College of Arts & Sciences The Graduate Division Professional and Liberal Education
Frontiers - Art
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May 2013
Is Cinema Dead? Define Dead. And While You’re at It, Define Cinema.
Scholars, critics, and industry professionals gather at a Penn conference to discuss new crossroads for cinema and cinema studies.
Meta Mazaj, senior lecturer in Cinema Studies at the School of Arts and Sciences, acknowledges that the film community as a whole tends perhaps more than a little toward anxious self-reflection.
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May 2013
The Politics of Print
English doctoral candidate Marissa Nicosia explores historical literary genres.
Have you ever been sucked into reading the tabloids while waiting in line at the grocery store? Fifth-year English doctoral candidate Marissa Nicosia reads them, too—but the ones she’s looking at are from the 17th century.
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April 2013
Habit-Forming
Undergraduate architecture students chart maps of human-environment interaction.
Habits are activities not often subject to conscious evaluation: crossing and uncrossing one’s limbs in a certain fashion while studying; fiddling with a watch or similar accessory.
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March 2013
Books on the Battleground
An uncle’s secret history leads Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of History Kathy Peiss to study what happened to millions of displaced books after WWII.
“People are dying. Should you care about a book?” asks Kathy Peiss, the Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of History.
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January 2013
Video: Dreaming on Canvas
Senior Irina Markina explores influential French painter Pierre Puvis de Chavannes’ “subjective realities”
As an art history minor studying in in Lyon, France, Irina Markina became enamored with the soothing atmosphere that influential French painter Pierre Puvis de Chavannes was able to create with his murals.
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December 2012
Overcoming Anonymity
Associate Professor of History Eve Troutt Powell uses intimate accounts of slavery to chronicle the history of the trade in the Middle East.
The stories of those without a voice are often the most telling. As difficult as it is to bring the struggles of the disenfranchised to the light of day, it’s even more daunting when the accounts are centuries old—many only available as oral histories.
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October 2012
Penn Gets Animated
Karen Beckman, Elliot and Roslyn Jaffe Endowed Professor of Film Studies and Professor of History of Art, organizes an animation conference at Penn.
From 1908’s Fantasmagorie to Disney’s Snow White to resistance films by Czech animators in the ’50s to Avatar, animated films have been around as long as their live action counterparts.
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October 2012
Romancing the Machine
Associate Professor of History and Sociology of Science John Tresch discusses his new book.
Nature versus machine: a locomotive covered with butterflies. It seems like an obvious opposition, but in the first half of the 19th century in Paris, philosophers saw them as partners.
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September 2012
Character Building
Senior Kirby Dixon interns with the animation team at Nickelodeon.
Not many summer internships include spontaneous Nerf gun fights. But for senior Kirby Dixon, visual arts major, it wasn’t only entertaining; her summer at Nickelodeon was a chance to learn the ins and outs of a highly-competitive industry.
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August 2012
Subjective Objectivity
Professor of English and Cinema Studies Timothy Corrigan explores essay film.
We go to the movies for a variety of reasons. Summer blockbusters are a great escape, while documentaries can provide unique perspectives into worlds which otherwise we may not explore. But what can films teach us about society? And what are filmmakers doing behind the scenes to not only entertain us but make their own indelible mark on the issues of our day?