Writing with a view to publication in the freelance sections of newspapers such as THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER and THE NEW YORK TIMES, in magazines such as THE ATLANTIC and THE NEW YORKER, and in the literary quarterlies and the journals of opinion. Among the areas likely to be considered are writings as a public act, issues of taste and of privacy, questions of ethnics and of policy, methods of research and of checking, excerpting, marketing, and the realistic understanding of assignments and of the publishing world. Student papers will be the basis of weekly editorial sessions, with concerntration on the language: how to render material literate, how to recognize the dispose of padding and self-indulgence, how to tighten structure and amplify substance. Topics vary. Consult the Center for Africana Studies for detailed course description, or visit: http//www.sas.upenn.edu/africana.

This course explores the political character of contemporary urban American life. It seeks to familiarize students with the structural and ideological factors (e.g., dynamics of political economy, race, ethnicity, pluralism and gender) that constrain the policy context and define the urban environment as a terrain for commingling, competition, and conflict over uses of space. It makes considerable use of case studies to throw into relief the complex and sometimes subtle processes that shape urban life.

This workshop is intended to help students with prior experience writing poetry develop techniques to generate poems along with the critical tools necessary to revise and complete them. Through in-class exercises, weekly writing assignments, readings of established poets, and class critique, students will acquire an assortment of resources that will help them develop a more concrete sense of voice, rhythm, metaphor, and the image as well as a deeper understanding of how these things come together to make a successful poem. In addiiton to weekly writings, students will be asked to keep a journal, and to produce a final portfolio of poems.

This course explores the sources of current differences in economic status by race, ethnicity and gender. First, we explore reasons for race, gender and economic differences that are not due to current discrimination. We examine the history of participation in the U.S. economy for various racial and ethnic groups and evaluate whether that history creates differences in current productivity by race and ethnicity. We examine the effects of family decisions about work within the household on gender differences in labor market productivity. Second, we review the economic theories of current discrimination in the labor market. Third, we use data to test how well the various discrimination and non-discrimination theories explain current labor market patterns. Finally, we review the major national policies on labor market discrimination and evaluate their effectiveness in light of the theoretical and empirical evidence amassed throughout the course.

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

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.

Never before has poetry been so inescapable. Hip hop, the soundtrack of our times, has made rhyme, meter, and word-play part of our daily lives. How did this happen? This course begins not on the page, but in the bardic traditions of Homer's Iliad, which encoded many of the values of its time in oral formulas. Poetry was, however, no mere encyclopedia, but also a source of risk, as we will read in Plato's warning against its hypnotic powers, and in the excesses of The Bacchae. We continue through 19th and 20th century attempts to recover these classic traditions (Wordsworth, Longfellow, Pound). Yet Europe was not the only center of poetic production. How does the Homeric tradition relate to living traditions of West African singing poets (griots) and Southern African praise songs? And what traces of these traditions can we hear in the blues? We will listen to early blues recordings and discuss the politics of collecting folklore, and the genius of African American modernists ( Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Georgia Douglas Johnson) who brought vernacular speech onto the page. We will read and listen to a number of 20th century poets inspired when page meets stage in jazz poetry, dub poetry, spoken word, and hip hop. Assignments will include 2 papers, 2 small-group performances, memorization exercises, and a creative adaptation of one poem.

African Contemporary Music: North, South, East, and West. Come to know contemporary Africa through the sounds of its music: from South African kwela, jazz, marabi, and kwaito to Zimbabwean chimurenga; Central African soukous and pygmy pop; West African Fuji, and North African rai and hophop. Through reading and listening to live performance, audio and video recordings, we will examine the music of Africa and its intersections with politics, history, gender, and religion in the colonial and post colonial era. (Formerly Music 053).

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.