News Archives

Best book

Barbie Zelizer, Ph.D., Raymond Williams Term Chair and associate professor of communication, received the Best Book Award for “Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory Through the Camera’s Eye” (Chicago) from the International Communication Association in May. Foreign study fellowships Clarissa Su

Style guide

After spending last year plumbing the depths of human nature, the Penn Humanities Forum has decided to spend this year doing something a little more, ahem, stylish. The Forum has put together a series of exhibits, talks and performances, all with a common theme — style. What is style, anyway? It’s not just decoration, or musical taste, or fashion or cuisine, though all of those are elements of it. At its heart, style is the expression of the human urge to express individuality, and many of the events in this year’s forum feature people doing just that by various means.

CEO goes to Glaxo

Peter G. Traber, M.D., is going back to pure research. President Judith Rodin announced July 26 that Traber, CEO of the Health System and interim dean of the School of Medicine since February, has accepted an offer from GlaxoSmithKline to head its clinical pharmacology and experimental medicine division. Health System Chief Operating Officer Robert Martin, Ph.D., will take the title of interim CEO, and School of Medicine Deputy Dean Arthur K. Asbury, M.D., the Van Meter Emeritus Professor of Neurology, will serve as interim dean.

Everyday science

The little computers that make many everyday devices work will work better in the future, thanks to a Penn research grant.

Bike tales

SARAH GOLDFINE-WARD, Nursing Master’s Bike: “An old, beat-up Huffy mountain bike.” Lives: 15th & Locust

The protesters’ media guru

Matt Ruben was a little blasé about being interviewed. This was understandable. After all, the Ph.D. student in English and urban studies had just come down off a stint as media guru that pushed him in front of TV cameras a dozen times in two weeks. “When I did my first press conference, I was like, ‘Wow, I’m in a press conference,’” laughed Ruben. “By the second week, I was like, ‘God, not another one!’”

“An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean”

Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy 392 pages, 41 black-and-white illustrations, $22.50 paper

Issues emerge from Shadow Convention

  The Republican shindig at the First Union Center wasn’t the only game in town this summer. While the herd of elephants staged their extravaganza in South Philly, a smaller but more interesting convention took place on the Penn campus — the Shadow Convention, a gathering called by an assemblage of activists and a syndicated columnist to raise issues the organizers claim the major parties are ignoring.

Colleges take stock

This summer, Penn played host to the Campus Compact Presidents’ Leadership Colloquium, where higher education administrators discussed making their institutions “vital agents and architects of a flourishing democracy.”

Robokids