Thanks to our guests and to everyone who joined us for our events this semester! If you missed us, a selection of our Fall 2025 Forum on Truth events are now streaming on our Youtube page. Visit bit.ly/4pI7V4K Stay tuned for more info about our spring events! We hope to see you in the New Year!

The grad students of Penn Music invite proposals for For(u)m: Re-forming Value, Re-valuing Form in Music Studies (Feb 13–14), a two-day conference exploring how form & value shape the ways we listen, create, & understand music today. 🗓️ Abstracts due Dec 3. Questions: [email protected]

*Fellow Spotlight* 2025-26 Wolf Humanities Center Regional Faculty Fellow Samuel Proffitt Driver is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Russian at Dickinson College.

Saturday, November 15 NCAAAE Keynote Lecture 42nd Northeast Conference on Andean and Amazonian Archaeology and Ethnohistory Kukuli Velarde is a Peruvian-American artist based in Philadelphia.

Tomorrow, Nov 12th: Join us at Public Trust for a screening of two classic feminist documentaries of the 1970s: The Woman’s Film (1971) and Inside Women Inside (1978). Followed by a conversation with Shilyh Warren (UT Dallas) and Asher Guthertz (UPenn). wolfhumanities.upenn.edu/events/woman...

Tuesday, November 11th Writer, scholar, and activist Tareq Baconi and Rutgers Professor of African Studies and Criminal Justice Noura Erakat will be in conversation, celebrating Baconi’s new book, Fire in Every Direction.

*Fellow Spotlight* 2025-26 Wolf Humanities Center Penn Faculty Fellow Ege Yumusak is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania.

There is hope, and we must use it! Join us at our annual symposium next month to envision new possibilities for media research and practice at this time of profound upheaval. Register here: bit.ly/JournalistsUnderFire @asc.upenn.edu

Coming soon! Penn Philosophy welcomes Catarina Dutilh Novaes (VU Amsterdam) for a discussion about her forthcoming book, Reason and Power in Argumentation (CUP, 2026). Thursday, November 13 3:00–5:00pm Van Pelt Library, Class of 1955 Room Free & open to all wolfhumanities.upenn.edu/events/novaes

Weds 11/19: Harvard Professor of Ukrainian History Serhii Plokhy joins Penn historian Benjamin Nathans to analyze the impact of the Russo-Ukrainian war on academia, explore a project titled The Ukrainian History: A Global Initiative, and discuss Plokhy’s forthcoming publication. bit.ly/3WYJhQr

Applications for our 2026–2027 Postdoctoral Fellowships on the theme of "Practice" are due this Sunday, November 2. wolfhumanities.upenn.edu/postdoc

Coming up tomorrow, Thursday the 30th!

Wednesday, October 29: The Perspectives Film Series continues with A Hero (2021), dir. Asghar Farhadi. A Hero tells a deceptively simple tale of a man on a two-day leave from a debtors' prison, who chances upon a pile of gold coins and faces a moral dilemma. wolfhumanities.upenn.edu/events/a-hero

*Fellow Spotlight* 2025-26 Wolf Humanities Center Regional Faculty Victor Sierra Matute ( @sierramatute.bsky.social) is an Assistant Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature in the Department of Modern Languages and Comparative Literature at Baruch College, The City University of New York.

Wednesday, October 29: The Perspectives Film Series continues with A Hero (2021), dir. Asghar Farhadi. A Hero tells a deceptively simple tale of a man on a two-day leave from a debtors' prison, who chances upon a pile of gold coins and faces a moral dilemma. wolfhumanities.upenn.edu/events/a-hero

We’re delighted to introduce Julia Verkholantsev, Topic Director of the Wolf Humanities Center’s 2025-2026 Forum on Truth and Associate Professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Thursday, October 30: Poet and novelist Aria Aber will be in conversation with Professor Fatemeh Shams (MELC). Aber is an assistant professor of Creative Writing at the University of Vermont. Her debut poetry collection, Hard Damage (2019), won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize and the Whiting Award.

Penn Music invites proposals for papers & performances for their Feb 13–14 graduate conference, For(u)m: Re-forming Value, Re-valuing Form in Music Studies. Grad students across disciplines are invited to examine the intersection of form & value in music, sound, & performance. tinyurl.com/2xyhbftx

Oct 18: Penn's Department of Cinema & Media Studies hosts a day of conversation at the intersection of film, pedagogy, and freedom, organized in conjunction with the Open Access publication of Course Projections: Film, Pedagogy, Freedom, eds. Full details: cinemastudies.sas.upenn.edu/events/2025/...

Weds 10/22: Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth, said Albert Camus. Geraldine Brooks spent half her life as a journalist, running after the truth in difficult places. Later she turned to fiction, but her novels always hew as closely as possible to historical truth.

Tonight, October 3, join us at Public Trust for a screening and conversation. Tree of Violence is a documentary that combines animation and live-action footage to capture the artistry of Victoria Lomasko, a Russian artist and journalist. Register here to attend: www.eventbrite.com/e/tree-of-vi...

Friday, October 3: Please join us for the 2024 documentary Tree of Violence, the first screening in the Perspectives Film Series hosted by the Wolf Humanities Center, the Department of Cinema & Media Studies, and Public Trust.

Friday, October 3: Please join us for the 2024 documentary Tree of Violence, the first screening in the Perspectives Film Series hosted by the Wolf Humanities Center, the Department of Cinema & Media Studies, and Public Trust.

Sept 19–20: Revisiting Language Politics: Historical Perspectives and Current Trends in India. wolfhumanities.upenn.edu/events/revis...

Way to go, Eric! Eric Ryu joins the Wolf Humanities Center as an Undergraduate Research Fellow this year. wolfhumanities.upenn.edu/fellows/eric....

Sept 18: The Edges of Truth, an all-day conference bringing together scholars across disciplines to explore how what we perceive as truth has been constructed, obscured, misunderstood, contested, and reimagined throughout history. wolfhumanities.upenn.edu/events/edges...

Sept 17: Michael D. Gordin (Princeton) introduces "The Edges of Truth" Conference with his keynote, "The Persistence of Wretched Subjects." September 17, 2025 5:30pm Widener Lecture Hall, Penn Museum, 3260 South Street Registration required. wolfhumanities.upenn.edu/events/gordin

Sept 17: Michael D. Gordin (Princeton) introduces "The Edges of Truth" Conference with his keynote, "The Persistence of Wretched Subjects." September 17, 2025 5:30pm Widener Lecture Hall, Penn Museum, 3260 South Street Registration required. wolfhumanities.upenn.edu/events/gordin

In 2025–2026, the Wolf Humanities Center is pleased to host scholars from across the humanities disciplines who are conducting research on our annual topic, Truth. Join us in welcoming this year’s cohort of Research Fellows! wolfhumanities.upenn.edu/fellows/truth

Join us in welcoming the new director of the Wolf Humanities Center, Ayako Kano, professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations! Kano is a cultural historian specializing in the history of gender and performance in Japan. More: wolfhumanities.upenn.edu/kano-director

Standing faculty at Penn in the humanities and allied departments are invited to apply for 2026–27 research fellowships on the Wolf Humanities Center’s annual theme, Practice. Apply by October 1, 2025. Full fellowship and application details: wolfhumanities.upenn.edu/fellowships/...

Now accepting applications for our 2026–2027 Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowships on the general theme of "Practice." Eligibility guidelines and application instructions: wolfhumanities.upenn.edu/postdoc Application deadline: November 2, 2025.

Heartfelt congratulations to each of Wolf's graduating students!! We thank you for your contributions and wish you all the best in your future endeavors. Best wishes to the entire Class of 2025!

With gratitude and admiration, we introduce Wolf Humanities Center Director Jamal J. Elias @eliasj.bsky.social, Annenberg Professor of the Humanities in the Department of Religious Studies and Director of the Penn Forum for Global Islamic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

On March 28th, Wolf’s Undergraduate Fellows presented their research on our 2024-25 topic of Keywords in the 24th annual Undergraduate Humanities Forum Research Conference, “Ideas in Motion, Words in Flux.” Thanks to our fellows for organizing a fantastic conference & many thanks to our moderators!

2024-25 Wolf Humanities Center Penn Faculty Fellow David Kazanjian is Professor of and Chair of the Program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at Penn. His two current research projects range from colonial Yucatán to contemporary Armenian diasporic art.

*Fellow Spotlight* Maryam Athari is a 2024–2025 Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Wolf Humanities Center. An art historian of twentieth-century global modernisms, she focuses on Middle Eastern and Iranian modern art, with particular attention to transregional and transmedial exchanges.

*Fellow Spotlight* Juan Suárez Ontaneda is a 2024-25 Wolf Humanities Center Regional Faculty Fellow and Assistant Professor of Spanish and Co-Director of Latin American, Iberian, and Latina/o Studies at Bryn Mawr College.

*Fellow Spotlight* Charlotte Kiechel is a 2024–25 Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Wolf Humanities Center and a historian of modern Europe. Her research interests include Holocaust memory, human rights, and decolonization.

A highlight of this year’s Forum on Keywords was the February 21, 2025 Keywords Symposium in Van Pelt Library.

*Fellow Spotlight* Angelina Eimannsberger is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania and the 2024-25 Graduate Research Assistant at the Wolf Humanities Center.

*Fellow Spotlight* Usmon Boron is a 2024–25 Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Wolf Humanities Center. Born and raised in Uzbekistan, his research and teaching broadly focus on entanglements between Islam and secular modernity.

This weekend, join the Francophone, Italian, and Germanic Graduate Studies Society for their conference, Reimagining Collage. Dr. Mame-Fatou Niang of @cmu.edu will give the keynote address, and four panels of discussion will follow. More details here: wolfhumanities.upenn.edu/events/reima...

Tomorrow (4/23): Don't miss author Andrea Lawlor at Kelly Writers House!

Our final colloquium event of the year takes place this Thursday! ---------------------------------- An Ethics of Completion: Russian Coloniality and Islamic Tradition in Kyrgyzstan RELS Colloquium Usmon Boron (@wolfhumanities.bsky.social) Apr 24, 2025 at 3:30pm - 5:00pm | Cohen 204

*Fellow Spotlight* 2024-25 Wolf Humanities Center Penn Faculty Fellow Seçil Yilmaz @sopranax.bsky.social is an assistant professor of History and Core Faculty at Penn GSWS.

Tomorrow (April 22)!

*Fellow Spotlight* Lama Elsharif @elsharif.lama is a 2024-25 Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Wolf Humanities Center and a historian of the early modern and modern Middle East and North Africa.

April 22: Penn faculty Abdulhamit Arvas & Caz Batten present Premodern Trans Studies, a symposium that will bring together scholars working on medieval & early modern trans studies to discuss current trends & future directions in historical trans studies. wolfhumanities.upenn.edu/events/premo...

*Fellow Spotlight* 2024-25 Wolf Humanities Center Penn Faculty Fellow Sebastián Gil-Riaño jsgriano.bsky.social is an Associate Professor of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania.