Louisa Shepard

A Penn researcher and colleagues have chemically identified wine residues in pottery dating back 8,000 years, indicating that the country of Georgia may be the birthplace of viticulture and winemaking.

It began with a line from a medieval encyclopedia. Fewer than 140 characters typed into Twitter, it was an academic exercise to grapple with an overwhelmingly dense tome.

Unraveled sweaters. Folded photographs. Concrete blocks. Coffee grounds. As curators of an art gallery exhibition, two University of Pennsylvania art history students found a common thread in these disparate materials used in the work of four Penn fine arts students: Lauren Altman, Erlin Geffrard, Jiayi Liu and Heryk Tomassini,.

“Rasputin,” an opera composed by the University of Pennsylvania’s Jay Reise, was performed in Moscow last weekend, part of a celebration marking the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution.

Combining myriad forms of expression, including visual art and music, is integral to the “Introduction to African-American Literature” courses taught by Margo Natalie Crawford, a professor of English in her first semester at Penn.

Up four flights of stairs in the house-like home of Penn’s Creative Writing Program is the office of Carmen Maria Machado, writer-in-residence and celebrity author in the making.

In what was characterized as a path-breaking experiment at the University of Pennsylvania, nearly 100 students from seven universities came to discuss politics with each other, despite their differing perspectives.In groups of 10, they tackled tough questions posed by Penn faculty during the two-hour event, “Can We Talk? Political Dialogue in Donald Trump’s America.”

A 20-minute trolley ride and a world away, the woods of Bartram’s Garden became an outdoor classroom for a group of University of Pennsylvania students this fall.

Nearly 200 children sit shoulder-to-shoulder in neat rows on the floor of a refugee settlement classroom, their sunlit faces looking up and toward the front. It’s a familiar scene, a primary school in Kenya with too many students, too few resources, too uncertain a future.

“I can’t stop thinking about corn.”The line had been in his head for years.Its meaning was a mystery for Herman Beavers, a professor of English and Africana Studies in the School of Arts & Sciences.