One School’s push for hosting and spearheading international fieldwork
In a challenging global landscape, Penn Arts & Sciences faculty and students are finding ways to preserve and continue international scholarship.
2 min. read
International scholarship, an essential cornerstone of research, looks different today than in the past—given new and renewed global tensions, hurdles posed by visa requirements, and dwindling opportunities to study or conduct research abroad. Those changes have affected higher education at every level, from undergraduates seeking global experiences to faculty and graduate students relying on international fieldwork.
The Atacama Cosmology Telescope in Chile is just one site Penn faculty are conducting ongoing global research.
(Image: Debra Kellner)
But, as Kevin Platt, professor of Russian and East European Studies, says, when there’s a will, there’s a way—a truism he’s had to put into practice for his own research since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. “Russia’s war on Ukraine has entailed hundreds of thousands of victims. It’s heartbreaking for everyone who studies this region and has disrupted many, many lives in great and small ways,” he says, adding that for him, it has also meant, in some instances, turning his work to new challenges, traditions, and languages.
That spirit is driving work and programming across Penn’s School of Arts & Sciences, from initiatives catering to visiting undergraduates—like the International Guest Student Program (IGSP) based out of the College of Liberal & Professional Studies—to major projects faculty are working to preserve and deepen. Such global efforts, touted as a priority in the recently released strategic vision, SAS Horizons, underscore the value of sharing knowledge across borders.
During a Living the Hard Promise panel discussion, a dialogue series aimed at frank conversation about important subjects, Mark Devlin spoke about conducting global research in the modern era. Devlin, Reese W. Flower Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics, said he always tries to remember that he and his colleagues and students are guests in these places. “There’s essentially nowhere in the U.S. where you can put a telescope on the ground and do what we can do. Everything we can do is international,” he said, referencing his experimental cosmology, which has taken him to places like the Chilean desert for projects like the Simons Observatory and the Atacama Cosmology Telescope. “Chile, Sweden, Canada. No matter where you are, you have to get along with people,” he said.
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