News Archives

Your career on track

Keeping your career on track is a breeze with these classes from Human Resources. For course locations and more information, call 215-898-3400 or visit www.hr.upenn.edu/learning. Registration Required. Brown Bag Matinee: “Clown”

Campus Buzz

An innovator moves on: WXPN General Manager Vinnie Curren, whose leadership turned Penn’s station into a public radio powerhouse that helped spawn an entire radio format—“adult album alternative”—is off to Washington. His new job title: Senior vice president for radio at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Your Buzz correspondent wishes him success in his new job and anticipates that Curren’s new bosses will be pleased with the way he applies his creative talent to the larger policy issues affecting public radio stations across the country.

Sister Jeannine Gramick to Speak at Penn on Homosexuality and Catholic Church Reforms

WHO: Sister Jeannine GramickWHAT: Talk on "Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Ministry and Non-Violent Love"

Brod Barnville and Richard Graham

“Quaker Aesthetics: Reflections on a Quaker Ethic in American Design and Consumption”

The notion of a uniquely Quaker style in architecture, dress, and domestic interiors is a subject with which scholars have long grappled, since Quakers have traditionally held both an appreciation for high-quality workmanship and a distrust of ostentation. Early Quakers held “plainness” or “simplicity” as a virtue while still using fine material goods.

Procedure cuts suffering from sinusitis

If you could compare suffering which do you think is worse—chronic lower back pain or chronic sinusitis? Surprisingly, the answer is sinusitis. “When it is severe and chronic,” explained David Kennedy, chairman of the department of Otorhinolaryngology/Head and Neck Surgery, “it can have greater impact on quality of life than such other common conditions that are recognized as debilitating, such as asthma, angina, chronic pulmonary disease and chronic lower back pain.”

Artists frame solutions to myriad problems

If you’re looking for works by Penn artists only in museums and galleries, then you’re missing out. Beyond display cases and gallery walls, Graduate School of Fine Arts faculty and students are exercising their aesthetic sensibilities in the most unexpected places.

Student performing arts groups keep campus theaters busy

Is it some kind of harmonic convergence that has made a cappella singing so popular with students at Penn? There’s a barbershop group, Penn Pipers; there’s a gospel group, The Inspiration; there’s even a Hindi group, Penn Masala. There are groups with catchy names like Chord On Blues and Pennsylvania Six-5000 and groups with musical names like Counterparts and Off the Beat. There are boy groups and girl groups and coed groups. There are 11 a cappella groups in all. But this year, there are 12 dance companies, surpassing the number of singing ensembles for the first time.

Test drive for a College House makeover

The multi-year project to renovate Hamilton, Harrison and Harnwell College Houses is doing more than patching the concrete, replacing the windows and repairing the mechanical systems. The interiors are getting a makeover, too. And a big part of that makeover is new furniture. And when a large institution like Penn goes furniture shopping, it gets to ask for samples to try out.

Staff Q&A: Ajay Nair

Ajay Nair has proved Thomas Wolfe wrong: You can go home again. But the West Philadelphia he has come back to is a different place from the neighborhood where he was born. “It’s so different. It’s really very beautiful,” he said. “It’s always had this element of beauty to it, but I think Penn has done some interesting things in the community to help beautify it and make it an attractive place.”