Wolf Humanities Center

Professor Anna Tsing launches the Wolf Humanities Center's 2024-2025 Forum on Keywords with a talk exploring the "concreteness of concrete."Wolf Humanities Center • University of Pennsylvania2024–2025 FORUM ON KEYWORDSDR. S.T. LEE DISTINGUISHED LECTURE IN THE HUMANITIESConcreteConcrete is a material—and an adjective pointing to the physical existence of things. To be concrete is to have form in the material world. In this talk, renowned anthropologist Anna Tsing considers the material form of concrete as a building material, that is, the concreteness of concrete. Concrete repels water, and in the city of Sorong, Indonesia, where her current research has taken her, it

Historian Nayan Shah explores the visceral ways that hunger strikes communicate through media and political movements.Wolf Humanities Center • University of Pennsylvania2024–2025 FORUM ON KEYWORDSThe Paradox of Hunger StrikesThe talk considers the keyword "hunger strike" and the historical, social, and political conditions that motivate the rise and transformations of this puzzling and persistent bodily defiance in the 20th and 21st centuries. Investigating contexts from South Africa, India, Ireland, the United States, and Iran, historian Nayan Shah explores the visceral ways that hunger striking communicates through media and political movements, and how it can turn a personal agony into a call

Illumination artist Behnaz Karjoo explores Islamic illumination – or tazhib – in a brief lecture followed by a participatory workshop.Wolf Humanities Center • University of Pennsylvania2024–2025 FORUM ON KEYWORDSWord, Ink, Gold, and PaperAn Exploration of the Art of IlluminationIllumination artist Behnaz Karjoo will explore the evolution of Islamic illumination, or tazhib, and its role in manuscript decoration, providing an overview of the traditional tools and materials involved. Visual images of illuminated manuscripts, along with the tools and materials, will illustrate the techniques involved in tazhib, highlighting the precision and artistry.Following her lecture, Karjoo will host a hands-on workshop, inviting participants

Renowned cultural critic Wendy Steiner offers a dazzling new account of aesthetics grounded in female agencyIn 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.Steiner reframes long-standing questions surrounding desire, art, sexual assault, and beauty in light of #MeToo. Beginning with an opera she wrote based on Chaucer’s “The Wife of Bath’s Tale,” she presents women’s sexual choices as fundamentally aesthetic in nature—expressions of their

Anthropologist Deirdre de la Cruz on the efforts to develop and enact reparative approaches to her institutions's Philippines collections.Wolf Humanities Center • University of Pennsylvania2024–2025 FORUM ON KEYWORDS“It’s Your Curse,” and Other Lessons in Repairing Historical HarmDeirdre de la CruzAssociate Professor of History and Asian Languages and Cultures, University of MichiganThe University of Michigan possesses extensive archival, photographic, archaeological and natural history collections from the Philippines, many of which were built during the American colonial period from objects, images, and ancestors taken without the consent of local source communities. In this talk, historical anthropologist Deirdre de la Cruz introduces a

Screening to be followed by a conversation with artist Victoria Lomasko and Julia AlekseyevaDir. Anna Moiseenko, 2024, 52 min.Tree of Violence is a documentary combining animation and live-action footage to capture the extraordinary artistry of Victoria Lomasko, an artist known for depicting figures of ordinary Russians not often found in mainstream media. We see her standing still amidst public protests against the regime, carefully sketching the outlines of individuals which later appear in large-scale paintings and murals. The film chronicles Lomasko’s life just before the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, when she had to leave Russia in order to protect herself

Screening followed by a conversation with Penn's Meta Mazaj (Cinema & Media Studies) & Mahyar Entezari (Middle Eastern Languages & Cultures)Dir. Asghar Farhadi, 2021, 127 min.A Hero is a 2021 film by a master of Iranian cinema, two-time Oscar winner, Asghar Farhadi. It 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. Should he return the money to its owner, or use it to pay off some of his debt? An ordinary predicament and simple moral judgement, once confronted with complex layers of circumstances and

Screening two classic feminist documentaries produced at bookends of the 1970sThe Woman's Film: Dir. Jennifer Gauthier, 1971, 40 min.Inside Women Inside: Dir. Christine Choy and Cynthia Maurizio, 1978, 21 min.As a mode of action and as a way of thinking, feminism constantly interrogates truth. Whose actions, language, and experience constitute truth? How would/could a feminist truth be gathered, recorded, presented, and claimed? These questions erupt in two classic feminist documentaries produced at bookends of the 1970s: The Woman’s Film (1971) and Inside Women Inside (1978). Screened together, we hope these films will facilitate a conversation about the relationship between feminism,

An interdisciplinary symposium that engages experts in an exploration of truth(s) contested or revealed in crises.In conjunction with the Wolf Humanities Center’s 2025–2026 Forum on Truth, this interdisciplinary symposium engages experts in an exploration of truth(s) contested or revealed in crises across panels on (1) Institutions of Learning, (2) Land and its Technologies, and (3) Borders. In the framing, we take our cue from Sara Ahmed (2010), who understands crisis, perceived and described, as constructed; a crisis necessitates the identification and defense of shared norms and values, a world and its inhabitants, against that which threatens. The articulation of crisis

Each year the Wolf Humanities Center's Undergraduate Humanities Forum brings together undergraduate students from across the humanities and beyond to explore a common theme. Join us on March 27th as the Wolf Humanities Center's 2025–2026 Undergraduate Research Fellows present their research on "Truth."