Arts, Humanities, & Social Sciences

Working in the ancient Egyptian city of Abydos over the winter break, a team of Penn archaeologists knew they had found something special. After excavating a series of chambers constructed of mud-brick—usually a sign of a common person’s tomb—they encountered a stone slab, and finally, a burial chamber lined with limestone.

By Julie McWilliams Aspiring journalist Brennan Cusack set off on a solo cross-country trek last summer to get an insider’s look and to research four instances where environmental and economic interests were at odds.

April 10 – June 21, 2015 The Arthur Ross Gallery at the University of Pennsylvania presents A Sense of Place: Modern Japanese Prints, an exhibition, that brings together Japanese prints addressing the idea of place and landscape in the modern era on view to the public until June 21, 2015.

Chopping up rare books and manuscripts does not bother Will Noel, University of Pennsylvania Libraries’ director of the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, and founding director of the

From interning in a kitchen breaking down hundreds of lobsters to hunting truffles in Italy to hosting random four course dinner parties, Amanda Shulman lives to cook. The University of Pennsylvania senior has completed the first level of basic cuisine from Le Cordon Bleu in Paris and is as likely to fall asleep reading a cookbook as she is reading a textbook studying for class.

The National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded Grant Frame, University of Pennsylvania associate professor of Near Eastern languages and civilizations, a two-year $250,000 grant for his Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period Project. The award brings to nearly $950,000 the total NEH grants Frame has received for the RINAP Project since 2008.

Waking up and seeing a two-ton elephant nearby sounds like it could be a scene from a movie, but that’s exactly what University of Pennsylvania student Hannah Watene experienced while studying abroad in Tanzania.

When members of the spoken word troupe The Excelano Project perform, their fans in the University of Pennsylvania community are spellbound by what they have to say. 

From Harare, Zimbabwe, Rutendo Chigora is a senior double majoring in international relations and political science, and minoring in English. In December, she was awarded one of the two Rhodes Scholarships available to students from Zimbabwe. She will study at the University of Oxford in Oxford, England.

The American Council on Education (ACE) honored Penn President Amy Gutmann with the 2015 Reginald Wilson Diversity Leadership Award.