News Archives

Campus Buzz

A big apple for the teacher: Perhaps the greatest testament to Dennis DeTurck’s reputation as a teacher is the presence of so many of his present and former students at his recent lecture on math education (see “Education”). They made up about one-third of the roughly 75 people who filled Houston Hall’s Ben Franklin Room.

Service for those who serve

To show how much they appreciate the work of their volunteers, senior staff at the Penn Museum served them at a lunch in their honor April 12 in the Upper Egyptian Gallery. Here, Associate Director of Programs Gillian Wakely serves iced tea to Sam Nash, a volunteer in the Museum Applied Science Center for Archaeology who put in 739 hours of volunteer service in 2003.

McPherson on Americans’ identities

LITERARY LIFE/A distinguished author discusses a constantly shifting topic. According to novelist and essayist James Alan McPherson, most Americans are con artists, adopting multiple identities as their lives and desires change. The nature of those identities was a subject the Pulitzer Prize-winning author returned to often during his two-day visit to Penn April 19 and 20 as the last Kelly Writers House Fellow of the academic year.

Out & About: Culture space bridges the gap

It’s not every venue that will take a chance on a local hip-hop act with no national following, an experimental ambient music series and a forum from the African People’s Solidarity Committee. Of course, the Rotunda is hardly every venue.

Staff Q&A: Tom Waldman

STAFF Q & A/Tom Waldman wears two hats—medieval scholar and fundraiser. Tom Waldman’s first job at the University was as bibliographer of rare books and manuscripts, a logical choice for someone who had studied medieval history at Columbia and Oxford. It wasn’t until a few years later that he discovered his skill at fundraising.

Six Guggenheim fellowships for SAS faculty  

Six professors in the School of Arts and Sciences have received the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship, the largest number of recipients from the school since 1995. Every year since 1925, the John Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has recognized distinguished scholarly achievement and exceptional promise for the future by giving aid to scholars, artists and writers pursuing research in any field or creation in any area of the arts except the performing arts.

At Work With...Ed Dixon

Star search turns up fewer new ones

With few new stars being formed, will the twinkling lights above our heads soon disappear into the night sky? According to Raul Jimenez, assistant professor of physics, there is now very little gas—the main component of stars—available in the galaxies, so few new ones are forming. But since stars tend to have a lifetime of 10 to 100 billion years, and our universe is a youthful 13 billion years old, we don’t need to worry that the lights above will dim anytime soon.

Center explores ties that bind people, animals

Like most animal lovers, when James Serpell thinks about the stray dogs of Taiwan or Philadelphia’s own canine abuse problem, he gets upset. As director of Penn’s Center for the Interaction of Animals and Society, a multi-disciplinary research center within the School of Veterinary Medicine, he gets to explore the root causes and work toward solutions. Doing research on how animals fare in their relationships with people is a big part of the center’s mission. It also looks at the other side of the equation—how people are affected by their interaction with animals.

Research: What’s goin’ on with Marvin Gaye?

Twenty years after his untimely death at the hands of his father, Marvin Gaye has a secure place in the pantheon of pop music. At least four biographies, a memoir and a score of other works have explored his troubled life and groundbreaking music. Now comes Michael Eric Dyson to tell us there’s more to the story.