Undergraduate Humanities Forum

Penn undergraduate students participate in the Wolf Humanities Center (formerly the Penn Humanities Forum) through an annual research fellowship program. Approximately twelve Wolf Undergraduate Research Fellowships are awarded competitively each year to promote excellence in undergraduate research in the humanities and to cultivate the importance of humanistic thought across disciplines and schools at Penn.

candidates should be conducting work related to the Wolf Center's theme for the year in which the award is granted. Calls for applications are solicited in late Fall of the year preceding the fellowship.

All Undergraduate Humanities Forum papers posted in ScholarlyCommons are under copyright of the individual authors. ScholarlyCommons is a repository of scholarly output of researchers at the University of Pennsylvania. The content of each collection is determined by the sponsoring research unit (i.e., department, center, laboratory, institute, etc.). Any content is appropriate if all applicable policies are followed (e.g., copyright), it is technically feasible (the content can be posted using existing format types, etc.), and the sponsoring unit decides it is appropriate.

 

 

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  • Publication
    Replacing Periods With Question Marks: A Study of the Role of Public Education in Kanawha County, West Virginia
    (2016-05-01) Engell, Sarah Michelle
    In 1974 the proposal and adoption of new language arts textbooks, that sought to emphasize themes of multiculturalism and egalitarianism, sparked a violent year-long protest in Kanawha County, West Virginia. The opposition perceived the texts as overly sexual, anti-American, and intrusive while supporters celebrated the diversification of narratives and information. The ability of newly adopted language arts textbooks to spark an explosive controversy reflects the impact of textbooks and, more broadly, public education on creating a sense of identity and belonging. Through objecting or supporting the textbooks and the language they contained, the citizens of Kanawha County were bitterly fighting to protect their own definitions of what it meant to be a good student, parent, teacher, community member, and American. Furthermore, through protesting and ultimately reworking the process of textbook adoption and inclusion, the citizens redefined who and what was included in their notion of a good public school education. The research seeks to understand how a community’s perception of public education and the role it should play in a child’s life impacts the inclusion of the public in academic decision making as well as the insertion and definition of controversial matter in the classroom. In addition, the research seeks to better understand the triangulation of rights in public school between students, teachers, and parents.
  • Publication
    Ill-Fame on Blackberry Alley: Prostitution and Sport in 19th-Century Philadelphia
    (2016-05-01) Korostoff, Thomson
    The 19th century offers a view of prostitution in a time of its open celebration. A remarkably permissive attitude towards sex work defies conventional understandings of “Victorian prudery” and makes for a fascinating period of American sexual history. Though the 20th century history of prostitution is defined by efforts to regulate the practice on moral grounds, the 19th century allows an assessment of the bawdy life through the eye of the market. In the mid 19th-century, the era of established brothels as social spaces, the urban leisure and sex trade was found objectionable only as noise disturbances. This project conducts a spatial analysis of the 19th century leisure economy via a public guide, in contrast to the 20th-century post-reform accounts of prostitution in arrest records or city Vice Commission reports.
  • Publication
    Redefining American Motherhood: Emily Mudd's Mission at Home and Abroad
    (2016-05-01) Hunter, Helen
    In 1929, Emily Hartshorne Mudd risked arrest by volunteering as a nurse at Philadelphia’s first birth control clinic. Visibly pregnant with her second child, Mudd relied on an antiquated law that barred the incarceration of a pregnant woman in order to serve women in need of contraceptive advice. Before this bold venture, Emily Mudd had worked for a decade as her husband’s unpaid research assistant in immunology and had personally experienced the conflicting pressures of a woman in the early twentieth century who aspired to be both a mother and a professional. Over the next seventy years, Mudd became a key player in the development of marriage counseling as a way to help women navigate their maternal and professional ambitions. Scholars have remembered Mudd for her contributions to the field of marriage counseling but have criticized her for her methods and her failures. This limited view of her career detracts from her larger professional ambitions. Mudd’s professional shortcomings, reexamined, reveal a strong-willed and pragmatic idealist working against a rapidly changing social order.
  • Publication
    "The Implacable Surge of History": Investigating Jewish Activism in Atlanta During the Civil Rights Movement
    (2015-05-01) Kerker, Danielle Rose
    Existing works on southern Jewry illustrate how most southern Jews were concerned with self-preservation during the Civil Rights Movement. Many historians have untangled perceptions of southern Jewish detachment from civil rights issues to explain how individuals and communities were torn between their sympathy towards the African- American plight and Jewish vulnerability during a period of heightened racial tension. This project draws connections among the American Civil Rights Movement, the southern Jewish experience, and Atlanta race relations in order to identify instances of southern Jewish involvement in the fight for racial equality. What were the forms of activism Jews chose, the circumstances that shaped those decisions, and the underlying goals behind them? Studying Atlanta’s Jewish communities during the 1950s and 1960s helps broaden the conversation on Jewish activism, raise questions of southern Jewish identity, and uncover distinctive avenues for change. Analysis suggests that, although their story is less known, Jewish organizations and individuals in Atlanta found ways to contribute to the fight for civil rights equality within the context of the Jim Crow South.