Fri 2/27, 9:30am: What constitutes a moving image practice of abolition? Scholar and filmmaker Althea Wasow explores crucial approaches to moving-image practice committed to abolition as our "Truth in Crisis" Symposium keynote speaker.

*Fellow Spotlight* 2025-26 Wolf Humanities Center Doctoral Fellow Priyamvada Nambrath is a PhD Candidate in the Department of South Asia Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

March 5, 12:00–1:30pm Penn's Center for East Asian Studies welcomes Kirsten Seuffert (Yale) for "The 'Truth' About Delinquent Girls in Late 1970s–1980s Japanese Media: Adaptation, Authorship, Articulation." wolfhumanities.upenn.edu/events/seuff...

Fri 2/27: “Truth in Crisis” will begin with “The Prison and Moving Images: The Aesthetics and Politics of Truth-Making” by Dr. Althea Wasow, followed by three panels exploring truth(s) in crises concerning (1) Institutions of Learning, (2) Land and its Technologies, and (3) Borders.

Our 2021-2025 Wolf Humanities Center Director, Jamal J. Elias, was recently featured on @sas.upenn.edu's OMNIA following the release of his latest book, After Rumi: The Mevlevis and Their World, published by Harvard University Press. web.sas.upenn.edu/omnia-intera...

(Un)Making the (Abyssal) Womb: A Symposium Centering Afro Latinas' Roles in Culture, Inheritance, and the "Monstrous" Gestation of Worlds Otherwise, Feb 20, Cherpack Lounge, Williams Hall. Event details & registration: wolfhumanities.upenn.edu/events/unmak...

Our Undergraduate Humanities Forum visited the National Constitution Center on Friday and got to see the new America's Founding exhibit, which focuses on the drafting, ratification, and adoption of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Thank you for the tour!

Thurs 2/19: The Theorizing Lecture Series of the Comparative Literature and Literary Theory Program at @upenn.edu invites you to a reading and conversation with Dr. Karim Mattar, Associate Professor of English at the University of Colorado at Boulder. wolfhumanities.upenn.edu/events/ruins

Fri 2/27: Humanities scholars convene at Penn to explore questions of crisis, its meanings and manifestations in the modern world, & the role of truth in surviving. This full day symposium is free & open to the public. Registration requested. Some presentations will be livestreamed. bit.ly/3MpGtKI

(Un)Making the (Abyssal) Womb: A Symposium Centering Afro Latinas' Roles in Culture, Inheritance, and the "Monstrous" Gestation of Worlds Otherwise, Feb 20, Cherpack Lounge, Williams Hall. Event details & registration: wolfhumanities.upenn.edu/events/unmak...

CORRECTED LINK: wolfhumanities.upenn.edu/events/lillo...

Penn Music's graduate students are delighted to welcome attendees to For(u)m: Re-forming Value, Re-valuing Form in Music Studies, featuring a keynote by Eric Drott (Butler School of Music, Univ of Texas at Austin) – Feb 13–14, Kislak Center. Conference details & registration: tinyurl.com/mvatjj5

CORRECTED LINK: wolfhumanities.upenn.edu/events/lillo...

Join us for a presentation on the Truth about Sign Language Acquisition next Wednesday, February 11th. Please note this event will not be streamed.

Join us for our upcoming symposium on Feb 27: Truth in Crisis. What of Truth in Crisis? Crisis of truth, truth of crisis: how do we articulate, orient, and act on matters intricately interwoven with survival? For more information: wolfhumanities.upenn.edu/events/truth...

2025-26 Wolf Humanities Center Doctoral Fellow Austin Svedjan is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania.

*Fellow Spotlight* 2025-26 Wolf Humanities Center Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow Spencer Small is a scholar of Soviet and Post-Soviet literature, culture, and digital media.

February 11: Diane Lillo-Martin (@dclm.bsky.social) (University of Connecticut/Yale University) will present on The Truth about Sign Language Acquisition, in collaboration with ASL and Deaf Studies in Penn’s Department of Linguistics. For more information: wolfhumanities.upenn.edu/events/lillo...

Our Forum on Truth continues this semester with lectures, films, and conferences. Join us! Feb 11 • The Truth about Sign Language Acquisition Feb 27 • Truth in Crisis Symposium Mar 5 • The Truth about Delinquent Girls in Late 1970s–80s Japanese Media & more! wolfhumanities.upenn.edu/events/upcom...

Apply now for 2026–27 Research Fellowships on the theme of "Practice" in the following categories: • Regional Faculty (apply by March 1) • Doctoral (apply by March 1) • Undergraduate (apply by April 1) Also available, a 2026–27 Graduate Research Assistantship (apply by March 1). tinyurl.com/5n7xz3b3

*Fellow Spotlight* 2025-26 Wolf Humanities Center Regional Faculty Fellow Caitlyn Olson is a historian of premodern Islamic northwest Africa and the Josephine Hildreth Detmer and Zareen Taj Mirza Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies at Bucknell University.

What is True? In the latest issue of The Pennsylvania Gazette, Julia M. Klein talks with our Forum on Truth topic director Julia Verkholantsev about this year's theme and revisits some of our Fall programs. thepenngazette.com/what-is-true/

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