program,” he says, “but because young people really respond to film, they respond to media.”

CIMS undergraduates have also benefited from hands-on experiences, like an impressive roster of available internships all over the country, facilitated, in part, by ample representation of Penn alums in the film and media industries.

And in partnership with Penn Global, Decherney directs the Penn Global Documentary Institute, which brings students to communities across the world to document their stories through various media; students in his Virtual Reality Lab course can learn VR filming techniques.

(See “Flow Motion” on page 18.)

CIMS began attracting students early on with a graduate certificate and doctoral degrees conferred by collaborative departments. “Through those doors, we’ve had a really phenomenal bunch

of grad students over the years who are now well-placed in faculty positions,” says Corrigan.

Redrobe notes that Corrigan, who retired four years ago, “left an imprint as someone who approached this as a student-first enterprise, while also being a very important scholar.” She says the entire CIMS faculty—“all active researchers and creators who also care a lot about teaching and pedagogy”—share those qualities.

Students today are constantly inundated with all manner of media with which they need to engage critically.

Fleishman was drawn to cinema & media studies through teaching, specifically a course he led at Harvard, where he struggled to engage the students until he decided to show them a clip of the film M by Fritz Lang. “They came to life,” he says. “And not only did they come to life, but afterwards they were so much better at coming to back to the books and suddenly had more interesting things to say about them. I think there’s something both so familiar about the moving image

O that MNIA to students, and so alive about it, they can come to it at once very critically and very naively.”

An Interdisciplinary Discipline CIMS currently counts 10 professors as core faculty, covering a broad array of national, historical, and methodological approaches. In addition to Redrobe, Decherney and Rahul Mukherjee have both taken turns as program director.

Mukherjee, Dick Wolf Associate Professor of Television and New Media and the department’s new graduate chair, focuses on media more broadly and brings expertise in Indian media. Senior lecturer Meta Mazaj, undergraduate chair, specializes in Balkan cinema and cinemas of Eastern Europe. Assistant Professor Chenshu Zhou’s focus is on East Asia.

Film studies programs and film archives traditionally have prioritized North American and European film and film histories. In expanding the department, Fleishman says he wants to build on the areas covered by current faculty.

“We hope, for instance, to make exciting new hires in areas—geographical or otherwise—where we’d like more coverage, including Latin America or African cinema and media traditions.”

Reflecting this expansive view, the word “media” was added to the program title in 2014, acknowledging the broader universe of media in which cinema is only one form.

“Students today are constantly inundated with all manner of media with which they need to engage critically,” says Fleishman. “For this reason, I’m thrilled to have scholars like Rahul working on subjects as diverse as Bollywood thrillers, data management systems, and media coverage of nuclear power plants and cell phone antennas in India.” Fleishman also points to Shannon Mattern, recently hired Penn Presidential Compact Professor of Cinema & Media Studies, who focuses on “media archaeologies,” encompassing everything from stone tablets to urban print cultures to telegraphs and smart cities in the age of big data.

Ian Fleishman, Chair of the Department of Cinema & Media Studies, teaches a course on German cinema.

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“At a moment of heightened specialization across the academic world,” says Redrobe, “CIMS can function as a hub for the whole

FALL /WINTER 2023

Students watch a film during Professor Rahul Mukherjee's Television and New Media class.

University, because you have medical imaging, media systems, storylines, visual art, performance, music, legal questions. There are so many different arenas that moving images play a role in. With cinema and media, we’re also dealing with a very accessible form of visual culture that opens a door to the non-academic world.”

Looking Ahead This theme of accessibility drives CIMS’s long-time commitment to engaging not only the campus, but also the wider community. “Our public programming rivals almost any department at Penn,” says Fleishman.

For example, Wednesday lunch colloquia, featuring top-notch local, national, and international film and media scholars, are open to students and the general public alike. CIMS often partners with student groups and film clubs, and has co-sponsored numerous Philadelphiabased film festivals, most recently the 2023 Black Star Film Festival. Through

the University’s partnership with Slought, a cultural and educational nonprofit based in West Philadelphia, CIMS has been co-hosting screenings and other events there on Tuesday evenings.

As the new department prepares to launch full graduate curricula, both for a Ph.D. and a terminal M.A., along with certificates in the discipline, it is also overhauling the undergraduate curriculum.

At a moment of heightened

specialization across the academic world, CIMS can function as a hub for the whole

University.

“We want to make sure to do this right, so we’re updating our requirements and core courses to better reflect the current state of the field,” Fleishman says.

One notable change will come with the

introductory three-course sequence: World Film History to 1945, World Film History 1945 to the Present, and Television and New Media. To correct an imbalance between film and media, beginning in the 2023–2024 academic year there will be just two gateway courses: Introduction to Cinema Studies and Introduction to Media Studies, allowing for more varied and diverse pathways through the global histories of cinema and media.

One big aspiration is a dedicated space for the CIMS department, complete with its own media screening room. In the meantime, Fleishman and colleagues will continue working to update the curriculum, recruit new faculty, and ramp up community offerings. “We have the most wonderful colleagues I can imagine,” he says, “and the support of many others at the University who are helping us find our footing.”

Jane Carroll, CGS’00, is associate director of donor relations for the Penn Arts & Sciences Office of Advancement and writes frequently for Omnia.

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STUDENT SPOTLIGHT

OMNIA

Exploration Expo Brooke Sietinsons

At the Exploration Expo on August 28, College students had the opportunity to mingle and learn about the School’s 28 departments, plus the dozens of majors and programs on offer. “What’s beautiful about this event is that here in a physical set-up are so many of the options in the College in the School of Arts & Sciences,” said Paul Sniegowski, Stephen A. Levin Family Dean of the College. “It’s a chance for students to connect faces with programs and majors, and just to hang out.” Professors from many of the departments, including Eleni Katifori (bottom left) from the Department of Physics & Astronomy, came out to share with the students their passion for their subject matter.

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STUDENT SPOTLIGHT

FALL /WINTER 2023

Balancing Ballet

Ayesha Patel, C’25, designed a plan that allowed a Philadelphia dance company to revive a program for younger supporters.

Courtesy of Ayesha Patel

Ayesha Patel, C’25, developed an interest in ballet when she was a little girl, and she has been dancing ever since. So, an internship with BalletX, the Philadelphia contemporary ballet company, seemed like a great opportunity to combine her knowledge of dance with her economics major.

Follow Your Nose

You might say that a sweet tooth turned sixth-year psychology Ph.D. student Clara Raithel onto the human sense of smell.

“As a master’s student, I was studying how the brain responds to ‘sweet’ taste under various conditions, for example, whether we approach certain food with an indulgent or restrictive mindset,” she says.

“I realized you can’t really study eating behaviors without understanding how people’s brains respond to odors. I decided to look for grad school experiences where I could study the human sense of smell.”

When she and others reviewed applications and interviewed finalists for the position, Patel “stood out from the crowd,” O’Donnell says. “She was really amazing.”

A Summer Humanities Internship with Philadelphia dance company BalletX gave Ayesha Patel, C’25 (above), a great opportunity to combine her dance experience with her economics major.

In the laboratory of Jay Gottfried, Arthur H. Rubenstein University Professor in Psychology and Neuroscience, Raithel found the perfect mentor. Gottfried has studied olfaction—essentially, the science of smell—for nearly two decades. “I was very lucky to get a spot here,” Raithel says.

Courtesy of Clara Raithel

During the research phase, she reviewed the pilot, studied similar programs at other arts organizations, and wrote a comparative analysis.

She then created a description of a Young Xers committee and a membership structure, a proposed budget, an events calendar, and suggested local partners. Finally, she drafted a marketing plan and content for the website, presented a three-year strategic plan to the BalletX team, and helped plan and staff a Young Xers July social event.

For Patel, the feeling was mutual. “They gave me a lot of responsibility for an intern, and I really appreciated that,” Patel says. “I also just really appreciated having that professional experience working in the ballet and arts industry…. I’ve made a lot of connections.” — LOUISA SHEPARD

In the lab of neuroscientist Jay Gottfried, sixthyear psychology Ph.D. student Clara Raithel is studying how humans use their sense of smell to find their way.

The 10-week internship was through the Summer Humanities Internship Program, which provides a $5,000 award supported by the College and administered through the Center for Undergraduate Research and Fellowships. This is the first year BalletX was a program partner. “It is fantastic and a huge support to nonprofits like us,” says Megan O’Donnell, BalletX managing director.

A major project for Patel entailed research and strategy around a BalletX program called Young Xers for professionals 21 to 40 years old. A pilot was in place before the pandemic, and Patel was tasked with creating a plan to bring it back to life.

of the dance company—this year. “Having an intern like Ayesha, who is so smart and diligent, was really beneficial,” O’Donnell says.

“It all involved a lot of financial planning, making sure that we’re generating revenue from this program, and that it is benefitting BalletX in some way,” Patel says. Her summer experience also included work on shorter-term projects, like tracking and analyzing ticket sales for a twoweek run of July performances and brainstorming marketing materials.

O’Donnell says that without Patel, BalletX would not have been able to relaunch the Young Xers program— one she calls critical to the future

Psychology Ph.D. student Clara Raithel looks at an anatomical brain scan, part of work to understand how people’s brains respond to odors.

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By the time she joined the lab, Gottfried and colleagues had already experimented with the ways in which humans navigate abstract smells like banana or rose in twodimensional spaces, finding that certain parts of the brain linked with memory and emotions help people understand which aromas surround them. Now Gottfried wanted to take the work in a more natural direction, creating a virtual reality smellscape (think landscape, but for your nose) that people could attempt to move through.

For the new experiment, 28 participants each entered the smellscape four times.

The placement of eight “odor objects” in the environment, smells like orange or banana, always stayed the same. What changed was where participants were placed in the virtual reality arena and which target odor they needed to find.

The results surprised and excited the team, Raithel says. “We showed that participants could successfully navigate using their nose. We also demonstrated that this behavior was associated with the emergence of a particular neural signature indicative of what we might call ‘cognitive maps.’ This neural signature not only appeared in areas traditionally associated with navigation behavior, but also in olfactory-related brain regions.” Their findings suggest that these two sets of brain regions share a common spatial code— something previously unknown.

Raithel says the results, recently published in the journal Current Biology, provide her with further proof that the human sense of smell is highly underrated. “It’s important in its own way,” she says, “delivering unique information in ways that other senses can’t.”

— MICHELE W. BERGER

Conservation, Justice, and Gender

Through her summer program, Mia McElhatton, C’26, explored how efforts to save the planet may disproportionately burden women.

Ta’Liyah Thomas

What happens when our moral commitments to non-human nature conflict with our commitments to social justice? How can we integrate our obligations to animals and fellow human beings? This summer, Mia McElhatton, C’26, spent 10 weeks answering such research questions as part of a project with Professor of Philosophy Kok-Chor Tan, offered through the Penn Undergraduate Research Mentoring Program.

Tan, whose work primarily focuses on philosophy and global justice, has a new book in progress, Justice in Conservation: The Ethics and Politics of Wildlife Conservation. He was looking for a student to help him conduct preliminary research.

Mia McElhatton, C’26, spent the summer working in the lab of Kok-Chor Tan, a professor in the Department of Philosophy. Her project focused on how conservationists respond to women and those who identify as women.

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McElhatton is intrigued by political philosophy and ideas around personhood—who is considered a “person,” including whether and when this designation applies to

animals and the environment. Those interests dovetail with a curiosity about environmental equity and feminist theory. Tan’s PURM project, offered through the Center for Undergraduate Research and Fellowships, married so many of her interests, so she applied for and secured the position.

For her first task, McElhatton conducted a thorough literature review focused on biological conservation and environmental and animal ethics.

She also sought real-world examples of conservation justice challenges. Through the latter, she saw how such efforts can have unique gender dynamics, which led her to want to learn more about how conservationism may inequitably harm women and those who identify as women.

McElhatton’s independent research is “closely related, but different” to what Tan is focusing on in his book, which will primarily look at three dimensions of conservation justice: distributive, deliberative, and cultural justice. “What Mia has done is identify a fourth question, that of gender justice, which I believe is a fruitful topic for her to explore and build upon,” Tan says. He notes that because of McElhatton’s work, his book will pay more attention to the distinct problem of gender justice than it would have otherwise. — KATELYN SILVA

A Solution for Cleaner Cars

Mining metals for electric car batteries can be wasteful and destructive. Andrew Ahn, C’26, ENG’26, spent the summer fine-tuning a chemical reaction that could make the process greener.

When Andrew Ahn, C’26, ENG’26, finished his summer research in the lab of chemistry professor Eric Schelter, he purposely left vials scattered around the lab. If all goes well, the orange cobalt compound powder in the equipment will crystallize, allowing Ahn to perform tests to better understand the compound’s chemical structure, a key component

STUDENT SPOTLIGHT

FALL /WINTER 2023

of a process to extract pure cobalt and nickel from mined ore and, potentially, old batteries.

Brooke Sietinsons

During a summer in the lab of Professor Eric Schelter, Andrew Ahn, C’26, ENG’26 (above), worked to reduce the environmental harm associated with lithium-ion batteries.

Ahn, who is double majoring in chemistry and mechanical engineering, worked in the Schelter Lab as part of his participation in the Vagelos Integrated Program in Energy Research. By testing different concentrations of metals and solutions, Ahn helped improve a chemical process that could reduce the environmental harm associated with the lithium-ion batteries expected to power a more electric future.

His drive for sustainability research derived from a lifelong love of cars. “If we want to keep driving cars,” Ahn says, “it’s crucial that we limit their climate impact.”

Schelter’s process more cleanly separates cobalt and nickel, two key battery metals, from other materials and from each other.

Ahn spent the summer optimizing the reaction between a particular cobaltcontaining compound and carbonate ions to maximize the amount of solid cobalt compound that could be filtered from the dissolved nickel compound.

He also helped the lab purchase “black mass,” a jumbled conglomeration of crushed car battery metals, to test whether the process can extract pure cobalt and nickel from the mess.

The processes to extract metals used in batteries is often environmentally destructive and can create economic structures that exploit local communities, Schelter says. And only five percent of lithium-ion batteries are recycled each year, partly because mining new materials is cheaper, Ahn says.

In March, Schelter filed a patent on the chemical reaction. That means Ahn’s work solving even seemingly small lab problems such as coaxing cobalt to crystallize could lead to an end product with real-world impact in the near future.

“I can see real applications for what I’m doing here,” Ahn says. — LAURA DATTARO

Make a difference in the world with the science of well-being Developed by one of the founders of positive psychology, Dr. Martin E.P. Seligman, Penn’s Master of Applied Positive Psychology educates students at the cutting edge of this transformative field.

• Complete nine graduate courses in one year of low-residency study • Design research-informed applications to benefit real-world organizations • Become part of a vibrant and enduring community of classmates, alumni, and faculty Learn how to transform your workplace, career, or community:

www.upenn.edu/MAPP

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Ambassador Council Adds Four Members The Penn Arts & Sciences Ambassador Council was created as a way for College alums to connect with Penn, keep learning, and give back to current students. Its members share a love of the liberal arts and a determination to build and strengthen the Penn Arts & Sciences network. “Ambassadors” come from all over the country and work in a variety of disciplines.

Ambassador Council initiatives include conceiving and creating the Ben Connect online platform, which allows alums to offer mentorship to current College students. The council also holds networking and career information events for alums and students, as well as salons with faculty.

HARINI CHUNDU, C’05, is part of the portfolio management team at Advent Capital. Before her time at Advent, she worked in various investment management roles. She has a background in cross-capital structure investing, spanning leveraged loans to equity. Chundu is the proud mother of two sons, Will and Robbie. She resides in New York City and Cold Spring, New York, with her children and husband, Andy, W’03. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in health and societies and, in 2011, earned an M.B.A. in the Value Investing Program from Columbia Business School.

STEVEN EIDELMAN, C’07, is the founder and CEO of Modern Animal, a next-generation veterinary care provider that is reimagining animal care by starting with humans. The company designs, develops, and operates its own clinics, as well as a digital platform that supports both members and employees. Prior to Modern Animal, Eidelman co-founded Whistle, a consumer electronics company that developed pet tracking and health monitoring devices and was acquired

by Mars, and worked as an investor at Spectrum Equity and a consultant at Bain and Company. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife Julia, two sons Leo and Roman, and dog Layla.

KEVIN J. CROSS, C’97, MED’02, is a plastic surgeon and owner of Cross Medical Group (CMG), an aesthetic plastic surgery and medical practice with offices in Philadelphia and Villanova, Pennsylvania. He started CMG in 2008 and now employs more than 40 team members and 12 full-time providers. He is a multi-year recipient of Philadelphia Magazine and Main Line Today Top Docs recognition. After earning his degree from the College, Cross graduated from the School of Medicine in 2002. He then completed a research fellowship at the Northwestern University School of Medicine before going on to train in general surgery and plastic surgery through a dual program at Cornell University and Columbia University. He lives near Philadelphia with his wife and three children.

ROBIN WEINBERG, C’91, is an oral historian and adjunct professor who creates and produces projects for community building and civil discourse. She also works with families, corporations, and nonprofits to record their unique stories and histories.

She previously founded Just So You Know, a nonprofit that helps people living with cancer record life histories, in honor of her Penn roommate, Gail Addlestone, C’91; and WestportVoices, a communitybuilding storytelling project. Weinberg is an officer and campaign manager of the Democratic Town Committee in Westport, Connecticut, where she lives with her husband, three daughters, and a small menagerie. She has a bachelor’s in psychology, a J.D. from the New York University School of Law, and a master’s in oral history from Columbia University.

The Ambassador Council added four new members this fall:

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Courtesy of Ambassador Council Members

Council members are ambassadors for Penn Arts & Sciences, its alums, and its students, working to engage alumni, create connections, and support the School through actions and gifts. If you’re interested in learning more about or joining the Ambassador Council, please contact Chrissy Bowdren, Senior Associate Director of Volunteer Programs, Penn Arts & Sciences, at cbowdren@sas.upenn.edu.

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INSPIRING COMMUNITY

Brooke Sietinsons

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

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

BRIAN LANG, C’08 Senior Manager, Human Resources at Comcast PHILADELPHIA, PA • PSYCHOLOGY MAJOR

“Listening only to your head will create a very short runway, while listening to your heart will sustain you for your entire career.”

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Brooke Sietinsons

Three Questions: On Laughter Corine Labridy, Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies, writes and teaches about laughter, as well as its role in building identity and making sense of tough times.

BY LAUREN REBECCA THACKER

L

aughter is having a moment, says Corine Labridy.

a Nobel-prize winning physicist relaxing on the beach like a Ken doll.

The assistant professor in the Department of Francophone, Italian, and Germanic Studies explains that particularly in cultures that engage heavily in online discourse and sharing, laughter is a currency that should be taken seriously. “We often process the news through comedy, which means that laughter is sometimes our main line to reality,” she says.

This fall, Labridy is teaching a class called Laughter and Tricky Topics. Omnia asked her to share some insights on the power, pleasure, and danger of laughter.

In her classroom, Labridy uses it to build trust and camaraderie. In recent years, sharing memes has become a form of love language, a way of expressing care.

Laughter is sometimes our main line to reality.

Thinking of one that recently made her chuckle, Labridy points to a tweet from the account @AlbertEinstein. A photo shows the scientist leaning against a rock on a beach. Another account retweeted the photo with the comment, “His job was beach,” referring to the repeated assertion in the summer hit Barbie that Ken’s job was “beach.”

“The thought of Einstein having a social media account is funny but to imagine him using it like a normal person is absolutely delightful,” Labridy says. It works because of the incongruity theory: Laughter can emerge when wildly opposed ideas unexpectedly come together—like, say, 62

LAUGHTER IS OFTEN SPONTANEOUS AND PLEASURABLE. DOES IT HAVE A SOCIAL FUNCTION? The French philosopher Henri Bergson proposed that laughter was a social corrector. So, in our society, it would be frowned upon to subject someone to corporal punishment for a small social faux pas. But peers laughing at that faux pas might nudge that person back into socially acceptable behavior. Laughter, then, can be an effective, gentler way to maintain social cohesion.

That said, we cannot underestimate the fear that laughter can cause. There are risks we don’t take and brilliant ideas that we don’t share because we are afraid of being laughed at. That’s just one dark side. Another, which philosophers have warned about, is that if we spend so much time seeking pleasure or laughter, we can have a false sense of happiness and get distracted from the bigger struggles at hand. In that way, laughter can also be a sort of social anesthetic.

SO, SHOULD WE AVOID LAUGHING AT OUR TROUBLES? Not at all. I absolutely, truly believe that laughter offers us an opportunity.

German philosopher Georg Hegel, for one, believed that laughter was a productive way to produce a social critique. So, while it is true that our hedonistic pursuit of laughter can have its problems, I also think that laughter can be a solution.

It’s perhaps the most effective way to speak truth to power; for marginalized communities, laughter has always been a way to resist. And I’ll add that some points are simply better made and, importantly, better received with laughter than with serious or academic discourse.

IF THE ACT OF LAUGHING CAN MEAN EVERYTHING FROM PLEASURE TO SURVIVAL, DOES THAT SUGGEST ANYTHING CAN BE FUNNY? The French literary theorist Gérard Genette, when asked if we can laugh at everything said, “Well, what else would we laugh at?” And while I do agree, there is a caveat, which is to always check whether we are punching up or punching down. Punching up would be speaking truth to power. And punching down would be making fun of a marginalized community or person.

I would say that nothing is inherently funny, but there are mechanisms that can work together to make a situation funny at a particular moment. At the end of the day, many factors must converge for a situation to be funny.

There are lots of theories and debates about what makes us laugh. It’s a subject about which scholars politely—or not so politely—agree to disagree.

TA K E

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OU

R

SU RV

ONLINE

EY!

CO N T E N T OMNIA.SAS.UPENN.EDU Be sure to visit Omnia online for multimedia content that covers all aspects of Penn Arts & Sciences research, including faculty, students, alums, and events. Below is just a small sampling of recent highlights.

It’s just 2 questions.

The first 300 people to fill it out will get a Penn Arts & Sciences winter hat.

OMNIA PODCAST: WE HAVEN’T PASSED THE CLIMATE TIPPING POINT...YET (AUDIO) Climate scientist Michael Mann discusses the unprecedented weather events of late and why there’s still time to act.

DATA DRIVEN DISCOVERY INITIATIVE (VIDEO) Inaugural co-directors Bhuvnesh Jain, Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor in the Natural Sciences in the Department of Physics & Astronomy, and Greg Ridgeway, Professor and Chair of Criminology, talk about the new initiative.

PATHWAYS: SARA HANSSON, C’23, W’23 (VIDEO) Hansson intended to study earth science, but experiences at Penn allowed her instead to follow a passion for Medieval and Renaissance studies and pursue a law career.

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 & Sciences. In addition, the Penn Arts & Sciences Vimeo channel houses dozens of videos featuring faculty, students, and alums.

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Brooke Sietinsons

INSOMNIA

Office Artifacts: Eric J. Schelter Discover the story behind several of the Hirschmann-Makineni Professor of Chemistry’s favorite office items.

I

’ve occupied this office in the Vagelos building of the chemistry complex for almost 15 years, having taken it over from legendary organometallic chemist Professor Brad Wayland. The office has exceptional views of the Fisher Fine Arts Library. I’ve enjoyed contemplating the gargoyles and watching redtailed hawks perch atop the flagpole on the library’s roof.

Next year, my group will move to the new Vagelos Laboratory for Energy Science and Technology at Walnut and 32nd Streets. We are excited for the move and for the new opportunities for collaboration and discovery that will bring, but it does feel bittersweet—I started my career at Penn in this office and have had so many great conversations with students, postdocs, and colleagues here over the years. Here’s hoping the next resident of this office finds as much joy here as I did.

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Firefighter’s Helmet In 2015, a grad student had a small fire in a fume hood in the lab adjacent to my office and I responded by putting it out with an extinguisher. As a result, I got to meet Chief of Fire and Emergency Services Eugene Janda, one of the nicest guys on Penn’s campus. Dan Burke, the chemistry department’s building coordinator, had this hat made in recognition of my firefighting skills.

Wind Turbine Rotor Parts These were sent to me by a wind turbine manufacturer. The small silvery pieces at the edges are permanent magnets made of energy-critical rare earth metals.

We have crushed and dissolved the magnets to test our chemistry related to recycling of rare earths. I also use the rotors to demonstrate to students the strength of industrialgrade rare earth magnets.

Queer Coffee Mug A Christmas present from my husband last year and a useful conversation starter for queer students.

Mineral Samples During a conference trip in 2019, I collected these samples from the mine site where rare earth elements were first identified in Ytterby, Sweden.

The samples contain the mineral gadolinite, named for the Finnish chemist Johan Gadolin. Though we now know how many rare earth elements the mineral includes, it’s still challenging to purify them efficiently and sustainably.

Framed “Periodic Table of Rejected Elements” This image, by Michael Gerber and Jonathan Schwarz, appeared in the August 1999 issue of The Atlantic. It was a gift from legendary School of Engineering and Applied Science Dean Emeritus Eduardo Glandt. I’m a particular fan of “anodyne” (symbol A) and “crouton” (symbol Cr).

Bust of Nefertiti A reproduction of the famous Nefertiti bust in the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin in Germany.

This one I inherited from my grandmother, Dorothy Schelter.

She was a brilliant and graceful educator and an inspiration to me. Of the original bust, Ludwig Borchardt, the Egyptologist, historian, and head of the 1912 Tell el-Amarna excavation, wrote: “Description is useless, must be seen.”

©Brian Lanker Archive

FALL /WINTER 2023

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hirty-plus years ago, when photojournalist Brian Lanker approached Mary Frances Berry about being part of what would become his book, I Dream a World: Portraits of Black Women Who Changed America, she says she initially rejected the idea. “How could I be in the group of distinguished Black women I had long admired?” recalls Berry, Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social

LAST LOOK

Thought Emerita. Pause on any single “I trudged with him up to a park near my moment in her illustrious career—when house much too early in the morning for she was first female head of a major U.S. me so, as he explained, he could catch just research institution or chair of the U.S. the right light,” she says. For seven months Commission on Civil Rights or honored in 2023, 34 years after the original book with the Nelson Mandela Award by the published, the resulting image hung at the South African government for her social Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery justice activism—and there’s no question along with Lanker’s renderings of tennis she belonged. But Berry needed convincing, star Althea Gibson, activist-scholar Angela and luckily, Lanker eventually succeeded.

Davis, and many others.

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