Arts, Humanities, & Social Sciences

Aminata Sy sits with student reading a book to them.

‘What can be done today?’

Senior Aminata Sy founded a program for Philly kids and will soon head to Congress to begin her Rangel Graduate Fellowship.

Susan Ahlborn ・

Student holding magazine

Senior pictures

Graduating senior and photographer Isabel Zapata captured 57 of her classmates in places of significance to create Torch Magazine. The publication features their reflections as well as her portraits.

Louisa Shepard ・

Student standing in front of a stand of forsythia.

Photo finish

Graduating senior Wilson Fisher will use a Fulbright Award to study photographers and other artists in Ukraine.

Louisa Shepard ・

Joshua Becker and Damon Centola

Echo chambers may not be as dangerous as you think

Research on the “wisdom of crowds” has found that access to information exchange can increase the likelihood that beliefs are accurate, even contentious partisan political beliefs, among homogenous groups.

Penn Today Staff ・

A colorful artist's rendering of a river with people fishing with a barge in the background and a drawing of an old map on the horizon

A sense of place on shifting shores

Roderick Coover, whose work merges cinema, science, and history, is the 2019 Mellon Artist-in-Residence for the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities (PPEH). His recent film “Toxi-City: A Climate Change Narrative” screened at PPEH’s “Teaching and Learning with Rising Waters” event.

Katherine Unger Baillie ・



In the News


The Washington Post

Tiny township saves, transforms historic quarantine station

Built in 1799, a quarantine station helped protect Philadelphia against epidemic diseases for nearly a century. “It’s part of American history that we never learn about,” said David Barnes of the School of Arts and Sciences who is writing a history of the building. “It gives us entry to a lost world and into the hidden story of how our country came to be and grow, how it accommodated immigrants and dealt with disasters.”

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WHYY (Philadelphia)

China’s multiple crises

Jacques deLisle of the Law School and the School of Arts and Sciences joined a conversation about pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong and about U.S.-China relations during the ongoing trade war.

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The Atlantic

The mystery of ‘Skeleton Lake’ gets deeper

Kathleen Morrison of the School of Arts and Sciences weighed in on the origins of human remains found in India’s Skeleton Lake. “I suspect that they’re aggregated there, that local people put them in the lake,” she says. “When you see a lot of human skeletons, usually it’s a graveyard.”

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NPR

Understanding Kashmir

Suvir Kaul of the School of Arts and Sciences talks about political conflict between Indian and Pakistan. “I’m watching this [Indian] government doing all it can to change that kind of unitary sense of the nation and that’s what worries me enormously,” said Kaul.

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The Washington Post

Is a recession looming? Here’s what experts on the economy are watching

Ioana Marinescu of the School of Social Policy & Practice weighed in on the possibility of a recession in the near future. “I expect a recession any day now, because it’s been almost 12 years since the last trough,” she said. “However, it’s impossible to predict with high accuracy when it will happen since recessions are often precipitated by market panics coalescing around a particular event that is usually hard to anticipate.”

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