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Penn Museum

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

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

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.