The Wolf Humanities Center is the University of Pennsylvania’s main hub for interdisciplinary humanities research and public programming. Our mission is to show how vital the humanities are to the life of the mind and the health of society, and how deeply they connect to urgent questions in all fields of knowledge. The Center hosts annual theme-based fellowship programs as well as public events and research-related activities. Along with other efforts, such as our Humanities at Large collaborations, we invite people of all ages and places to join us in exploring both timely and timeless questions through the “thinking arts.”
UNDERGRADUATE HUMANITIES FORUM RESEARCH CONFERENCE
March 27, 2026
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 2025–2026 Forum on Truth
UNDERGRADUATE HUMANITIES FORUM RESEARCH FELLOWS, 2025–2026
Saanvi Agarwal
Max Brody
Kara Butler
Sergio Emilio Carballido
Cristina Diaz
Thalia Graeff
Noa Rubinstein
Eric Ryu
Ella Sohn
Izzy Welsh
Ryan Wolff
Arwen Zhang
UNDERGRADUATE HUMANITIES FORUM DIRECTOR, 2025–2026
Emily Steiner
A. M. Rosenthal Professor of English University of Pennsylvania
Welcome, all, to Unlocking the Truth, the 25th annual research conference of the Wolf Humanities Center’s Undergraduate Humanities Forum at the University of Pennsylvania. We are thrilled to host you in the Kislak Center to celebrate the humanities and share the work we have been developing over the past year.
Our 2025–2026 theme, Truth, may initially appear self-evident: something fixed, stable, that we all think we know. And yet, as our conversations quickly revealed, truth is anything but simple. What do we mean when we invoke “truth”? Who has the authority to define it? How is it preserved, distorted, inherited, or manipulated? And how might the humanities help us think more critically about truth’s relationship to power, memory, and history?
Over the course of the year, the Wolf Undergraduate Fellows have approached truth not as a static answer, but as a process: something that is constructed through narrative, archive, performance, material culture, and political discourse. Through visits to museums and rare book archives, as well as conversations with accomplished scholars and authors, we have explored how truth is negotiated and contested, finding unexpected connections between medieval mapmakers and contemporary artists in America. We bring together voices from the studies of literature, art history, anthropology, philosophy, and even international politics, reflecting the interdisciplinary nature of this inquiry.
Learning from one another has been as much a part of the fellowship experience as the development of our independent research projects. We hope that the richness of the interdisciplinary work and the spirit of the Wolf Humanities Center shine through as we share our research in dialogue with one another.
Today’s conference is organized into four panels that reflect the diverse ways our fellows engage with these questions. After opening remarks from Emily Steiner, Director of the Undergraduate Humanities Forum, we will begin with “Tracing Truth.” This will be followed by “Lived Truth,” then “Narrating Truth.” Our final presentation will be “State-Sanctioned Truth.”
The Undergraduate Humanities Forum would not be possible without the incredible support of the Wolf Humanities Center staff, as well as the collaboration of faculty advisors, panel moderators, librarians, and museum curators across Penn’s campus. We are extremely grateful for the work of Director Emily Steiner, Associate Director Sara Varney, as well as Administrative Coordinators Pamela Horn and Erin Bailey. The wisdom and guidance of Professor Steiner, who has worked tirelessly with the Undergraduate Research Fellows this year, has been invaluable. These individuals have helped foster a very special environment of scholarly exchange and camaraderie, which we are so excited to celebrate here today.
We thank all of you for coming out today and for your continued support.
Sergio Emilio Carballido and Izzy Welsh 2025–2026 Executive Board and Research Fellows Undergraduate Humanities Forum
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The Wolf Humanities Center's 2025–2026 Undergraduate Research Fellows also thank the following people for their support this year.
Julia Alekseyeva
Eiichiro Azuma
Ericka Beckman
Macy Berryman
S. Pearl Brilmyer
Jim English
William Ewald
Lynne Farrington
Al Filreis
Sarah Gronningsater
Sarah Guérin
Chris Halsted
Emma Hart
Ayako Kano
Ada Kuskowski
Bakirathi Mani
Justin McDaniel
Alicia Meyer
Rahul Mukherjee
Benjamin Nathans
Tiffany Nguyen
John Pollack
Keisha-Khan Y. Perry
Sophia Rabaté
Michaile Rainey
Sophia Rosenfeld
Paul Saint-Amour
Allison Schmidt
Spencer Small
Emily Steiner
Melissa Teixeira
Jolyon Thomas
Lilith Todd
Julia Verkholantsev
Ellie Webb
Christine Woody
UNDERGRADUATE HUMANITIES FORUM RESEARCH CONFERENCE
Wolf Humanities Center, University of Pennsylvania
8:45–9:15 AM BREAKFAST
9:15 AM
OPENING REMARKS
Emily Steiner, Director, Undergraduate Humanities Forum; A. M. Rosenthal Professor of English
9:30–11:00 AM TRACING TRUTH
Moderator: Ada Kuskowski, Associate Professor of History; Penn Faculty Fellow, Wolf Humanities Center
Arwen Zhang | Finance, International Studies; Wharton, CAS, 2028
"A Collection of the Most Curious Facts": Truth, Travel, and SelfRepresentation in the Works of Gerald of Wales
Eric Ryu | Health and Societies, History, Classical Studies; CAS, 2026
"The Boy on the Benches": Into the Classrooms of the Scottish Enlightenment
Cristina Diaz | History, Linguistics; CAS, 2026
The Etymological Method in Alphonsine Chronicle
11:15 AM–12:45 PM LIVED TRUTH
Moderator: Tiffany Nguyen, PhD Candidate, Classical Studies; Doctoral Fellow, Wolf Humanities Center
Ella Sohn | English; CAS, 2026
In Name Only: Mapping Nonhuman Personhood in Richard Powers' Gain and The Overstory
Max Brody | English, Native and Indigenous Studies; CAS, 2026
Crazed, Psychotic, and...Desperate?: Prototypes of "The Sick Woman Theory" in 20th Century Theory and Literature
Sergio Emilio Carballido | Religious Studies, Mathematical Economics; CAS, 2026
Accessing Truth Through Mind: A Comparative Study of Ratnakīrti's Epistemology and Nāgārjuna's Mādhyamaka
March 27, 2026
Class of 1978 Orrery Pavilion
Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts Van Pelt Library
12:45–1:45 PM
EXHIBIT, LEA LIBRARY
Please join us for a special pop-up exhibit featuring a selection of items that shaped the Fellows’ research and creative inquiry this year.
1:45–3:15 PM NARRATING TRUTH
Moderator: Julia Alekseyeva, Assistant Professor of English and Cinema & Media Studies; Penn Faculty Fellow, Wolf Humanities Center
Saanvi Agarwal | English, Legal Studies & Business Ethics, Statistics; CAS, Wharton, 2026
Inheritance of Post-Colonial Trauma in the Modern Diaspora
Izzy Welsh | English, Cinema & Media Studies; CAS, 2026
Beyond the Self: The Ethics of Authorial Voice in the Poetics of Patti Smith
Thalia Graeff | History of Art; CAS, 2026
Artists' Books by Women: Selections from Penn Libraries
3:30–5:00 PM
STATE-SANCTIONED TRUTH
Moderator: Spencer Small, Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities, Wolf Humanities Center
Kara Butler | Communication, Anthropology; CAS, 2026
Play Fighting: Childhood through the Lens of WWII Propaganda
Ryan Wolff | History; CAS, 2026
A Shift in Statecraft: Human Rights and U.S. Intervention in Latin America's Southern Cone During the Late Cold War
Noa Rubinstein | History, International Relations; CAS, 2026
Truth on Trial: International Influences on Canada's Truth & Reconciliation Commission
5:00 PM
CLOSING REMARKS
Sergio Emilio Carballido and Izzy Welsh, Executive Board and Research Fellows, Undergraduate Humanities Forum
ABSTRACTS
Saanvi Agarwal
English, Legal Studies & Business Ethics, Statistics; CAS, Wharton, 2026
Inheritance of Post-Colonial Trauma in the Modern Diaspora
This project examines how South Asian women writers use literary form to reconstruct truth in the aftermath of colonialism. It focuses on the mother-daughter authors Anita and Kiran Desai, and traces how narrative experimentation—nonlinearity, fractured voice, magical realism—becomes a means of articulating identities shaped by generational trauma, diaspora, and postcolonial dislocation. Rather than relying on historical or empirical truth, the Desais’ fiction engages with layered, affective truths that emerge in the silences of official record. Drawing on postcolonial and feminist theory, this project argues that literary form enables new modes of truthtelling in contexts where state narratives and inherited structures have failed. It contributes to ongoing conversations about how fiction functions as a medium of epistemic resistance and identity formation.
Max Brody
English, Native and Indigenous Studies; CAS, 2026
Crazed, Psychotic, and…Desperate?: Prototypes of “The Sick Woman Theory” in 20th Century Theory and Literature
Conceived in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Johanna Hedva’s “Sick Woman Theory” (2020) incisively critiques how emotional distress from chronic illness is framed by medical institutions. This project aims to explore the historical tenets of Hedva’s critique, particularly attending to 20th century theory that may have shaped Hedva’s affective experience today. Focusing on Sigmund Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia (1917) and Michél Foucault’s The Birth of the Clinic (1963) as opposing schools of thought on the role of medicine, the project will analyze how Freud’s position affirms the gendering and medicalization of the body while Foucault attempts to deconstruct Freudian “truth” surrounding medicine. Then, employing Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963) as a case study of the mid-20th century feminine psyche, it will examine how Freud’s psychoanalysis imposes itself on Esther’s understanding of self, and how Foucault undermines the psychological analysis that Plath asserts in the narrative. All throughout, it aims to trace the relevance of these theoretical frameworks and literary works to postmodernist feminist theory, drawing salient connections to both Hedva’s experience and academic critique.
Kara Butler
Communication, Anthropology; CAS, 2026
Play Fighting: Comparative Attitudes on Children in American and Japanese Propaganda
During global conflicts, propaganda produced by the powers involved is an important vehicle into the ideologies shaping the societies at war. Often, especially during the second World War, children became a common topic in propaganda campaigns. However, an analysis of World War II propaganda from both Japan and the United States, we can see that there is commonality. Despite being on opposing
sides of a highly ideological war, and often depicting each other negatively, there is common ground between the two countries in how children are viewed and targeted by propaganda in each society.
Sergio Emilio Carballido
Religious Studies, Mathematical Economics; CAS, 2026
Executive Board, Undergraduate Humanities Forum
Accessing Truth Through Mind: A Comparative Study of Ratnakīrti’s Epistemology and Nāgārjuna’s Mādhyamaka
Following a tradition that can be traced at least from Descartes, western philosophy has assumed the subject-object duality, questioning constantly the interactions and characteristics of both notions. Can the subject access reality? Descartes conceptualized the mind (the thinking “I”) as fundamentally distinct from external reality. Heidegger, in a revolutionary approach, takes the being of the subject (Dasein) to be intimately intertwined with the world—however, he still preserves a meaningful, if more fluid, distinction between Dasein (the subject) and the objects it encounters. On the other hand, Buddhist philosophers have taken a more radical approach. Ratnakīrti’s emphasis on the mind’s conceptual constructs and Nāgārjuna’s insistence that nothing has an independent essence both challenge the classical subject–object duality even questioning the existence of reality. This paper dissects Ratnakīrti’s and Nāgārjuna’s arguments to challenge the notion that our mind can access truth.
Cristina Diaz
History, Linguistics; CAS, 2026
The Etymological Method in Alphonsine Chronicle
The etymological method was an important tool for medieval historians. Their main source was Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae sive origines, which outlined the principles and methods of how to derive etymologies. This tradition was taken up by many medieval authors, who used these principles in their historical writing. My thesis examines instances of etymologia in the General Estoria, written in the 13th century under Alfonso X of Castile. What is especially interesting is how the compilers adapted and revised etymologies they encountered in their predecessors' works, and whether the treatment of the sources varied based on the language of the source text.
Thalia Graeff
History of Art; CAS, 2026
Artists' Books by Women: Selections from Penn Libraries
This curatorial project brings together contemporary artists’ books made by women that center women as their primary subject. Drawn from the University of Pennsylvania’s Special Collections and Libraries, the works presented in this mock-exhibition demonstrate how the artists’ book has become a powerful tool through which women artists explore a broad spectrum of themes—from feminist engagements with history to reflections on personal memory to constructions of entirely fictional narratives. In addition to examining the content these books present,
this project centers the physicality of the artists’ book itself as a site for meaningmaking. It considers questions such as how the book’s material qualities contribute to its message, and how the portrayal of information within the book form—through its tactile, sequential, and intimate modes of engagement—differs from more static, public displays such as exhibitions or installations. By bringing these works into dialogue, this project highlights how women artists use the book as a venue to revisit and reinterpret historical and personal narratives, ultimately revealing the artists’ book as a powerful tool for constructing new records—new “truths”—that shape how women’s histories and experiences are documented and understood.
Noa Rubinstein
History, International Relations; CAS, 2026
Truth on Trial: International Influences on Canada's Truth & Reconciliation Commission
The concept of truth and reconciliation commissions was created in the 1980s in Latin America and most famously used in post-apartheid South Africa. Since then, there have been dozens of such commissions, which have become a typical way for post-conflict and transitional governments to deal with their past. Canada’s creation of a commission as part of the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement marked a shift to the use of these commissions in liberal democracies. While the commission was the result of Canada’s particular history, the litigation involved in its formation and operation was heavily influenced by the international “duty to remember” and “right to truth.” The integration of these norms into the Canadian court system reflects the evolution of approach to state memory, where truth is not only prescribed by the Crown but can be shaped through people’s involvement in litigation and the judiciary.
Eric Ryu
Health and Societies, History, Classical Studies; CAS, 2026
"The Boy on the Benches": Into the Classrooms of the Scottish Enlightenment
Student lecture notes have been, for the most part, neglected by histories concerning the educational tradition of the Scottish Enlightenment. In many of these histories, official university histories, or even professor lecture notes, are the far more popular choice of archival material. This neglect is not without cause. It rises from the distinct particularities of later eighteenth-century and early nineteenthcentury Scottish lecture notes; namely, in the difficulty of reaching past the silence of the archives to access the perspective of the "boy on the benches." While it is true that authorship, date of creation, and marks of individual creation are sometimes impossible to uncover from documents produced by the environments of rote Scottish lecturing classrooms, this does not mean that other aspects of the student's lived experience was nowhere to be found within their pages. If not the lived perspective of the student, these documents certainly reveal a great deal about the nature of the Scottish lecturing environment. As such, the lecture notes of Scottish Enlightenment universities represent a underutilized way to glean potentially valuable information about the teaching method of professors and lived experiences of Scottish university students.
Ella Sohn
English; CAS, 2026
In Name Only: Mapping Nonhuman Personhood in Richard Powers' Gain and The Overstory
The recognition of nonhuman entities as "persons" in law with accompanying rights has been applied to both the corporation and, more recently, the environment. The theory underpins two novels by Richard Powers: Gain (1998) and The Overstory (2018). This project uses the lens of nonhuman personhood to examine both works simultaneously, exploring where they converge and diverge in their representation of this status and its literary implications. It focuses on nomenclature as the locus of the difficulty of condensing nonhuman subjects into a coherent person. In Gain, this paradox takes the shape of a corporation granted a single legal body, eternal life, and infinite capacity for proliferation. In The Overstory, human and arboreal networks suggest alternate ways of conceptualizing the figure of the person. By mapping nonhuman subjectivity across Powers' novels, this thesis asks how the act of naming can define, delimit, or destabilize the fiction of personhood.
Izzy Welsh
English, Cinema & Media Studies; CAS, 2026
Executive Board, Undergraduate Humanities Forum
Beyond the Self: The Ethics of Authorial Voice in the Poetics of Patti Smith
This thesis examines Patti Smith’s Just Kids as a radical intervention into memoir’s reliance on singular authorship, arguing that Smith constructs an intersubjective authorial voice grounded in ethical relationality. While Smith’s public persona is often read through the lens of punk individualism, this project demonstrates that Just Kids reimagines voice not as self-assertion but as collaborative formation. Drawing on feminist theory by Luce Irigaray, Carolyn Burke, and Denise Riley alongside scholarship on autotheory and life writing, this thesis theorizes Smith’s memoiric practice as a feminist poetics that exceeds the autobiographical “I.” Smith’s voice emerges through relation—with Robert Mapplethorpe, artistic communities, visual artifacts, and shared labor—producing what is termed a third, intersubjective voice that unsettles the boundaries between autobiography and biography. In contrast to avant-garde contemporaries such as Alice Notley who insist on the primacy of singular voice, Smith reconceives collectivity as a generative aesthetic force. The project also intervenes in critical debates that moralize Smith’s independence as egoistic, reframing her formal strategies as deliberate ethical acts. Ultimately, this thesis positions Just Kids as a feminist reconfiguration of memoir that challenges phallogocentric models of authorship by imagining voice as porous, plural, and cocreated, capable of sustaining artistic kinship even after death.
Ryan Wolff
History; CAS, 2026
A Shift in Statecraft: Human Rights and U.S Intervention in Latin America's Southern Cone During the Late Cold War
This thesis investigates the pivotal shift in U.S. foreign policy during the mid-tolate Cold War, specifically examining the transition from aggressive anticommunist containment to a framework prioritizing human rights. Focusing on the military-
led regimes of Uruguay and Argentina, it argues that these two nations served as case studies for the first major revisions of American policy on humanitarian grounds. While the Kennedy, Nixon, and Ford administrations historically utilized Cold War imperatives to justify supporting repressive right-wing governments, the mid-1970s saw the emergence of a new political process. Driven in part by the advocacy of NGOs like Amnesty International and the legislative leadership of figures such as Congressman Donald Fraser (DFL-MN), human rights evolved from abstract idealism to concrete policy prescriptions. This research highlights the landmark decisions to revoke military aid to Uruguay in 1976 and Argentina in 1977, illustrating how a burgeoning network of activists, academics, and policymakers successfully challenged establishment foreign policy views. By analyzing these two Southern Cone countries, the thesis explores how the brutality of such civic-military dictatorships were catalysts for change. The U.S. decision to ban military aid to those governments marks a true inflection point not because it set the United States on an entirely different path, but because it allows us to examine what different policy choices were possible, despite all the constraints of that era.
Arwen Zhang International Studies, Finance; CAS, Wharton, 2028
"A Collection of the Most Curious Facts": Truth, Travel, and Self-Representation in the Works of Gerald of Wales
In one of his first works, Topography of Ireland, Gerald of Wales describes his work as a “collection of the most curious facts”. At first glance, his writing appears to conform with the typical conventions of medieval travel narrative, describing new landscapes, flora and fauna, and people. Yet, what characterizes Gerald’s writing is the extent to which his personal ambitions, political biases, and internal identity conflicts pervade his narrations. Modern scholarship has generally viewed Gerald as a medieval ethnographer, or as a religious historian and writer. This paper instead argues his travel writings serve as a form of autobiography, in which his version of the truth functions as a form of self-representation. By analyzing Gerald’s most wellknown works about his travels through Ireland and Wales through an autobiographical lens, this paper demonstrates how his personal motivations shaped not only his narrative style and subject matter, but also the image of himself he constructs within the text. Ultimately, this paper reconstructs the contemporary understanding of medieval travel narratives by reframing Gerald of Wales as an author interested in both observation and self-representation.
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