Faculty Archive

Heather Love reclaims the darker aspects of queer history.

Political science professor examines why emerging democracies go to war.

We know that the amount of CO2 going into the atmosphere is increasing. We know that the physical chemistry of CO2 gas means that the more we pump into the atmosphere, the warmer it's going to get. ...And we know that all of this becomes detectable starting around 1850, at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution when the burning of fossil fuel became more prevalent."

Linguist publishes first comprehensive guide to the varieties of speech patterns across the U.S. and Canada.

Rick Beeman presents a unique overview of political culture and practice across the colonies on the eve of the American Revolution.

Ralph Rosen's new book explores the dynamics of comic mockery and satire in Greek and Roman poetry

Ask David Wallace who a modern-day Chaucer is, and he’ll fold his hands in his lap, exhale lightly and explain. It’s not someone in the United States, whose words and ideas follow familiar English patterns established long ago. And it’s not someone in the European-influenced city of Philadelphia or in the sharp and at times street-savvy student body of the University of the Pennsylvania. A new Geoffrey Chaucer would be lurking in an emerging country that is still fighting for its modern identity, its voice. “If there is one, she’s probably in Africa,” Wallace said recently.

What do contemporary readers look for in a novel or poem, and just where can we trace the roots of those expectations?

Light is bouncing off the page and entering your eyes, creating inverted shapes on your retinas. The shapes trigger chemical reactions in rod and cone cells, which send electrical impulses carried on optic nerves to the back of your brain. The impulses pass through the optic chiasma, with half from each eye entering each brain hemisphere. They collect in lateral geniculate nuclei – relay stations in each hemisphere - before shooting into your visual cortex.

And then...consciousness. You “see” the printed page.

Cinema studies and English professor Peter Decherney traces the relationship between the film industry and the cultural elite to show how movies became American.

Emeritus historian writes the human story from the Stone Age to today.

Ethnomusicologist writes about the power of faith in the life of music and the power of music in the life of faith.

Classicist examines the tragic fate of living too long.

In the office of a typical archaeologist, you would expect to find things like stone tools, pottery fragments, and maybe even a few Wooly Mammoth bones. But Clark Erickson is no typical archaeologist. Oversize rolls of aerial photographs are stacked into tubular pyramids on a desk and worktable in his University Museum office. They fill up file cabinets and populate a storage room. At last count, he had about 700 giant aerial and satellite images—almost all of them picturing some region of the Amazon.

Nelson Mandela was released from prison one week after Rita Barnard, Professor of English and Director of the Women's Studies Program and the Alice Paul Center for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality, first visited the Penn campus. That's when Barnard, who was born and raised in South Africa, realized that even though her doctoral training had been in American literature, she'd eventually have to focus her scholarship on the momentous changes happening in her homeland.

Penn researchers discover of three of the faintest and smallest objects ever detected beyond Neptune.

Alan Charles Kors' work described as "an amazing scholarly and publication achievement.

Brendan O'Leary, Lauder Professor of Political Science and Director of the Penn Program in Ethnic Conflict, grew up thinking that ethnic conflict came standard with domestic politics. During the childhood years he spent in Nigeria, the Nigerian Civil War began when, in his neighborhood and in his own garden, members of Hausa ethnic group attacked the Igbo people. O'Leary was then sent to school in Northern Ireland – just as the Northern Ireland conflict began.

Sociologist Jerry Jacobs shows how time itself is dividing working Americans in new ways.

Smaller portions may explain the “French paradox" of rich foods and a svelte population.