We’re the Graduate Division

Home to more than 30 graduate groups spanning the humanities and social and natural sciences, the Graduate Division at Penn Arts & Sciences is here to support your research.

Create New Knowledge

Home to expert faculty, archives, and state-of-the art equipment, Penn Arts & Sciences will help you grow into a leader in your field.

At the Frontiers

Our graduate groups offer a rigorous education, guiding students as they pursue advanced research and begin to make their own original contributions at the frontiers of knowledge.

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News & Announcements

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Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowships

This fellowship program provides opportunities for doctoral candidates to engage in full-time dissertation research abroad in modern foreign languages and area studies. Internal application deadline: March 19, 2021.

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2021 Penn Grad Talks

For the past four years, the Penn community has gathered in late February for an afternoon of TED Talk-style presentations by Penn Arts & Sciences graduate students representing the Humanities, Social Sciences, Natural Sciences, and Professional Master’s programs.

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Extended funding for SAS Doctoral Students

We hope you are navigating the last weeks of this semester and looking forward to a much-needed break.

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Big Ideas for Strange Times

A series featuring short lectures on life’s bigger questions from Penn Arts & Sciences experts, including Ph.D. Candidates Aylin Malcolm (English), Sara Ray (History and Sociology of Science), and Angelina Eimannsberger (Comparative Literature and Literary Theory).

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Extended funding for SAS Doctoral Students

Since the beginning of the pandemic, the School of Arts and Sciences has provided approximately 300 additional semesters of f

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Resources and Emergency Funding for Graduate Students

Several new initiatives have been implemented to address broader issues affecting graduate and professional students and to provide you with support both immediately and in the longer term.

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Graduate Groups

Learn about our 33 graduate groups in the humanities and social and natural sciences.

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Grad Students in the News

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Veterans at Penn

Jesse Hamilton, a Ph.D. student in philosophy, Jason Hartwig, a Ph.D. candidate in political science are incorporating their military experience and varied perspectives into their research and work.

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Things Remembered

Anna Lehr Mueser, a doctoral candidate in history and sociology of science, studies memory, loss, and technology in the New York City Watershed and the villages that were destroyed to construct it.

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Forgetting Doesn't Heal

Stephanie Gibson, a doctoral candidate in the history of art, explores monuments of trauma in Africa, the Caribbean, and the Black Atlantic.

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African American in the ‘raceless’ Soviet Union

History Ph.D. candidate Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon’s work looks at how the African American experience in the Soviet Union shaped Black identity and how the presence of people of color shaped Soviet understandings of race.

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Community Builders

Daniel Morales-Armstrong, William Fontaine Fellow of Africana Studies and History, helms a course designed to lead students in a collaborative engagement with a local Philadelphian community.

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Using photography to explore the human experience

Leniqueca Welcome, a Ph.D. candidate in cultural anthropology with specialties in urban studies and experimental ethnography, is a member of the Collective for Advancing Multimodal Research Arts (CAMRA).

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Penn Grad Talks

Each year, Penn Arts and Sciences presents Penn Grad Talks (formerly Grad Ben Talks): an afternoon of TED Talk-style presentations by graduate students representing the Humanities, Social Sciences, Natural Sciences, and Professional Master’s programs. Judges select winners in each of the four categories. There is also an Audience Choice Winner selected by online votes.

Watch the 2021 presentations