Upcoming Events

Penn Arts & Sciences' long-running Knowledge by the Slice lunchtime series offers educational talks led by our insightful faculty experts. Did we mention there’s pizza? So, come for the discussion and have a slice on us. 

In this talk, Justin McDaniel will share the experiences from two of his Penn courses in which students take on “monastic” challenges—like giving up cellphones and computers for a month, staying silent, or even reading books straight through from 5 p.m. to midnight.Go to event

This lecture is part of the 2024-25 Penn Music Colloquium Series. The Department of Music's main Colloquium Series showcases new research by leading scholars in music and sound studies and composers both in the United States and internationally. All Music Colloquia will take place in Room 101 of the Lerner Center on Tuesdays at 5:15 PM.

Event Info

Andy Wolk, C'70, presents an exciting Zoom by screening his riveting film Rough Magic: Exit Shakespeare.Go to event

How did Medieval German aristocrats satisfy their appetites for long stories about beautiful, wealthy and tragic fictional characters of their own time? What were the themes which motivated the best storytellers, and how might they have gone about fashioning a real “performance”? How did music and the voice figure into this world of noble entertainment, where a given story might require a dozen long episodes to be told in full, in an age which did not know widespread literacy and long before printing?

In The Beauty of Choice, the renowned cultural critic Wendy Steiner offers a dazzling new account of aesthetics grounded in female agency. Through a series of linked meditations on canonical and contemporary literature and art, she casts women’s taste as the engine of liberal values.

South Korea is a mature democracy that has undergone regime changes through the medium of peaceful elections since its democratization in the late 1980s. However, as evidenced by the Global Gender Gap Index, the Glass Ceiling Index, and the #MeToo movement, South Korea's democracy has been unable to overcome its patriarchal political culture and male-dominated power structure. To illustrate, the proportion of women in the National Assembly is 20%, which places South Korea in 117th position globally.Go to event

Healing Women in Jewish History

This talk explores how Jewish physicians in twentieth-century Poland were concerned with women’s health, mobilizing female bodies to ensure the future of the community. It compares the discourse and the medical practices before and after the Holocaust.  New histories of medicine and the body offer a more direct vantage on women’s experiences than traditional approaches mediated through the sources and concerns of men.Go to event

For as long as house ball culture has been around, people have been appropriating it. Long recognized as a nexus of Black trans/queer diasporic performance, ballroom is home to a cluster of embodied practices and movement vocabularies popularly referred to as vogue. Over the past 40 years, vogue, and house ball culture more generally, has faced multiple waves of appropriation within popular culture in the 52 years since ballroom began with femme queens Crystal and Lottie founding the historic House of Labeija.Go to event

The 2025 presidential transition continues to generate strong reactions across a diverse spectrum of American voters, along with heightened scrutiny of the vulnerabilities and strengths of U.S. democracy.

Join Peter Struck, Stephen A. Levin Family Dean of the College, and a panel of faculty experts at The Times Center for a wide-ranging and nuanced discussion of what makes for a democracy, whether democracies today—nationally and internationally—are imperiled, and what can be done to strengthen democracy. 
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On February 6th, join us for a compelling dialogue with Jenny Andersson, Professor at Uppsala University, Sweden, and Dr. Troels Skadhauge, a recent PhD graduate from the University of Pennsylvania, for a conversation titled, "Scandinavian Social Democracy as an Alternative to Liberal Democracy?" This event offers an opportunity to explore the distinct principles underlying Scandinavian social democracy and how it diverges from liberal democracy in its approach to economic policy, political organization, and cultural priorities.Go to event