Events

The past several years have seen an increase in public awareness of political and other forms of state violence, especially those directed at African-Americans and other people of African descent worldwide. While the contemporary uproar about this violence has generated new forms of activism and organization,the history behind these recent incidents is sometimes not sufficiently understood, and the links between events in the United States and elsewhere in the diaspora are not often adequately articulated. This panel brings together feminist scholars across the disciplines to discuss the histories of anti-black violence in a range of locations, the ways these histories are connected, and the strategies people are using to counteract them.

Join us for the Rosenwald screening + Q&A event on November 15, from 6-8pm in Stiteler Hall B6. Food served at 5:30pm in the Silversetin Forum, Stiteler Hall (208 S. 37th Street).

Opening remarks by Penn faculty Herman Beavers, Professor of English and Africana Studies & Katherine Hellerstein, Ruth Meltzer Director, Jewish Studies Program, and Associate Professor, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures.

Free and Open to the Public.

Join us in remembering victims of trans-based violence and lift up those who give us hope in honor of the Trans Day of Remembrance. Co-sponsored by the LGBT Center, CAPS, and SHS

Facilitated by Jessica Mertz, Director of Sexual Assault Prevention and Education at Penn, and Litty Paxton, Director of the Penn Women's Center

If a student discloses an occurrence of sexual violence, would you know what to do? What resources are available to your students and to you as an instructor? How might we navigate these traumatic issues both inside and outside the classroom? This workshop is intended for graduate students, faculty, and anyone in an instructional role. We will be discussing basics such as mandatory reporting obligations and Penn resources. But we will also consider a more expansive set of best practices around pedagogy and various forms of sexual violence, including but not limited to abusive relationships, harassment, stalking, and sexual assault. We will work through a number of scenarios in which disclosure by a student might occur and strategies for responding.

This event is sponsored by the English department and open to the public.

A light lunch will be served

Although terms such as “displacement” and “exile” have been more recurrent in the wake of the ongoing refugee crisis across the world, the constant search of ”home” has been always present in various literary traditions including Persian literature. In this talk, Dr. Fatemeh Shams, Persian poet and professor in Near Eastern languages and civilizations, School of Arts & Sciences, will explore various meanings and representations of “home” throughout the classical and modern literary traditions in an attempt to understand the notion of “exile” and “displacement” as a mental and physical mode of existence. 

Speaker: Jennifer Ponce de Leon, Assistant Professor of English

In this lecture Prof. Johnson will share excerpts from his current creative nonfiction research on black southern women who love women to demonstrate how he employed performative and creative writing as a feminist method for conducting oral histories. Johnson will also point to how creative nonfiction provided him a space to allegorize cross-gender ethnographic and oral history praxis and the tensions that arise therein.

Penn Museum Second Sunday Culture Films

A dialogue between practitioners and academics to increase women’s representation in public life.