5/18
News Archives
A complete list of stories featured on Penn Today.
Filter Stories
Archive ・ Penn Current
Old English Politics Endure in Modern Sexual Politics
Once upon a time--1702-1714 to be exact--there was an English queen named Anne. To engage the affection of her subjects, she ordered her publicists to promote her as the mother of the nation. Anne had a precedent for her action. Queen Elizabeth had also promoted herself as mother of the nation. She had cashed in on her virginity: virgin queen as virgin mother, with the nation as the Son. At her coronation, Anne went even further with the metaphor, and presented herself as a nursing mother to the nation.
Archive ・ Penn Current
Education's Challenge: Economic Change and the Alienation It Brings
When the American Federation of Teachers met in Philadelphia Feb. 22, they asked Sociology Professor Elijah Anderson, Charles and William L. Day professor of social science and director of the Philadelphia Ethnography Project here at Penn, to deliver the keynote address. Anderson has written a synopsis of his speech for the Compass.
Archive ・ Penn Current
Alum's Moving Documentary Played at IH
An award-winning film at International House caught our eye. Annenberg School of Communication alumna Nilita Vachani documents the life of a domestic worker who struggles to support her own children in Sri Lanka by taking care of someone else's child in Greece. First prize winner at the Festival dei Popoli in Florence, an important documentary film festival, "When Mother Comes Home for Christmas" was screened at numerous international festivals before arriving at Annenberg Feb. 19.
Archive ・ Penn Current
On the Shelf
As Penn faculty publish books, an occasional column appears on these pages to inform the University community of new releases. Modernism as Déja Vu All Over Again A collection of essays by Jean-Michel RabatŽ, Marjorie G. Ernest Term Professor of English, questions whether modernism and postmodernism can be separated from the past, from the future and from each other.
Archive ・ Penn Current
Faculty Creak Past Students
The first student-faculty basketball game, the Provost's "Stanley" Cup (named after Provost Stanley Chodorow), offered 16 students a chance that every college kid wants--to go up against the faculty and show them who's boss. And that is exactly what they were doing in the first half of the game. College senior Jugdeep Bal left his teammates and his competitors frozen in awe as he snagged a rebound (top).
Archive ・ Penn Current
New Eatery Sates Midnight Snack Attacks
Tonight's grand opening of a new campus nightspot is six months ahead of schedule, with hoopla and food, all because--you asked for it. When students responded to a Dining Services survey last spring, they expressed a strong desire for a late-night dining spot in the Quad. Dining Services began to develop plans for a new facility, targeting the fall of 1997 for the opening.
Archive ・ Penn Current
Nobel Prize Winner: Oe Charms With Tales of His Past
One of this century's greatest writers, Nobel Prize winner Kenzaburo Oe, graced the Annenberg School of Communications Feb. 14. Oe, a Japanese expatriate now living in Princeton, N.J., was greeted with a thundering round of applause from a multi-ethnic and multigenerational audience--despite showing up ten minutes late. "My apologies," stated Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Professor William LaFleur, who later went on to introduce Oe. "But we had to stop by the house of [Edgar Allen] Poe, one of Mr. Oe's great influences." Somehow, the over-capacity crowd did not seem to mind.
Archive ・ Penn Current
WELL SAID
The following quotes from Penn professors and others appeared in publications across the country and around the world.
Archive ・ Penn Current
Beavers on Race and Manhood
Even though he is walking through our biggest cultural minefield, Herman Beavers, director of Penn's Afro-American Studies Program, is calm, soft-spoken, and, as he puts it, "a pretty straightforward guy." Beavers, you see, has made it his scholarly business to examine how we explain and define what it means to be black and male in America. "When we talk about black men, we conflate masculinity and race in very tangled ways," Beavers explained in the course of a wide-ranging conversation about his research findings and views about race.
Archive ・ Penn Current
Insanity Defense: Fair or a Cop Out?
What was John du Pont thinking at the instant he pulled the trigger and shot wrestler Dave Schultz? Did du Pont think he was in danger? Why did he kill Schultz? These are among the questions the jury must wrestle with to decide if du Pont was legally insane. More broadly, what exactly is the insanity defense and is it being used legitimately in our criminal justice system?