A Selection of Mexican Ex-Votos

A Selection of Mexican Ex-Votos - Exhibition

April 12 - October 18, 2024  Gain insight into Mexican religious folk practices through these selections from the Dr. William H. Helfand collection of ex-votos and devotional paintings on medical subjects. The display is located on the main level of the Holman Biotech Commons, outside the Holman Reading Room. 

Diana Henderson, Phyllis Rackin Lecture in Women's Studies

Kislak Pavilion, 6th Floor, Van Pelt Library | to

Speaker: Diana Henderson (Professor of English at Massachusetts Institute of Technology), whose scholarship on women's writing, performance and media has been of great importance to scholars of gender and culture in the Renaissance.

The author of Collaborations with the Past: Reshaping Shakespeare across Time and Media and Passion Made Public: Elizabethan Lyric, Gender and Performance, Professor Henderson served as Immediate Past President of the Shakespeare Association of America (SAA) from 2014 to 2015 and co-chaired the "Women and Culture in the Early Modern World" seminar at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University. She has also been an MIT MacVicar Faculty Fellow since 2009 and is co-editor of the prestigious scholarly journal, Shakespeare Studies.

Trans Day of Remembrance

LGBT Center |

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

Responding to Student Disclosure of Sexual Violence

Fisher-Bennett Hall, Room 330 | to

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

Where Is ‘Home’? Displacement and Exile in Persian Literary Tradition, Talk by Dr. Fatemeh Shams

World Cafe Live Upstairs |

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. 

How to See Violence: Artistic Activism & the Radicalization of Human Rights

Silverstein Forum of Stiteler Hall | to

Speaker: Jennifer Ponce de Leon, Assistant Professor of English

E. Patrick Johnson, Stirring the (Honey) Pot: On Performative Feminist Methodologies

Penn LGBT Center, 3907 Spruce St | to

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.

Forever Chinatown, Film Screening

Rainey Auditorium, Penn Museum, 3260 South Street |

Penn Museum Second Sunday Culture Films

Good Reasons to Run Conference

Good Reasons to Run Conference | to

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

Revisiting the Ongoing Debate about Globalization - Ernesto Zedillo

Golkin 100, Michael A. Fitts Auditorium |

On the 10th anniversary of the Holt Lecture in International Law, we welcome Ernesto Zedillo, who served as President of Mexico from 1994 – 2000.

Leo Bersani, Part I: Selfless Being, Dosoretz Lecture

401 Fisher-Bennett Hall (34th & Walnut) | to

A lecture by Leo Bersani, an internationally renowned scholar who has worked in a variety of fields including gender/sexuality studies, literary studies, psychoanalytical theory, and film and media studies. He has taught at University of California, Berkeley; Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris; Princeton University; the University of Chicago; and the University of Pennsylvania.