Penn Arts & Sciences

The University of Pennsylvania School of Arts and Sciences forms the foundation of the scholarly excellence that has established Penn as one of the world's leading research universities. We teach students across all 12 Penn schools, and our academic departments span the reach from anthropology and biology to sociology and South Asian studies.

Members of the Penn Arts & Sciences faculty are leaders in creating new knowledge in their disciplines and are engaged in nearly every area of interdisciplinary innovation. They are regularly recognized with academia's highest honors, including membership in prestigious societies like the National Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society, as well as significant prizes such as MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships.

The educational experience offered by Penn Arts & Sciences is likewise recognized for its excellence. The School's three educational divisions fulfill different missions, united by a broader commitment to providing our students with an unrivaled education in the liberal arts. The College of Arts and Sciences is the academic home of the majority of Penn undergraduates and provides 60 percent of the courses taken by students in Penn's undergraduate professional schools. The Graduate Division offers doctoral training to over 1,300 candidates in more than 30 graduate programs. And the College of Liberal and Professional Studies provides a range of educational opportunities for lifelong learners and working professionals.

 

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 6323
  • Publication
    Religion and Diplomacy
    (1995-11-16) Runcie, Robert A. K.
    Archbishop Runcie's presentation represents well his interest in and experience of the complex intersection between religion and world events. Both his consideration of the difficult history of the Christian Church, and his call to greater understanding of other religions reflect his long work with and commitment to these issues. His refusal to simplify the problems tied to religion is characteristic both of his efforts to find real solutions to world problems and his intellectual rigor.
  • Publication
    Nonactive Voice in Hebrew and Elsewhere: Between Unaccusativity and Agentivity
    (2016-01-01) Kastner, Itamar
    Two verbal templates in Modern Hebrew allow for any kind of verbal construction, except for a simple transitive verb. Unaccusatives, reflexives, reciprocals and unergatives that take an obligatory indirect object are all attested, but transitive verbs are not allowed. I discuss what the morphology of these templates actually signals, given that external arguments and internal arguments are both possible. Working in Distributed Morphology, I propose that a number of functional heads conspire to produce the existing alternations in argument structure, with implications for theories of anticausativization, reflexivization and reciprocalization.
  • Publication
    Beyond Conformal Field Theory
    (1990-06-01) Nelson, Philip C; Nelson, Philip C
    This is an account of some recent work done with H. S. La [1] [2], based ultimately on the work of Fischler and Susskind [3] and Polchinski [4].
  • Publication
    Mesons and Flavor on the Conifold
    (2007-11-27) Levi, Thomas S.; Ouyang, Peter
    We explore the addition of fundamental matter to the Klebanov-Witten field theory. We add probe D7- branes to the N = 1 theory obtained from placing D3-branes at the tip of the conifold and compute the meson spectrum for the scalar mesons. In the UV limit of massless quarks we find the exact dimensions of the associated operators, which exhibit a simple scaling in the large-charge limit. For the case of massive quarks we compute the spectrum of scalar mesons numerically.
  • Publication
    Announcements
    (1980)
  • Publication
    What Happened to the Honorifics in a Local Japanese Dialect in 55 years: A Report from the Okazaki Survey on Honorifics
    (2012-09-01) Matsuda, Kenjiro; Matsuda, Kenjiro
    This paper reports the analysis of the three trend samples from the Okazaki Honorifics Survey, a longitudinal survey by the National Language Research Institute on the use and the awareness of honorifics in Okazaki city, Aichi Prefecture in Japan. Its main results are: (1) the Okazakians are using more polite forms over the 55 years; (2) the effect of the three social variables (sex, age, and educational background), which used to be strong factors controlling the use of the honorifics in the speech community, are diminishing over the years; (3) in OSH I and II, the questions show clustering by the feature [±service interaction], while the same 11 questions in OSH III exhibit clustering by a different feature, [±spontaneous]; (4) the change in (3) and (4) can be accounted for nicely by the Democratization Hypothesis proposed by Inoue (1999) for the variation and change of honorifics in other Japanese dialects. It was also pointed out, however, that the complete picture of the changes in the honorifics system in Okazaki requires the analysis of the panel samples of the survey.
  • Publication
    Keeping Score in the 2010 World Cup: How Do Sports Mega-Events Compete with Pro-Poor Development?
    (2010-01-01) Riegel, Jessica; Riegel, Jessica
    This thesis uses the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa, which was framed as a catalyst for economic growth and broader development, to consider the relationship between global sporting events and pro-poor priorities. The study is driven by three main questions. To what extent did the World Cup deliver on its expectations; are event-driven strategies compatible with pro-poor needs; and why, given a priori doubts about the effectiveness of mega-events as development instruments, do political elites and publics embrace them? I find the event piqued international interest and improved perceptions, potentially boosting tourism and foreign investment, but its other impacts were negligible and came at the expense of more critical needs and the marginalized communities it aimed to uplift. The priorities of FIFA and mega-events’ assumptions about economic growth suggest mega-events are incompatible with pro-poor principles. Yet regardless of significant tolls, financial and otherwise, mega-events are embraced based on factors other than the public good, influenced by dynamics of decision-making, perceptions of personal benefit, and symbolic appeal.
  • Publication
    Participant Structure in Event Perception: Towards the Acquisition of Implicitly 3-Place Predicates
    (2015-03-01) Wellwood, Alexis; Wellwood, Alexis; Xiaoxue He, Angela; Lidz, Jeffrey; Williams, Alexander
  • Publication
    Reverse-Polarity Activity-Based Protein Profiling
    (2019-05-01) Dettling, Suzanne; Dettling, Suzanne
    Reverse-polarity activity-based protein profiling (RP-ABPP) is a chemical proteomics approach that uses clickable, nucleophilic hydrazine probes to capture and identify protein-bound electrophiles in cells. The RP-ABPP approach is used to characterize the structure and function of reactive electrophilic PTMs and the proteins that harbor them, which may uncover unknown or novel functions of proteins in an endogenous setting. RP-ABPP has demonstrated utility as a versatile method to monitor metabolic regulation of electrophilic cofactors, as was done with the pyruvoyl cofactor in S-adenosyl-L- methionine decarboxylase (AMD1) and discover novel types of electrophilic modifications on proteins in human cells, as was done with the glyoxylyl modification on secernin-3 (SCRN3). These cofactors cannot be predicted by sequence and as such this area is relatively undeveloped. RP-ABPP is the only global unbiased approach to discover these electrophiles. Here, the utility of these experiments is described and a detailed protocol is provided for de novo discovery, quantitation, and global profiling of electrophilic functionality of proteins through the use of nitrogenous nucleophilic probes deployed directly to living cells in culture.
  • Publication
    On the acquisition of modality
    (2007-01-01) Papafragou, Anna; Ozturk, Ozge I