School of Arts & Sciences

Larry A. Silver, Farquhar Professor of Art History at the University of Pennsylvania, has been named a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar for the 2015-2016 academic year.

Barely one minute into his Penn Lightbulb Café talk on “The Anatomy of Violence,” University of Pennsylvania professor Adrian Raine pointed to a slide projected on the screen behind him that showed the cracked skull of a 19th–century railroad worker Phineas Gage, alongside a sepia-colored image of the maimed man.

WHO:             The University of Pennsylvania’s Program for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society will host a panel discussion featuring:                       &

“Preach!” is a common refrain heard among audience members when Tukufu Zuberi gives a public talk. “Preach,” someone will say in affirmation when he speaks passionately about Africa’s central role in world affairs or rails against racism. The University of Pennsylvania professor of sociology and Africana studies is a public intellectual who extends his teaching around the world across multi-media platforms.

Katharyn Hanson stands on stage at the World Café Live in Philadelphia in front of a crowd of several dozen. Behind her flash images of antiquities and artifacts that make up much of the cultural legacy in places like Syria and Iraq. Sprinkled throughout are photos of explosions, dark gray plumes masking former heritage sites.

Because plants cannot pick up and move, they have evolved a plethora of strategies to cope with environmental stresses, whether they bring a harsh spell of drought or a browsing deer.

While new evidence suggests that Mars may harbor a tiny amount of liquid water, it exists today as a largely cold and arid planet. Three billion years ago, however, the situation may have been much different.

One senior at the University of Pennsylvania is working to improve history. 

When John Medaglia joined the University of Pennsylvania a year ago as a postdoctoral fellow, he didn’t yet have a precise path. Now it’s a little clearer, thanks to a prestigious honor given out to just 16 young scientists across the country.

Demographers Samuel Preston of the University of Pennsylvania and Andrew Stokes of Boston University set out to solve a puzzle: Why is it that study after study shows obese or overweight people with cardiovascular disease outliving their normal