A year of ‘Connections’
Over the past 15 years, the Internet has transformed human knowledge, research, communication and commerce. Consumers purchase goods at Amazon.com and eBay.com. Friends stay connected through sites like Facebook and MySpace. And scholars work collaboratively across long distances.
But Peter Conn, a professor of English in the School of Arts and Sciences and director of the Penn English Program in London, says similar examples of connectedness can be traced back at least 2,000 years.
“The Roman Empire was an example of a huge geographic area gradually being gathered together and connected by both the physical technology of roads and language, and bound together culturally,” he says.
“Connections” is the topic for the 2009-2010 Penn Humanities Forum (PHF) season. Like this past year’s topic, “Change,” the PHF will feature lectures, seminars and other public events throughout the fall and spring.
Conn, the season’s topic director, says he proposed the idea “simply because it seemed to me that in one way or another, [connections] is a theme that would permit very wide-ranging discussions of both contemporary and older social and political organizations, as well as cultural interactions.”
The Forum’s goals are to explore a broad topic through a variety of disciplines, reaching into both the past and present. In the upcoming season, speakers from Penn and around the world will discuss historical and modern-day connectedness.
Michael Kearns, a professor of computer and information science at Penn, kicks off the season on Sept. 23 with a talk on “Social Networks.” Douglas Hofstadter, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and distinguished professor of cognitive science at Indiana University, follows on Oct. 7 with a discussion of his book, “I am a Strange Loop.”
On Oct. 14, David Crystal, an honorary professor of linguistics at the University of Wales, discusses “English as a World Language.” Later that month, on Oct. 28, Helen Epstein, author of “The Invisible Cure: Why We Are Losing the Fight Against AIDS in Africa,” lectures on “Pandemics.”
In the spring, Victor Mair, a professor of Chinese language and literature at Penn and editor of The Columbia History of Chinese Literature, chats about Chinese imperial history as a way of exploring connections across that part of the world.
Conn will give a talk of his own in February 2010 on “Forging Mass Audiences—The U.S. Best Seller.”
While most of the public events are lectures and seminars, the final event is a performance and concert—“When Music & Sweet Poetry Agree”—featuring the string quartet Parthenia, actor Paul Hecht and soprano Jacqueline Horner-Kwiatek.
For more information about the Penn Humanities Forum’s 2009-2010 season, visit the web site at www.phf.upenn.edu.
Originally published on June 11, 2009
