THE WOLF HUMANITIES CENTER AT THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA IS AN INNOVATIVE RESEARCH CENTER STRIVING TO DEMONSTRATE HOW VITAL THE HUMANITIES ARE TO ALL ASPECTS OF OUR LIVES. THE CENTER SUPPORTS AN ANNUAL THEME-BASED FELLOWSHIP PROGRAM, A SERIES OF PUBLIC EVENTS, AND A VARIETY OF RESEARCH-RELATED ACTIVITIES FOR MEMBERS OF THE PENN ACADEMIC COMMUNITY. WITH THESE AND OTHER EFFORTS, SUCH AS OUR HUMANITIES AT LARGE COLLABORATIONS, WE INVITE PEOPLE OF ALL AGES AND PLACES TO JOIN US IN A HUMANISTIC EXPLORATION OF THE MOST IMPORTANT ISSUES OF OUR TIME.
STAY CONNECTED wolfhumanities.upenn.edu
April 12, 2024
Wolf Humanities Center
School of Arts & Sciences
University of Pennsylvania
Class of 1978 Orrery Pavilion
Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts
Van Pelt Library
3420 Walnut Street, Philadelphia
A program of the Wolf Humanities Center's 2023–2024 Forum on Revolution
UNDERGRADUATE HUMANITIES FORUM RESEARCH FELLOWS, 2023–2024
Dhivya Arasappan
Victoria Avanesov
Sergio Emilio Carballido
Jiayi Li
Olivia McClary*
Jean Paik
Liam Phillips
Tova Tachau
Hertha Torre Gallego
Zhangyang (Charlie) Xie
Alex Yim
Yijian (Davie) Zhou
UNDERGRADUATE HUMANITIES FORUM DIRECTOR
Josephine Park
School of Arts and Sciences President's Distinguished Professor of English
University of Pennsylvania
*Fellow during Fall 2023 term only
WELCOME TO “CRAFTING REVOLUTION
S ,” the 23rd annual Undergraduate Humanities Forum Research Conference. We are excited to host you at the Kislak Center today, and eager to share and explore this year’s theme, Revolution, inviting you to reflect on breaking with the old and engaging with cycles of calm and chaos. As mentioned in Topic Director Dr. Huda J. Fakhreddine’s remarks for the Wolf Humanities Center's 2023–2024 Forum on Revolution, “although we tend to think of revolutions as sudden, radical, and forward-looking, the term carries within itself the need to account and look back, a return and a reconfiguration.” Most importantly, “revolution is therefore a disruption necessarily followed by a taking of account and a re-establishing of another order.” We are here today to explore those reconfigurations and new orders through research in the humanities.
Over the past year, the richness and interdisciplinary emphasis of the Wolf Humanities Center has allowed us to explore revolution from multiple dimensions. As Fellows, we have spent time workshopping our research while engaging with meaningful, revolutionary work being done in our communities. We have visited local institutions including the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, where we are today, and VietLead, a local Vietnamese grassroots organization where we learned about cultural crops and self-determination. Further, daytrips to renowned institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture have fostered diverse perspectives and approaches to ideas of revolution and the re-establishment of new orders. These experiences have filtered through our research, where we have explored narratives of global feminism and decolonization, as well as pro-human struggles and the radical transformation of artistic, religious, and philosophical terrains.
Our conference today is organized in three panels, as we bring together stories from studies of literature, religious studies, sociology, philosophy, and history, among others. After opening remarks from Charlie and Hertha, Revolutionary Thoughts will discuss decolonization and labor rights. The second panel, Revolutionary Bodies, covers anti-racist, religious, reproductive, and environmental reforms. Finally, Revolutionary Dimensions will focus on Slavic studies and their relationship with revolution, both in theory and practice. Closing remarks will be provided by Dr. Josephine Park, director of the Undergraduate Humanities Forum, whose help and support has been instrumental in organizing this conference and guiding this group through the year-long fellowship.
The Undergraduate Humanities Forum and its meetings and events would not be possible without the support of the Wolf Humanities Center staff, as well as the collaboration of faculty advisors, panel moderators, and librarians across the University of Pennsylvania’s campus. We deeply appreciate the work of Director Dr. Jamal J. Elias, Associate Director Sara Varney, as well as Coordinators Pamela Horn and Steven Perez, and thank them for their constant support and eagerness to expand undergraduate research in the humanities.
We thank you all for joining us today and for your continued support.
Hertha Torre Gallego and Zhangyang (Charlie) Xie
2023–24 Executive Board and Research Fellows, Undergraduate Humanities Forum
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The Wolf Humanities Center's 2023–2024 Undergraduate Research Fellows thank the following faculty for advising our projects:
Siarhei Biareishyk
Kristen Ghodsee
John L. Jackson, Jr.
Andi Johnson
D. Brian Kim
Shaon Lahiri
Amy Lutz
Adam Mohr
Mila Nazyrova
Jean-Michel Rabaté
Donovan Schaefer
Chi-ming Yang
We also thank the Wolf Humanities Center’s 2023–2024 Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows and Research Associate for participating in our workshopping sessions:
Alessandra Amin
Josué Chávez
José Carlos Díaz Zanelli
Alex Kreger
Timothy Malone
Melissa Reynolds
Lastly, we are grateful for the service of our panel moderators:
Ramah McKay
Kevin M.F. Platt
Dagmawi Woubshet
9:00–9:30 AM
BREAKFAST AND REGISTRATION
9:30 AM
OPENING REMARKS
Hertha Torre Gallego and Zhangyang (Charlie) Xie, Executive Board and Research Fellows, Undergraduate Humanities Forum
9:45–11:30 AM
REVOLUTIONARY THOUGHTS
MODERATOR: Dagmawi Woubshet, Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Endowed Term Associate Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania
Alex Yim | English
Kubo Walks: Character, Global Modernism, and the Literary World-System
Jiayi Li | Intellectual History, Economics
Translating the Marxist Teleology into Rural China: The Conceptualization of the ‘Feudal Relation of Land’ and the Agrarian Revolution under the United Front, 1924-1927
Yijian (Davie) Zhou | Philosophy, Psychology
The Genealogy of Colonial Racism in the Works of Frantz Fanon
Jean Paik | English
Embodied Resistance: Collectivizing the Body in the Literatures of Korean Women Factory Workers
1:00–2:45 PM
REVOLUTIONARY BODIES
MODERATOR: Ramah McKay, Associate Professor of History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania
Zhangyang (Charlie) Xie | Africana Studies; Science, Technology, and Society
Grappling Culture: How the Black Panther Party Addressed Colonial and Urban Anxieties through Martial Arts
Sergio Emilio Carballido | Religious Studies, Mathematical Economics
La Santa Muerte: A Revolution to Mexico’s Popular Religiosity and its National Identity
Hertha Torre Gallego | Health and Societies, Hispanic Studies
A Partial Revolution: Engaging with Realities of Abortion Reform in Argentina
Dhivya Arasappan | Health & Societies, Biology
A Climate-Health Revolution: Examining Novel Framings of Climate Change as a Health Crisis
3:00–4:30 PM
REVOLUTIONARY DIMENSIONS
MODERATOR: Kevin M.F. Platt, Professor of Russian and East European Studies, University of Pennsylvania
Liam Phillips | Comparative Literature, Russian and East European Studies
Form and Figure in the Russian Avant-Garde: From Mikhail Kuzmin's Stroinost' to Filmic Montage
Tova Tachau | Biochemistry, Comparative Literature, Russian and East European Studies
The Futurist Dynamism of Dimensionality: Embryos of Artistic Possibility in Malevich and Khlebnikov
Victoria Avanesov | Comparative Literature, Philosophy
Victory Over the Sun: Reimagining Russian Suprematist Works Through Hermeneutics
4:30 PM
CLOSING REMARKS
Josephine Park, Director, Undergraduate Humanities Forum; School of Arts and Sciences President's Distinguished Professor of English; University of Pennsylvania
ABSTRACTS
Dhivya Arasappan
Health & Societies, Biology; CAS, 2024
A Climate-Health Revolution: Examining Novel Framings of Climate Change as a Health Crisis
In 2019, the US Call to Action on Climate, Health, and Equity named climate change the “greatest public health challenge of the 21st century.” The past ten to fifteen years have seen tremendous growth in the climate-health nexus with the creation of wide-reaching global consortiums, centers, and research journals, and development of degree and training programs. Using historical and ethnographic approaches to map the emergence and gradual institutionalization of the “climate medicine” field, I attend to how and why US physicians have recognized and mobilized in response to climate change and its health impacts amidst the many potential and ongoing complexities of doing so. I argue that physicians and the medical community have sought to address climate change through largely non-reductive approaches—from educating patients and policymakers and seeking to address the upstream causes that impact patient health, while leveraging scientific expertise and authority. This project offers insight into medical activism, the climate-health movement, curricular reform, and processes like medicalization, and professionalization to understand how medical and academic communities may inspire novel responses to the climate crisis.
Victoria Avanesov
Comparative Literature, Philosophy; CAS, 2026
Victory Over the Sun: Reimagining Russian Suprematist Works Through Hermeneutics
This research aims to provide a critical examination of the Russian avant-garde, focusing on the iconic Suprematist opera "Victory Over the Sun." The research delves into the linguistic complexities of the Zaum language and its manifestation within the opera, which was a radical departure from conventional narrative and aesthetic forms. A revolutionary work at the time of its debut in 1913, the opera integrated Kazimir Malevich's Suprematist visual principles with Aleksei Kruchenykh's fragmented Zaum poetry, resulting in a performance that eschewed traditional storytelling for abstract ideological expression. My research navigates the nuanced translation challenges posed by the morphological peculiarities of Zaum, aiming to preserve its original spirit while addressing feminist critiques of the opera's inherent and historical misogyny. The study advocates for a translation approach that maintains Zaum's objectivity while incorporating necessary subjective interpretations to resonate with contemporary feminist discourse.
Sergio Emilio Carballido
Religious Studies, Mathematical Economics; CAS, 2026
La Santa Muerte: A Revolution to Mexico’s Popular Religiosity and its National Identity
In Tepito, Mexico, a neighborhood with high rates of crime, a new religious icon is emerging: La Santa Muerte, The Saint Death. Instead of worshiping the regular Catholic saints, people are switching to this new figure. The Catholic Church has been against The Saint Death, calling it satanic, and providing alternatives to it such
as promoting the worship of St. Jude Thaddeus, known for solving hopeless causes. However, this has not been enough to deter Santa Muerte’s believers. This paper explores to what extent La Santa Muerte is a revolution to popular religiosity and Mexican identity in Mexico City. It analyzes why people worship The Saint Death, its uniqueness in comparison to other canonized Saints, and the historical relationship between The Saint Death, Catholicism, and Santeria.
Jiayi Li
Intellectual History, Economics; CAS 2025
Translating the Marxist Teleology into Rural China: The Conceptualization of the ‘Feudal Relation of Land’ and the Agrarian Revolution under the United Front, 1924-1927
My project investigates the agrarian revolution that took place from 1924 to 1927 in the Chinese countryside, with a particular emphasis on the conceptualization of the “ancient and feudal relation of land” which was proposed by the Communist International as its theoretical guideline. The applicability of such an idea – established largely upon the Marxist doctrine and the European context – to rural China became a persistent point of debate between the Comintern and the Chinese Nationalist Party and contributed to the eventual collapse of the agrarian revolution. I want to explore the generation, perception, and reception of such an idea between factions in the revolution, hoping to assess the effect of this conflict of ideas on the Chinese agrarian revolution.
Jean Paik
English; CAS, 2024
Embodied
Resistance: Collectivizing the Body in the Literatures of Korean Women Factory Workers
Export manufacturing zones were sites of transnational capital, labor, and resistance in late twentieth-century South Korea. Established in the 1970s-80s, free export zones primarily employed women workers who were subject to highly precarious and exploitative labor conditions. My project examines written materials produced by Korean women factory workers in the form of the public appeal letter alongside poetry from the tradition of minjung literature (“minjung” referring to the people, or the masses) to explore how the body is rendered and represented. The materials I examine collectivize the bodies of Korean women workers precisely in the representation of these bodies in their most stripped, fragmented terms. The texts’ attention to the individual body is conversely expansive in its impact, powerfully articulating the shared conditions of Korean workers in the context of the export manufacturing zone.
Liam Phillips
Comparative Literature, Russian and East European Studies; CAS 2024
Form and Figure in the Russian Avant-Garde: From Mikhail Kuzmin's Stroinost' to Filmic Montage
Mikhail Kuzmin’s (1872-1936) Wings (Kryl’ia, 1906) was published in a radical era of transition in Russia: Wings is the first gay Russian novel, spurring shock and disapproval in literary circles and readers. The semi-autobiographical Wings reflects Mikhail Kuzmin’s own conflicts with the revolutionary upheaval around him. Kuzmin’s
novel is in search of a new community defined by its focus on a subjective form of reading and study of texts, images, and languages outside of the general Russian readership. Through Wings, Kuzmin grasps his readership with a textual montage of sensations that sets itself in opposition to the political newspapers of the period. My project seeks to define how Wings desires to create community in its readership, ushering a revolution unlike the political 1905 Russian Revolution.
Tova Tachau
Biochemistry, Comparative Literature, Russian and East European Studies; CAS 2025
The Futurist Dynamism of Dimensionality: Embryos of Artistic Possibility in Malevich and Khlebnikov
“We are destroying your old world,” declared Futurist poet, Vladimir Mayakovsky, to a captive audience at The Moscow Society of Art Lovers in 1913. Indeed, with Tolstoy and Dostoevsky thrown “overboard from the ship of Modernity,” Russian Futurism exhorted a break with the aesthetic confines of preceding generations and an embrace of the urbanism and technology of the early 20th century, epitomized in their aptly named manifesto, “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste” (“Poshchechina obshchestvennomu vkusu”). Iconoclastic, dynamic, and provocative, Futurists revolutionized the very fundamentals of literature and art: consonants became color and texture, vowels became time and space, and geometric planes became pools of pure intuition. Through Kazimir Malevich’s advent of Suprematism, a method of non-objective creation, and Viktor Khlebnikov’s experimentation with zaum, or ‘beyonsense’ language, both artists invented novel dimensions to expand the human perceptual apparatus beyond the confines of the phenomenal world and, in doing so, freed creative intuition from the shackles of utilitarian reason. This project queries the role of dimensionality in these figures’ respective approaches to a revolutionary reconceptualization of art as such. Both Futurists thus imbue their art with the revolutionary potential to escape existing dimensions and model new phenomenological frameworks: “economy” and zaum, respectively. Through an interdisciplinary comparison of these manifestations of dimensionality—via both authors’ theoretical writings, Malevich’s visual works, and Khlebnikov’s poetry—this project argues that Malevich and Khlebnikov’s invention of novel dimensions succeeds in expanding the human perceptual apparatus via two disparate, though interwoven, paths of creative intuition which lead beyond the utilitarian world into a nebulous cosmos of primordial, spiritual, and transcendental significance.
Hertha Torre Gallego Executive Board, Undergraduate Humanities Forum Health and Societies, Hispanic Studies; CAS 2024A Partial Revolution: Engaging with Realities of Abortion Reform in Argentina
In December 2020, the Argentinian Congress legalized abortion through the first 14 weeks of pregnancy, exemplifying the power of a massive feminist mobilization and starting a women’s rights movement revolution in Latin America. However, high rates of adolescent pregnancy and lack of access to reproductive education and healthcare remain high drivers of inequality and socioeconomic differences in Argentina, showcasing the difficulty of implementing this abortion policy. Thus, this project plans to study the existing gap between progressive policy and lived realities of patients and providers in Buenos Aires, Argentina. By drawing connections between history, sociology, and anthropology, this project will reveal broader attitudes
or the utilization of abortion resources and practices, particularly related to personal experiences, access to healthcare services, and cultural beliefs.
Zhangyang (Charlie) Xie Executive Board, Undergraduate Humanities Forum Africana Studies; Science, Technology, and Society; CAS 2024
Grappling Culture: How the Black Panther Party Addressed Colonial and Urban Anxieties through Martial Arts
Existing literature on the Black Panther Party and martial arts mostly focuses on how martial arts contributed to the Black Panther Party survival programs. Yet, few if any have focused on the role, intention, and effect of The Black Panther newspaper in promoting martial arts programs of the party. This paper fills in the gap by systematically analyzing The Black Panther newspaper as an attempt to help further explain the Party’s stance on Oriental culture and American cultural politics using its representation of martial arts as heuristic and framing device. I argue that the Black Panther Party’s martial arts, as a part of survival programs, is an American invention that addressed the party’s colonial and urban anxieties. This paper contributes to the growing literature on Afro-Asian relations and cultural hybridity and suggests that the Black Atlantic culture is simultaneously Asian.
Alex Yim English; CAS 2025
Kubo Walks: Character, Global Modernism, and the Literary World-System
Departing from studies of global modernism and the literary-world system as issues of genre, scale, and vernacular, my project examines what happens to such discourses with an emphasis on the role of character, type, and typicality. My project focuses on the Korean modernist writer Park Taewon’s novella A Day in the Life of Kubo, the Novelist (1934), where, through its titular character Kubo, I trace a genealogy of its character type across its literary influences and interlocutors. Drawing on Pascale Casanova’s literary world system and Joe Cleary’s discussion of realism and modernism, this project considers how character can contend and constellate the grey areas surrounding existing theories of global modernism and literature.
Yijian (Davie) Zhou Philosophy, Psychology; CAS 2024
The Genealogy of Colonial Racism in the Works of Frantz Fanon “One day,” Michel Foucault postulates, “the history of what would be called revolutionary subjectivity should be written.” People’s relations towards revolutionary experiences change, and Foucault thinks at a certain point one influential idea emerged: revolutionary processes could transform people’s personality, giving birth to revolutionary characters. I will follow Foucault’s suggestion, but limit myself to investigate the origins of this idea; more specifically, I want to test Foucault’s hypothesis that the origin should be found during 1840-1850. I will first give an overview of the traces of this idea in the writings of the revolutionaries in the postWWII twentieth century, especially Fanon and Mao, at the moment when theorization of revolutionary subjectivity became a prominent topic of discussion. Then I will explore how revolutionaries of 1848 and revolutionaries of the 1789 French Revolution relate to their revolutionary experiences, which would test Foucault’s hypothesis on revolutionary subjectivity. At the end I discuss the research’s contemporary relevance.
