University of Pennsylvania

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• SOURCE: Philadelphia Inquirer
  10/11/2022
  

  Penn Students Questioned the University's Comforting Story about its Relationship to Slavery

  The University of Pennsylvania embraced an origin story involving George Whitefield as a way to claim to be older than rival institutions. When it came to acknowledging Whitefield's advocacy for slavery, the university raised its Quaker roots as a shield. Kathleen Brown and students are trying to change the story.

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• 6-10-13
  

  UPenn's Stephanie McCurry to Lead First MOOC on History of Slavery

  by David Austin Walsh

  Credit: Wiki Commons/HNN staff.Stephanie McCurry, Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania and a distinguished scholar of the Civil War era, will be leading a new massive online open course this fall about the history of slavery in the United States. It will be based on her popular UPenn course, “The Rise and Fall of the Slave South,” a survey-level class.The course, which has yet to be officially titled, is the product of the partnership between UPenn and the popular MOOC provider Coursera.Professor McCurry says that she became interested in teaching a MOOC after spending three years as undergraduate chair at the university, during which she saw a decline in the number of enrollments in history classes.MOOCs offered an opportunity to shake up the field.“I became interested in pedagogical and curricular questions, and I'd already begun a series of initiatives within my department to move away from standard survey/AP-style courses.”

• SOURCE: WaPo
  6-1-13
  

  ‘History Detectives’ host’s collection of black propaganda posters subject of Philly exhibit

  PHILADELPHIA — A new exhibit created by a University of Pennsylvania professor and host of a popular public television show examines how wartime propaganda has been used to motivate oppressed populations to risk their lives for homelands that considered them second-class citizens.“Black Bodies in Propaganda: The Art of the War Poster,” opens Sunday and continues until March 2 at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Lectures, film screenings and other programming will be rolled out over the course of the exhibit’s run.The exhibit’s 33 posters, dating from the Civil War to both World Wars and the African independence movements, are part of the personal collection of Tukufu Zuberi, a Penn professor of sociology and African studies and a host of the PBS series “History Detectives.”...