News from

School of Arts & Sciences

Visit the School's Site
Reset All Filters
3734 Results
Guthrie Ramsey’s creative journey of healing, collaboration, and persistence
Professor sitting at a piano

Music Professor Guthrie Ramsey has released a new album of songs, “A Spiritual Vibe, Vol. 1,” meant to pay homage to his many musical partnerships. (Image: NJR2 Photography)

Guthrie Ramsey’s creative journey of healing, collaboration, and persistence

Music Professor Guthrie Ramsey has released a new album of songs meant to pay homage to his many musical partnerships. The project was prompted by his cancer diagnosis and influenced by the global pandemic and uprising against racial injustice.
Cholera vs. flu: Philadelphia’s historical epidemic successes and failures
Map from 1830s depicting the eastern United States, showing cholera cases with red highlights

The map depicts the spread of cholera in Pennsylvania and other eastern states in 1832. (Image: Courtesy of the New York Academy of Medicine)

  • Q&A

    • Cholera vs. flu: Philadelphia’s historical epidemic successes and failures

    Philadelphia’s response to the 1918 influenza might be the poster child of how not to handle an epidemic. Timothy Kent Holliday makes the case that the city was well equipped for outbreaks decades and even centuries earlier.

    Kristen de Groot

    New database aims to make Alzheimer’s diagnosis easier and earlier
    outline of a head in profile, the brain matter is filled in with question marks and the face, back of the head, and neck is outlined with roots resembling tree limbs and roots.

    New database aims to make Alzheimer’s diagnosis easier and earlier

    A five-minute online session will allow neural health to be tracked across time, so that doctors can make an earlier diagnosis and researchers can evaluate medications and other treatments.

    Susan Ahlborn

    Michael Hanchard on continuing injustice and the fight for equal protections
    Michael Hanchard

    Michael Hanchard, chair and Gustave C. Kuemmerle Professor of Africana Studies. (Image: Omnia)

    Michael Hanchard on continuing injustice and the fight for equal protections

    The chair and Gustave C. Kuemmerle Professor of Africana Studies, discusses the recent wave of protests following the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and other unarmed Black women and men across the country.

    From Omnia

    Penn performers keep creating during pandemic
    Mosaic of students singing together via Zoom call

    Penn Dischord.

    Penn performers keep creating during pandemic

    During the pandemic, the student Performing Arts Council has been working with the Platt Student Performing Arts House to encourage and support the hundreds of Penn performers, finding ways to promote their work on social media.
    Coding for a cause
    Satellite image of Earth highlighting border in different colors. This satellite image created by the Borders and Boundaries Project uses different colors to highlight the intensity of the official state presence along borders.

    Coding for a cause

    As the viral pandemic shuttered campus and disrupted routines, The Borders and Boundaries Project turned the challenging situation into a chance to give back and get work done.

    Kristen de Groot

    What the 1968 Kerner Commission can teach us
    Historic image of police storming a storefront in 1967 during a riot in Detroit.

    President Lyndon Johnson established the Kerner Commission to identify the genesis of the violence in the 1960s that killed 43 in Detroit and 26 in Newark. Pictured here, soldiers in a Newark storefront. (Image: Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture)

  • Q&A

    • What the 1968 Kerner Commission can teach us

    Criminologist and statistician Richard Berk, who worked on the report as a graduate student, explains the systemic racism and poverty found to underlie violent unrest in the 1960s and where COVID-19 and the economy fit today.

    Michele W. Berger

    ‘Beauty alone’ is a reason to read Q-INE
    Three blackboards in front of Claudia Cohen Hall say "I identify as..." with various descriptors written in colorful chalk (mormon, human, FGLI, queer, etc)

    Untitled photography by Anthony Scarpone-Lambert.

    ‘Beauty alone’ is a reason to read Q-INE

    A new student-run magazine highlights perspectives from the Penn LGTBQ+ community.

    Kristina García

    Cave discovery holds clues to earliest Homo sapiens in Europe
    People squatting in a cave with face masks on, digging through dirt and clay.

    Excavations in Initial Upper Paleolithic Layer I at Bacho Kiro Cave in Bulgaria. Four Homo sapiens bones were recovered from this layer, along with a rich stone tool assemblage, animal bones, bone tools, and pendants. (Pre-pandemic image: Tsenka Tsanova, MPI EVA Leipzig, License: CC-BY-SA 2.0)

    Cave discovery holds clues to earliest Homo sapiens in Europe

    Ancient DNA from 46,000-year-old bone fragments and a tooth reveals this group likely overlapped with Neanderthals for thousands of years.

    Michele W. Berger