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Decolonize the future: Defending Indigenous rights and lands
Maya activist Cristina Coc speaks into a microphone on the Perry World House stage

Cristina Coc, a Q’eqchi’ Maya community leader who founded and is program director of the Julian Cho Society, was one of three activists from Belize at the Perry World House event. (Image: Courtesy of Perry World House).

Decolonize the future: Defending Indigenous rights and lands

Three Maya activists from Belize spoke with Richard M. Leventhal about the challenges and progress they’ve made on land rights in recent years.

Kristen de Groot

World Heritage—too much of a good thing?
ABC Australia

World Heritage—too much of a good thing?

PIK Professor Lynn Meskell, also of the Penn Museum, joins a radio conversation to discuss how the World Heritage Convention has become a victim of its own success.

Regional roundup: September 12, 2022
WHYY (Philadelphia)

Regional roundup: September 12, 2022

On a “Radio Times” segment, Simcha Gross of the School of Arts and Sciences discusses his project at the Penn Museum to make incantation bowls more understood and accessible.

The story the bowls tell
penn museum incantation bowl being examined

Gross and Elitzur-Leiman are studying some intact, pristine bowls and others, like the one above, that are in pieces. “The sherds tell a story, too,” says Blanchard.

The story the bowls tell

In an ambitious new project, historian Simcha Gross and Harvard’s Rivka Elitzur-Leiman are studying hundreds of ancient incantation bowls housed at the Penn Museum. They hope to better understand the objects and eventually, build a database of all these bowls worldwide.

Michele W. Berger

What makes the world’s first bar joke funny? No one knows
WBUR Radio (Boston)

What makes the world’s first bar joke funny? No one knows

Phillip Jones of the Penn Museum explains the history behind a Penn Museum collection of Sumerian tablets, including the world’s first documented bar joke.

2022 museum you need to visit
Philadelphia Magazine

2022 museum you need to visit

Penn Museum is awarded Best of Philly for its 10 millennia of artifacts.

A multidisciplinary approach to considering the Earth’s changing systems
view of earth from space

(Homepage image) Touching on a broad range of topics from climate’s impact on national security to resilient building design to emissions related to food production, the course aimed to boost students’ understanding of earth systems and climate literacy. (Image: NASA)

A multidisciplinary approach to considering the Earth’s changing systems

Bringing expertise from each of their disciplines, the School of Arts & Sciences’ Kathleen Morrison and Joseph Francisco and the Environmental Innovations Initiative’s Melissa Brown Goodall infused chemistry, anthropology, policy, and more into an introductory course on climate and the environment.

Katherine Unger Baillie

Inspiring the next generation of archive scholars
students examine a long scroll in the archive class

Homepage image: Graduate students in the Inside the Archive course look on as Bill Whitaker, the curator and collections manager at the Weitzman School of Design’s Architectural Archives, unfurls an artifact from the Louis Kahn Collection.

Inspiring the next generation of archive scholars

Through Inside the Archive, a course taught by Liliane Weissberg of the School of Arts & Sciences, Penn students explore what an archive is, how history gets written, and what is ahead in a digital future.
Keepers of the cultural memory
An old and large book upside down on a table, being held by two sets of hands, one gloved, the other not. There are boxes and other materials all around.

Workers at the rare manuscripts and old printed books department of the Andrey Sheptytsky National Museum store them in cardboard boxes to reduce the risk of damage in the event of an attack in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, Friday, March 4, 2022. (Image: AP Photo/Bernat Armangue)

AP Photo/Bernat Armangue

Keepers of the cultural memory

In wartime, saving human lives is a top priority. But secondary considerations often include preserving the cultural heritage also under siege. Penn experts offer their thoughts as the situation in Ukraine continues to unfold.

Michele W. Berger