Arts, Humanities, & Social Sciences

The English major’s cheerleader and champion

Bestselling author Jennifer Egan taught an undergraduate literature course in the spring as an English Department artist in residence in the School of Arts & Sciences. A 1985 Penn graduate, she is a passionate advocate for the English major, the humanities, and a liberal arts education.

Louisa Shepard

Josephine Park on authoring identity

The School of Arts & Sciences President’s Distinguished Professor of English discusses the way literature has influenced the experience of being Asian American in the United States.

Blake Cole

False belief in MMR vaccine-autism link endures as measles threat persists

As measles cases rise across the United States and vaccination rates for the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine continue to fall, a new survey finds that a quarter of U.S. adults do not know that claims that the MMR vaccine causes autism are false.

From the Annenberg Public Policy Center

Fungi on the front lines against environmental injustice

The collective efforts of the Symbiotic Architecture for Environmental Justice research community are making former industrial sites reborn as vibrant community gardens, and safe, green spaces for children to play a reality.

From the Environmental Innovations Initiative

Penn alum named 2024 Yenching Scholar

Chonnipha (Jing Jing) Piriyalertsak, a 2023 graduate, has been selected as a 2024 Yenching Scholar, with full funding to pursue an interdisciplinary master’s degree in China studies at the Yenching Academy of Peking University in Beijing.

Louisa Shepard

Measuring readers of romance

Researchers at Penn's Price Lab for Digital Humanities conducted a quantitative analysis of the romance genre, studying thousands of avid readers and the hundreds of thousands of books in their collections in Goodreads

Louisa Shepard



In the News


The New York Times

Are we happy yet?

Martin Seligman of the School of Arts & Sciences says that thinking about life through the lens of moment-to-moment moods is a recipe for depression and anxiety.

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Religion News Service

Whose Christianity do Christian nationalists want?

In an opinion essay, Marci Hamilton of the School of Arts & Sciences says that the religious right is attempting to establish a monolithic “Christian supremacy” that has never existed in the United States.

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New Republic

The bad politics of bad posture

In her book “Slouch,” Beth Linker of the School of Arts & Sciences outlines how societal pressures have driven huge swaths of people to embrace falsehoods about posture.

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NPR

Inspired by the Olympics? It’s not too late to ignite your own fitness journey

Katy Milkman of the Wharton School says that repetition coupled with high motivation makes it much more likely to create a behavior change that lasts.

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NextCity.org

What happened to crash rates when one state legalized speed cameras?

A study by Erick Guerra of the Weitzman School of Design and colleagues suggests that speed cameras lead to a substantial and statistically significant reduction in fatalities and crashes.

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