HEATHER K. LOVE - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Director of the Penn Medicine Listening Lab
- Member of the Selection Committee
- Senior Lecturer, English and History of Art
Aaron Levy, PhD, MPhil is the inaugural Director of Health Humanities Initiatives at Penn Medicine and Senior Lecturer in the Departments of English and the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also a Senior Fellow in the School of Social Policy & Practice, and Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health at the Perelman School of Medicine. He received his BA and MPhil from the University of Pennsylvania, and was awarded his PhD from the School of Fine Art, History of Art, and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds in the UK.
A longtime advocate for the healing potential of the arts and humanities, Dr. Levy is the Director of the Penn Medicine Listening Lab, an innovative approach to patient experience which has produced over 70 stories from patients, caregivers, staff, and providers across six hospitals that have been accessed over 30,000 times. He is also the Director of the Health Ecologies Lab and co-Director of Rx/Museum, initiatives that reflect his dedication to new approaches to listening and care. These efforts investigate how the humanities and social sciences can support the complex matrix of factors that impact healing, and raise awareness regarding the diverse contributors affecting the well-being of individuals and communities. He is the author or editor of several publications about these topics including: On Listening as a Form of Care (2020); On the Poetics and Politics of Health (2021); The Language of Care: Stories from the Penn Medicine Listening Lab (2021); and Rx/Museum: 52 Essays on Art and Reflection in Medicine (2022). He has developed graduate and undergraduate core courses and electives on these topics for the School of Arts and Sciences, the School of Social Policy and Practice, the Weitzman School of Design, and the Perelman School of Medicine. He also established and leads the first ever educational partnership between the School of Arts and Sciences and the Barnes Foundation, which explores the museum as a space of social care through undergraduate courses and other efforts.
Dr. Levy has lectured extensively, both nationally and internationally, on the power of the expressive arts to transform socio-cultural norms and create openings for change to occur. As a non-profit leader and curator, his work seeks to challenge seemingly intractable socio-political problems and address pervasive inequities and social suffering in Philadelphia and beyond. He is also the founding Executive and Artistic Director of Public Trust, a non-profit organization that seeks to foster learning and creative collaboration about topical cultural and socio-political issues facing Philadelphia and the world. With an expansive network of university and community collaborators, Dr. Levy has developed and led hundreds of interdisciplinary programs and symposia across the humanities, art and design, social sciences, medicine, and other fields, featuring leading scholars from Philadelphia and beyond. He has also curated over 50 exhibitions and installations with celebrated artists and filmmakers such as Carolee Schneemann, Agnes Varda, Hermann Nitsch, Peter Greenaway, Susan Meiselas, Arakawa, Camille Henrot, and Devin Allen, among others. For more than twenty years, Dr. Levy has also conceived and curated several large-scale projects in both institutional and public settings around the world. These include serving as co-curator of Into the Open (2008-9) for the US Pavilion at the Venice Biennale for Architecture, which was organized on behalf of the US Department of State and the National Endowment for the Arts. This project explored the work of grassroots architects working collaboratively to invigorate community activism and environmental policy, and traveled to Parsons School of Design and the National Constitution Center. He also co-led the Perpetual Peace Project (2010-11), a global peace movement launched in partnership with the International Peace Institute, the United Nations University, and the European Union National Institutes of Culture. This effort included an exhibition at the New Museum and several international events, workshops, symposia, and other programs. Other projects include Mixplace Studio (2009-12), produced with People's Emergency Center and Estudio Teddy Cruz, which was a multi-year summer school and mentorship program for young adults in Philadelphia experiencing hardship. Dr. Levy has also co-organized several large-scale research initiatives and digital archives, including Ai Weiwei's Fairytale Project | 童话项目 | Märchen-Projekt (2011); A People War, a visual archive of the Nepal Conflict (2014); The Right to the Image, with the Syrian anti-war media collective Abounaddara (2015); and Add Oil Machine 打氣機 (2015), an online exhibition about the Hong Kong Umbrella movement. More recently, he organized Photographies of Conflict, a two-year exhibition cycle with artist collectives who use photography to contest dominant narratives of conflicts, and No Mud, No Lotus, a retrospective of Louverture Films exploring how filmmakers, thinkers, and activists can engage and record some of the most devastating and urgent issues of our day (2018-19).
He is the author or editor of numerous publications, including Cities Without Citizens (2002); William Anastasi's Pataphysical Society (2005); Helene Cixous: Ex-cities (2007); Tractatus Post-Historicus (2009); On the Living History of the Venice Architecture Biennale (2010); John Cage's How to Get Started (2010); Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (2010); and Four Conversations on the Architecture of Discourse (2011). Additionally, his filmography includes In Conversation at Acconci Studio, New York (2007); Tooth and Nail: Film and Video by Dennis Oppenheim, 1970-1974 (2007); Werner Herzog: On the Ecstasy of Ski-Flying (2007); Rewriting Perpetual Peace (2011); Utterly Precarious: Carolee Schneemann (2013); and Art, or Listen to the Silence: Soun-Gui Kim with Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy (2014).
Dr. Levy is a member of the Selection Committee for the Artist Protection Fund, an initiative of the Institute for International Education; has twice served on the Federal Advisory Committee on International Exhibitions (FACIE); and was a United States Cultural Envoy to Pakistan in 2010. From 2015 to 2023, he was on the board of directors of AICA-USA, the International Art Critics Association.
Interests
Cinema and Media Studies Critical Theory Digital Humanities Environmental Humanities Medical Humanities Modernism and Modernity Visual Culture
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor of English
Abdulhamit Arvas is Assistant Professor of English with affiliations in Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies, Comparative Literature & Literary Theory, the Middle East Center, and Global Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His research and teaching focus on early modern literature and culture, comparative histories of sexuality and race, queer studies, trans history, cross-cultural encounters, and Islam in the Renaissance. His book project, Boys Abducted: The Homoerotics of Empire and Race in Early Modernity (forthcoming, Duke UP), concerns early modern sexuality, gender, and race in a transcultural context. Specifically, reading English and Ottoman literatures together, this project explores the abduction and circulation of male adolescents in the transnational Mediterranean space during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
Dr. Arvas received his BA from Hacettepe University (Turkey), MA from Eastern Michigan University, and PhD in English, with additional specialization in Women's and Gender Studies, from Michigan State University. Prior to joining Penn English, he was Assistant Professor of Theater at the University of California Santa Barbara and Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Vassar College.
Job Titles:
- Kelly Family Professor of English Director, Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing Faculty Director, Kelly Writers House
- Professor of English and Innovator
Al Filreis, Kelly Professor of English and innovator in the humanities, Featured in Penn Today
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- Professor of Romance Languages
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- Catherine Bryson Professor of English
Ania Loomba received her BA (Hons.), M. A., and M. Phil. degrees from the University of Delhi, India, and her Ph. D. from the University of Sussex, UK. She researches and teaches early modern literature, histories of race and colonialism, postcolonial studies, feminist theory, and contemporary Indian literature and culture. She currently holds the Catherine Bryson Chair in the English department. She is also faculty in Comparative Literature, South Asian Studies, and Women's Studies, and her courses are regularly cross-listed with these programs.
Her writings include Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama (Manchester University Press; 1989; Oxford University Press, 1992) Colonialism/ Postcolonialism (Routledge, 1998; second edition, 2005; third edition 2015; Italian, Turkish, Japanese, Swedish and Indonesian editions) and Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism (Oxford University Press, 2002). She has co-edited Post-colonial Shakespeares (Routledge, 1998); Postcolonial Studies and Beyond (Duke University Press, 2005), Race in Early Modern England: A Documentary Companion (Palgrave, 2007) and South Asian Feminisms (co-edited with Ritty A. Lukose, Duke University Press, 2012) [http://southasianfeminisms.wordpress.com]. She is series editor (with David Johnson of the Open University, UK) of Postcolonial Literary Studies (Edinburgh University Press). She has also produced a critical edition of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra (Norton, 2011) [http://books.wwnorton.com/books/Antony-and-Cleopatra]
Her recent publications include Rethinking Feminism in Early Modern Studies: Gender, Race and Sexuality (co-edited with Melissa Sanchez; Routledge, 2016) [https://www.routledge.com/Rethinking-Feminism-in-Early-Modern-Studies-Gender-Race-and-Sexuality/Loomba-Sanchez/p/book/9781472421753]; essays on early modern global contact; on race and embodiment; caste and its implications for understanding racial philosophies, and race in modern India.
Her latest monograph, Revolutionary Desires: women, communism, and feminism in India (Routledge 2018), [https://www.routledge.com/Revolutionary-Desires-Women-Communism-and-Femi... the lives and subjectivities of militant-nationalistand communist women in India, from the late 1920s, shortly after the communist movement took root, to the 1960s, when it fractured. It traces their personal and political experiences through a wide range of writings-memoirs, autobiographies, novels, Party documents, and interviews-to show how they questioned, and were constrained by, the gendered norms of Indian political culture. Her latest edited collection is A Cultural History of Western Empires in the Renaissance (Bloomsbury, 2018).
Interests
20th-Century British Literature Early Modern Literature Postcolonial Literature and Global Anglophone Cinema and Media Studies Comparative Race and Empire Studies Drama and Theatre Gender and Sexuality Studies Transatlantic Studies
Anthony DeCurtis is the author of recently published "In Other Words: Artists Talk About Life and Work," as well as "Rocking My Life Away: Writing About Music and Other Matters." He is also the editor of "Present Tense: Rock & Roll and Culture," and coeditor of "The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll" and "The Rolling Stone Album Guide" (3rd edition). He is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, where his work has appeared for twenty-five years, and he occasionally writes for The New York Times and many other publications. His essay accompanying the Eric Clapton box set "Crossroads" won a Grammy Award in the "Best Album Notes" category. He holds a PhD in American literature from Indiana University.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor of Romance Languages
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- Professor of Practice in English
Barri J. Gold, Professor of Practice in English and Inaugural Senior Fellow in the Environmental Innovations Initiative, is a scholar of 19th Century British literature, Literature and Science, and Ecocriticism. With a background in Physics, she has been especially interested in the Victorian development of energy concepts as well as in the nascent ecological discourse of which these were a part.
Job Titles:
- Associate Director of Undergraduate Studies
Becky S. Friedman received her B.A., summa cum laude, and M.A. in English from the University of Pennsylvania and her Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Her research interests include English Renaissance drama, the history of Jews and Judaism in England, and gender and religion in early modern Europe. Her work reveals how London playhouses embraced Jewishness as a productive means of exploring difference and likeness at a time when economic transformation and globalizing influences were renegotiating the terms of communal belonging.
She is currently writing her first book, The Jewish Body on the Shakespearean Stage.
Interests
Early Modern Literature Comparative Race and Empire Studies Drama and Theatre Gender and Sexuality Studies History of Material Texts
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of German
- Associate Professor of German / Founding Director, Penn Program in Environmental Humanities Graduate Groups in Comparative Literature and English
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- Professor of English Emeritus
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- Senior Lecturer in Theatre Arts
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- Assistant Professor of English
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- Professor of Theatre Arts and English
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- Assistant Professor of Cinema & Media Studies and History of Art
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- Co - Director, PennSoundSr. Director of Academic Computing
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- Distinguished Professor in Arts and Sciences Professor of German and Comparative Literature
Clare Mullaney is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania. Her dissertation, "American Imprints: Disability and the Material Text, 1858-1932," considers how bodily and mental impairments-from eyestrain and word-blindness (the late nineteenth-century term for dyslexia) to war wounds, melancholy, and old age-transformed everyday practices of reading and writing. Scholarship about disability in literary studies has attended mainly to depictions of disabled characters in novels and autobiographies. By contrast, "American Imprints" suggests that acknowledging the text as a "made" object brings into focus how turn-of-the-century authors grapple with disability at the level of textual form. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in J19: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, New Dickinson Studies (Cambridge University Press), the Disability Studies Quarterly, and the Atlantic. She has received awards and fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society; the Emily Dickinson International Society; Penn's Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies Program; and the Society for Disability Studies.
At Penn, she has taught a range of introductory and upper-level courses: "Fabrics and Fashions in American Literature" (Junior Research Seminar; Fall 2015), "Disability Narratives" (Summer 2016), and "Short Fiction: From Stories to Sitcoms" (Summer 2017). In March of 2017, she organized the "Disability Studies: A History" conference, which brought together activists, artists, and academics working across different disciplines to reflect on the history of disability studies as a field, which-since its early activist origins in the 1960s-has gained an institutional presence in academia. In addition, she is the co-founder of Penn's Disability Studies Working Group.
Interests
19th-Century American Literature 20th-Century American Literature Gender and Sexuality Studies History of Material Texts Modernism and Modernity
Clare Mullaney receives the SAS Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching by Graduate Students
Job Titles:
- Felix Schelling Professor of English Emeritus
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- David Boies Professor of History
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- Lecturer in Theatre ArtsDirector, New Student Orientation & Academic Initiatives
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- Judith Rodin Professor of English
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- Dean 's Award for Distinguished Teaching by Affiliated Faculty
- Retired Staff
Don James McLaughlin earned his Ph.D. in English at the University of Pennsylvania in July 2017. He completed his dissertation "Infectious Affect: The Phobic Imagination in American Literature" under the direction of Heather Love, Max Cavitch, Nancy Bentley, and Chi-ming Yang. The dissertation traces the emergence of the -phobia suffix in American print culture as a diagnosis, political metaphor, and aesthetic sensation in the 18th and 19th centuries. In January 2016, an essay from the project was published in The New Republic, titled "The Anti-Slavery Roots of Today's "-Phobia" Obsession." In the summer of 2018, Don James was awarded the Hench Post-Dissertation Fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society to support completion of his first book. In the fall of 2018, he joined the English Department at the University of Tulsa as Assistant Professor of 19th-Century American Literature.
In and beyond this research, Don James's scholarship focuses on 18th- and 19th-century literary movements in the Americas; queer historiography; the medical humanities; and the history of emotion. While a doctoral candidate in 2014, he had the privilege of collaborating with Connie King, Curator of Women's History at the Library Company of Philadelphia, on an exhibit titled "That's So Gay: Outing Early America." The show documented various instances of queer life in early America across an array of materials at LCP, from rare books to bawdy stereographs, comic valentines, and other ephemera. Research for his dissertation and first book has been supported by the Penn Humanities Forum, American Antiquarian Society, and a Marguerite Bartlett Hamer Dissertation Fellowship at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies.
Interests
19th-Century American Literature Early American Literature Comparative Race and Empire Studies Gender and Sexuality Studies Transatlantic Studies
Job Titles:
- Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature
- Professor of English and Comparative Literature
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- History & Sociology of Science
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- Rose Family Endowed Term Professor of English
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- Associate Professor of English
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- Professor of Classical Studies and Chair of the Program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory
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- Felix Schelling Professor of English Emeritus
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- Senior Lecturer
- Assistant Professor of English
- Director, Penn Global Documentary Institute
- Director, Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women 's Studies
- Faculty Director of the Program in Asian American Studies
- Faculty Director, Price Lab for Digital Humanities
- Professor of English
- Senior Lecturer in Cinema Studies
Media artist and writer Fran Ilich will present "Another Culture is Possible. A brief retrospective of a movable co-op adhered to the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle, dealing with conceptual entrepreneurism, financial insurgency, and narrative m
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- American Social Thought and Professor of English
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- Associate Professor of History of Art
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- John Welsh Centennial Professor of English
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- Associate Director for Recruitment & Instructor, Creative Writing Program Director, Summer Workshop for Young Writers, Kelly Writers House
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- Undergraduate Chair
- Undergraduate Chair / Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature
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- Professor of English and Comparative Literature
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- Vartan Gregorian Professor of English
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- Associate Professor of English at the University
Jennifer S. Ponce de León is Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is also faculty in Latin American and Latinx Studies (LALS) and Comparative Literature; affiliated faculty in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies (GSWS) and Cinema Studies; and a member of the Graduate Group in Hispanic Studies. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on 20th and 21st century Left movements and cultural production in the Americas and Marxist and anticolonial thought. She works across studies of visual arts, literature, and performance; transnational Latinx and Latin American studies; and critical theory. She is Associate Director of the Critical Theory Workshop/Atelier de Théorie Critique, which holds an intensive summer research program at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris every summer, as well as public events online and at the University of Pennsylvania.
Dr. Ponce de León's first book, Another Aesthetics Is Possible: Arts of Rebellion in the Fourth World War (Duke University Press, 2021) theorizes aesthetics as an integral force in contemporary political and social struggles. Its interdisciplinary analysis of experimental literature, visual art, and performance produced by Chicanx, Argentine, Mexican, and Chilean artists in the past two decades shows how these works have been influenced by, and articulated with, antisystemic movements, popular uprisings, and local struggles, including Zapatismo, anti-displacement struggles in Los Angeles, the 2001 uprising in Argentina, and radical grassroots human rights activism. Dr. Ponce de León is currently working on the book manuscript "Revolutionizing Aesthetics," which she is co-authoring with Gabriel Rockhill for Columbia University Press's series New Directions in Critical Theory. It intervenes in debates within Marxist aesthetics and art and literary theory, while offering new analyses of works of literature, film, and visual and performance art from the Americas and Europe. Dr. Ponce de León is also co-editing Puto and Other Plays by Ricardo A. Bracho with Richard T. Rodriguez and Randall Williams.
Dr. Ponce de León co-authored with Gabriel Rockhill the Introduction to the English translation of Domenico Losurdo's Western Marxism: How It Was Born, How It Died, How It Can Be Reborn, which is forthcoming from Monthly Review Press in 2024. Her other publications include:"Cartographies of Contemporary Class Struggles: The Art and Pedagogy of the Iconoclasistas" in Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture; "After the Border is Closed: Fascism, Immigration, and Internationalism in Ricardo A. Bracho's Puto," in American Quarterly (December 2021); "Toward a Compositional Model of Ideology: Materialism, Aesthetics & Cultural Revolution," co-authored with Gabriel Rockhill and published in Philosophy Today, 63.1 (Winter 2020); "Through an Anticolonial Looking Glass: On Restitution, Indigenismo, and Zapatista Solidarity in Raiders of the Lost Crown" in American Quarterly (March 2018) and "How to See Violence: Artistic Activism & the Radicalization of Human Rights" in ASAP/Journal (May 2018). Her writing has also appeared in the edited collections Talking to Action: Art, Pedagogy and Activism in the Americas (U. Chicago Press, 2017); Dancing with the Zapatistas (Duke U. Press, 2015); Live Art in LA, 1970-1983 (Routledge, 2012); MEX/LA: Mexican Modernisms in Los Angeles (Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2011); Art and Activism in the Age of Globalization: Essays on Disruption (NAi, 2011), and in the journals Social Text, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, e-misférica, Contemporary Theatre Review, The Journal of American Drama and Theater, and Interreview.
Dr. Ponce de received her PhD in American Studies from the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University; her M.A. in Art History from the University of California, Los Angeles; and her A.B. in Literature from Harvard University. She was a 2018-2019 Ford Postdoctoral Fellow.
Interests
20th-Century American Literature African American and Ethnic American Literatures Postcolonial Literature and Global Anglophone Cinema and Media Studies Comparative Race and Empire Studies Critical Theory Drama and Theatre Gender and Sexuality Studies Visual Culture
Job Titles:
- John Welsh Centennial Professor of English
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- Judith Rodin Professor of English
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- Assistant Professor of English and Cinema & Media Studies
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- Director, Creative Writing Program
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- Associate Professor of Russian and East European Studies
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- President 's Distinguished Professor
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- Elliot and Roslyn Jaffe Professor of Cinema and Modern Media
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- David Boies Professor of History
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- Professor of Germanic Languages
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- Assistant Professor of Medical Ethics & Health Policy Faculty Director of Master of Bioethics ( MBE ) Program at the Perelman School of Medicine ( PSOM )
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- Department Chair
- Department Chair / Professor of English, Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Professor for Faculty Excellence
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- Associate Professor of English
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- Graduate Coordinator, Graduate English Program
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- Professor of English and Comparative Literature
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- Professor of Modern Hebrew Language & Literature
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- Knowledge ( PIK ) Professor
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- Vartan Gregorian Professor of English
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- Director of Seminar in the History of Material Texts
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- Professor of English Emerita
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- Professor of Anthropology Director, Center for Experimental Ethnography
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- Wolf Associate Professor of Television and New Media Studies Associate Professor of English
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- Professor of English and Comparative Literature
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- Annenberg Visiting Professor in History and Professor at the College De France
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- Director, Theatre Arts Program Senior Lecturer, Theatre Arts and EnglishAffiliated Faculty, Gender, Sexuality and Women 's Studies
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- Associate Professor of English
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- Assistant Professor of English
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- Administrative Assistant to the English Chair
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- Family Assistant Professor of English
Stuart Curran received his BA and MA from the University of Michigan and his PhD from Harvard. Before coming to Penn he taught at Wisconsin and John Hopkins. He has held fellowships from the Huntington Library, the NEH, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Author of two critical studies of Shelley, as well as the standard bibliography on the poet, he was also for many years the editor of the Keats-Shelley Journal. He now serves as President of the Keats-Shelley Association of America. He has written a history of Romanticism, Poetic Form and British Romanticism has edited the Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism, which is currently being revised. He served for many years as section editor (1740-1830) for The Brown University Women Writers Project text base and publications, of which his edition of The Poems of Charlotte Smith (Oxford University Press, 1993) was an early result; is preparing a hypertext edition of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein for internet distribution; and is writing widely on women poets during the Romantic period. His 14-volume edition of The Works of Charlotte Smith has just appeared from Pickering & Chatto; and he is also editing 4 volumes of the Johns Hopkins Univ. Press edition of Shelley, in progress. A member of the Graduate Program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory.
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- Instructor: August Wilson & Beyond Teaching Performing Arts for Cross - Cultural EducationDirector: UACS Arts, Culture, & Humanities Partnerships at Penn 's Netter Center for Community Partnerships
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- Artist in Residence, CPCW Affiliated Faculty, Gender, Sexuality, and Women 's Studies Affiliated Faculty, Fine Arts
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- Professor Emeritus of English, Cinema and Media Studies, and History of Art
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- Vartan Gregorian Professor of English
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- Sheldon and Lucy Hackney Professor of History
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- Assistant Professor of English
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- Graduate Chair
- Graduate Chair / Associate Professor of English