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“Early Carolingian Warfare: Prelude to Empire”
“Early Carolingian Warfare” is the first book-length study of how the Frankish dynasty, beginning with Pippin II, established its power and cultivated its military expertise to revive the Roman empire in Western Europe under Charlemagne.
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Research to cure a field in turmoil
The U.S. health care system is in turmoil. And the people who run it and shape it are looking for good advice on how to manage the upheaval. The folks at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics (LDI), which brings together faculty from four Penn schools — Medicine, Dental Medicine, Nursing and Wharton — have plenty of advice, based on the latest research in the field. And the institute gets that advice to those who need it — health care executives, legislators and others with a stake in how health care is delivered in America.
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A cool $16 mil.
An archaeologist has given $16 million to the University of Pennsylvania Museum — the largest individual contribution ever made to the Museum and one of the largest to any university museum. The donor, Charles K. Williams II (Gr’78), was field director from 1966 to 1997 of excavations in Greece where many Penn students have done field work. This donation caps his prior gifts to the Museum, totaling more than $5.3 million.
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Students discuss the shades of black
Blackness is political. It’s social. It’s not just wearing baggy clothes and listening to hip-hop. It’s eating soul food. It’s not the same thing as being African-American. It’s simply too big to define. All of these points and more were raised by the roughly 50 students who showed up for a discussion of “Degrees of Blackness” at DuBois College House Feb. 19.
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Word up to bilingual education
Bolivians speak more than 40 languages besides Spanish. The country made education bilingual and intercultural in the 1994 National Education Reform. South Africans speak multiple African tongues besides English and Afrikaans. The 1993 post-apartheid constitution added the nine African languages to the roster of official national languages and ended the segregation of the education system from four — white, African, Indian and colored (or mixed) — into one integrated system. What’s a teacher to do?
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College house dean named
Frank Pellicone, Ph.D. was named the new dean of Harrison College House. He comes here from the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he served as director of undergraduate studies in Italian, coordinator of the Italian language program and faculty advisor to the Italian Student Association. Andréa Grottoli, Ph.D., a new member of the department of earth and environmental sciences, was named faculty fellow of Goldberg College House. Grottoli comes from the University of California, Irvine, where she was a Dreyfus postdoctoral fellow.
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Faith, hope and charity
The words pour out in rivers when John DiIulio Jr. (C’80) starts talking about his latest big project, running the new White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. The Philly native was picked by President George W. Bush to head the office because DiIulio furnishes secular, scholarly heft to an initiative that some skeptics see as opening a crack in the wall of separation between church and state.
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One system, under Penn, indivisible
The Health System will be neither dismantled nor sold, President Judith Rodin announced Friday after meeting with the Trustees. The steps the University is taking will allow the Health System to respond more quickly in the volatile health care marketplace while maintaining the Health System’s missions of teaching, research and patient care.
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How do we love poetry? Let us count the ways
Valentine’s Day was dreary, drizzly and gray. Inside Kelly Writers House, though, students, faculty and community members gathered to share “Loved Poems and Poems About Love,” no lover required. Guests chattered and balanced plates of pink refreshments — M&Ms, pink wafer cookies and watermelon — on their knees until, at 3:05 p.m., the featured “beloved guests,” so described by Writers House Director Kerry Sherin, took their seats in the curve of the bay window.
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Prof. Farber goes to Washington
Over a year ago, I was asked if I could consider spending a year in government service as Chief Technologist at the Federal Communications Commission – the FCC. As a person who had spent a lot of time in D.C. serving on federal advisory boards, I hesitated. Would I turn into a bureaucrat? Would I waste a year or would I learn a lot that would help me in better teaching when I returned? I chose to go.