One of the goals of this seminar is to help students develop their capacity to solve strategic, real-world problems by working collaboratively in the classroom, on campus, and in the West Philadelphia community. Research teams help contribute to the improvement of education on campus and in the community, as well as the improvement of university-community relations.


Among other responsibilities, students focus their community service on college and career readiness at West Philadelphia High School and Sayre High School. Students are typically engaged in academically based community service learning at the schools for two hours each week.


A primary goal of the seminar is to help students develop proposals as to how a Penn undergraduate education might better empower students to produce, not simply "consume," societally-useful knowledge, as well as function as caring, contributing citizens of a democratic society. Please note new location of the class: The Netter Conference Room is on 111 South 38th Street, on the 2nd floor.

This course is an exploration of the family of musical idioms called jazz. Attention will be given to issues of style development, selective musicians, and to the social and cultural conditions and the scholarly discourses that have informed the creation, dissemination and reception of this dynamic set of styles from the beginning of the 20th century to the present.

Survey of major themes and issues in African history before 1800. Topics include: early civilizations, African kingdoms and empires, population movements, the spread of Islam, and the slave trade. Also, emphasis on how historians use archaeology, linguistics, and oral traditions to reconstruct Africa's early history.

This course provides an introduction to the society, culture and history of ancient Egypt. The objective of the course is to provide an understanding of the characteristics of the civilization of ancient Egypt and how that ancient society succeeded as one of the most successful and long-lived civilizations in world history.

This course examines how we as consumers in the "Western" world engage with musical difference largely through the products of the global entertainment industry. We examine music cultures in contact in a variety of ways-- particularly as traditions in transformation. Students gain an understanding of traditional music as live, meaningful person-to-person music making, by examining the music in its original site of production, and then considering its transformation once it is removed, and recontextualized in a variety of ways. The purpose of the course is to enable students to become informed and critical consumers of "World Music" by telling a series of stories about particular recordings made with, or using the music of, peoples culturally and geographically distant from the US. Students come to understand that not all music downloads containing music from unfamiliar places are the same, and that particular recordings may be embedded in intriguing and controversial narratives of production and consumption. At the very least, students should emerge from the class with a clear understanding that the production, distribution, and consumption of world music is rarely a neutral process.

This course examines how we as consumers in the "Western" world engage with musical difference largely through the products of the global entertainment industry. We examine music cultures in contact in a variety of ways-- particularly as traditions in transformation. Students gain an understanding of traditional music as live, meaningful person-to-person music making, by examining the music in its original site of production, and then considering its transformation once it is removed, and recontextualized in a variety of ways. The purpose of the course is to enable students to become informed and critical consumers of "World Music" by telling a series of stories about particular recordings made with, or using the music of, peoples culturally and geographically distant from the US. Students come to understand that not all music downloads containing music from unfamiliar places are the same, and that particular recordings may be embedded in intriguing and controversial narratives of production and consumption. At the very least, students should emerge from the class with a clear understanding that the production, distribution, and consumption of world music is rarely a neutral process.

This course examines how we as consumers in the "Western" world engage with musical difference largely through the products of the global entertainment industry. We examine music cultures in contact in a variety of ways-- particularly as traditions in transformation. Students gain an understanding of traditional music as live, meaningful person-to-person music making, by examining the music in its original site of production, and then considering its transformation once it is removed, and recontextualized in a variety of ways. The purpose of the course is to enable students to become informed and critical consumers of "World Music" by telling a series of stories about particular recordings made with, or using the music of, peoples culturally and geographically distant from the US. Students come to understand that not all music downloads containing music from unfamiliar places are the same, and that particular recordings may be embedded in intriguing and controversial narratives of production and consumption. At the very least, students should emerge from the class with a clear understanding that the production, distribution, and consumption of world music is rarely a neutral process.

This course examines how we as consumers in the "Western" world engage with musical difference largely through the products of the global entertainment industry. We examine music cultures in contact in a variety of ways-- particularly as traditions in transformation. Students gain an understanding of traditional music as live, meaningful person-to-person music making, by examining the music in its original site of production, and then considering its transformation once it is removed, and recontextualized in a variety of ways. The purpose of the course is to enable students to become informed and critical consumers of "World Music" by telling a series of stories about particular recordings made with, or using the music of, peoples culturally and geographically distant from the US. Students come to understand that not all music downloads containing music from unfamiliar places are the same, and that particular recordings may be embedded in intriguing and controversial narratives of production and consumption. At the very least, students should emerge from the class with a clear understanding that the production, distribution, and consumption of world music is rarely a neutral process.

SPRING 2018: This seminar will introduce students to the power of public art. Outdoor murals, painted poetry, poetry performed outdoors, anti-museum sculpture, and outdoor theater will be the focus of this seminar. How does public art make the very idea of art gain new dimensions such as art as an event (not an object) and art as a community intervention? Our starting point will be outdoor murals in Philadelphia and other very recent art reconsidering the meaning of public monuments. In addition to our focus on contemporary public art in Philadelphia, we will focus on the role of public art in the 1960s and 1970s Black Arts Movement. The seminar will unveil the power of outdoor space to create art that has urgency and the openness of radical experimentation.


See the Africana Studies Department's website at https://africana.sas.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

This course explores a broad set of issues defining important aspects of the Black/African American experience. In addition to the "usual suspects" (e.g., race, socioeconomic status, poverty, gender, and group culture), we also think about matters of health and well-being, the family, education, and identity in Black/African American communities. Our goal is to gain a deeper sociological understanding and appreciation of the diverse and ever-changing life experiences of Blacks/African Americans.