Faculty Archive

First-year seminars provide new students with an in-depth exploration of diverse topics.

Researchers across Penn Arts and Sciences are learning from and in Philadelphia.

Deborah A. Thomas, R. Jean Brownlee Professor of Anthropology, discusses her journey from professional dancer to academic, embracing her many roles as an author, activist, educator, and artist.

Galápagos sea lions and the 8,000 residents of Puerto Baquerizo Moreno, San Cristóbal Island, often compete for space on local beaches and along the waterfront.

Penn Arts and Sciences faculty use language to unravel mysteries of culture, cognition, and communication.

When people put sustainability into action, they quickly realize that it is a cultural practice, distinct from country to country.

In his field work across the Muslim world, Jamal J. Elias frequently saw images of children used to communicate religious, national, and civic ideals in places ranging from Turkey, a country with near-universal literacy, to Pakistan, a nation with low educational spending and correspondingly low literacy rates.

Physicist Charles Kane and chemist Andrew Rappe were part of an international team of scientists to discover a new form of insulating material with a metallic surface that may enable more efficient electronics, or even quantum computing.

Be sure to visit OMNIA online for exclusive multimedia content that covers all aspects of Penn Arts and Sciences research, including faculty, students, alumni, and events. Below is just a small sampling of recent highlights.

Faculty and students are pursuing a range of new multidisciplinary initiatives thanks to two special funds established by Penn Arts and Sciences.

Sharon Thompson-Schill, Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor and Chair of Psychology, and Michael Kahana, Professor of Psychology, have been awarded the inaugural Psychonomic Society Mid-Career Award. In addition, Martha Farah, Walter H. Annenberg Professor in the Natural Sciences and Director of the Center for Neuroscience and Society, has been made a Fellow of the prestigious British Academy.

Michael C. Horowitz, Professor of Political Science, will lead a research team that has been awarded a $1.04 million grant from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, through the Department of Defense (DoD) Minerva Initiative.

Daniel Q. Gillion, Julie Beren Platt and Marc E. Platt Presidential Associate Professor of Political Science, and Beth Simmons, Andrea Mitchell University Professor, have been selected as 2018 Andrew Carnegie Fellows.

Penn Arts and Sciences has appointed 22 new members to its standing faculty for the 2018–2019 academic year.

Erol Akçay, Assistant Professor of Biology, addresses the question of how an evolving social network influences the likelihood of cooperation in a theoretical social group.

An international team led by geneticist Sarah Tishkoff has identified new genetic variants associated with skin pigmentation.

In her book, Populating the Novel: Literary Form and the Politics of Surplus Life, Emily Steinlight examines not the well-studied characters of 19th-century British writers such as Dickens, Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, and Joseph Conrad, but the unidentified masses that pervade their literary works.

What if our standard ways of describing traditional musics exacerbate perceptions of ethnic difference and thus help drive ethnic conflicts?

An intense interest in drumming led Jim Sykes, Assistant Professor of Music, to study how music connects Sri Lankan populations typically defined by ethnic difference.

Margaret Bruchac, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, examines the social relationships between early 20th-century anthropological collectors and Indigenous collaborators.