Upcoming Events

We are thrilled to welcome Ivan Drpić (University of Pennsylvania) for a talk titled “Painters at Play: The Excessive Epigraphy of a Late Byzantine Church.”

Professor Ivan Drpić writes:

 

"Byzantine fresco-painters rarely marked their works with personal inscriptions. One notable exception to this pervasive anonymity is the Church of the Virgin Peribleptos in Ohrid, North Macedonia. The mural decoration of this church, completed in 1294/95, features at least eight written marks left by the painters, the chief among whom were members of the Astrapas family from Thessaloniki. What is striking about these written marks is not only their sheer number—an idiosyncrasy otherwise unparalleled elsewhere in the Byzantine world—but also, more crucially, their strategic placement. Fully integrated into the painted scenes and figures, the “signatures” of the Astrapades take on the guise of epigraphic parerga gracing a variety of objects represented on the walls—garments, weaponry, tableware, and architecture. Rather than being external appendages to the frescoes, these written marks are, in other words, an integral part of their pictorial fiction. This lecture argues that the ostensible furtiveness of the painters’ personal inscriptions at the Peribleptos invited the beholder to participate in a game of visual hide-and-seek. In the process, it created conditions for an alternative mode of viewing, one in which the subject matter of the murals could be downplayed or even ignored at the expense of its artful rendition. As though refusing to exhaust itself in the task of depicting sacred truths, the art of the Astrapades proclaimed itself to be a source of visual pleasure."

 

Ivan Drpić is the Cecil L. Striker Associate Professor of History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. He specializes in the art, architecture, and material culture of Byzantium and its Slavic neighbors in Southeastern Europe. Drpić’s first book, Epigram, Art, and Devotion in Later Byzantium (Cambridge University Press, 2016)—the winner of the 2017 Runciman Prize and the 2019 Karen Gould Prize—explores the nexus of art, personal piety, and self-representation in the last centuries of Byzantium, focusing on the evidence of verse inscriptions. Drpić is currently at work on a second book project, The Enkolpion: Object and Self in Medieval Byzantium, which investigates the dynamics of subject formation through the lens of material culture. His scholarship has received recognition from a number of sources, including the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.

The Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy's Graduate Workshop will feature works-in-progress by Rebekah Jones (UC Berkeley) and Natalia Reyes (Penn). 

More details are available on the AMC events & workshops page: https://amc.sas.upenn.edu/events-workshops

 

UAB is hosting a mentor matching event for English majors and minors on April 10th from 12:30-2 in 135 Fisher Bennett Hall! Use THIS link to be paired with a fellow English major/minor! Please fill it out by Sunday (April 5th) at 11:59pm to be matched.

On Monday, April 13th, from 5:30-7pm, Rea Tajiri (Professor of Film and Media Arts, Temple University) will join us for a screening of her films and post-screening conversation in FBH 401. Professor Tajiri is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist who creates installation, documentary and experimental films. Her works include the acclaimed documentary meditation on Japanese American internment: History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige. This event is co-sponsored by the Asian American Studies Program and the Department of Cinema & Media Studies.

 

This event is co-sponsored by the Asian American Studies Program and the Department of Cinema & Media Studies.

 

You are cordially invited to Angelina Eimannsberger's dissertation defense on Wednesday, April 15.   The public session plus celebration will be held at 3 p.m. in the Wolf Center, room 623, in person and on Zoom. 

Title: "Trivial Pursuits: Women Readers, Materialist Feminism, and a New Life of Bookishness in the Twenty-First Century"

Committee: Kristen R. Ghodsee and Melissa E. Sanchez (co-chairs), James English, Dagmawi Woubshet 

Place: 623 in Williams Hall on Penn's campus (aka the Price Lab/Wolf conference room on the 6th floor)  

 

Please contact Angelina for the Zoom link to the public session.

 

https://queerclassrelations.commons.gc.cuny.edu/graduate-student-pre-con...

The University of Pennsylvania is excited to partner with CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies at the City University of New York to hold a symposium addressing the intersection of queer and trans experience and social class. We invite applications from students at any stage in their graduate study and in any discipline who are working on related questions and topics to take part in a day of faculty-led interactive workshops.

This symposium hopes to foster emerging scholarship that explores the connections between queer lives and class experiences. We’re particularly interested in work that addresses this intersection alongside race, caste, disability, gender, and nationality. The symposium will begin with an evening keynote by Justin Torres, author of Blackouts (winner, 2023 National Book Award for Fiction) and We the Animals (2011). The following day will consist of a combination of reading groups and workshops. In the spirit of cross-institution solidarity, we are proud to collaborate with CUNY and CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies on this event.

Please get in touch with Heather Love or Rylee Smith if you have any questions.

 

Professor Kate Thomas will give a seminar on how to get a job in liberal arts colleges. 

By definition, well-qualified job candidates come out of programs in research universities, but not all tenure track positions are in those familiar settings.  How can candidates best prepare themselves to win jobs at undergraduate liberal arts colleges?  It can be hard to know how to translate your experience for the smaller liberal arts setting, and even harder to know how liberal arts structures, cultures and values will shape the interview process. 

Kate Thomas is the K. Laurence Stapleton Professor of English at Bryn Mawr College and was, for seven years, Chair of the English department   She has chaired multiple national searches in English and participated in many more across the humanities.  This workshop will give graduate students a realist and pragmatic guide to application materials, interviews and campus visits. 

Dr Thomas will cover topics such as: balancing emphases on teaching and research; assessing your audience; framing your specializations; navigating the call to be a “good fit”; making it easy for a search committee to hire you; recent changes in liberal arts education; challenges specific to liberal arts campuses; mistakes that can lose you the job.  

On Wednesday, April 29th, from 5-7pm, our very own Mursal Sidiqi will present their Work in Progress in the Faculty Lounge (FBH 135). In their own words, their dissertation "spans the eighteenth and nineteenth century to trace British technologies of national, racial, and gender formation as Britain first began to imagine the Afghan polity and the Afghan subject. Mursal’s work interweaves queer studies, empire studies, and translation studies to examine the entanglements of Afghan and British literary histories of sexuality." They will discuss a chapter titled “Staging the Afghan Beside the Horse (1811-1839).” The event is co-hosted by ResVic. 

 THE NOVEL AND LABOR WORKSHOP

May 1st, Kelly Writer’s House, room 202.

 

9.00-10.00 Novel & Labor on the Plantation 

 

Mariana Akawi (University of Pennsylvania) & Jack Fixa (UC Irvine) 

Comments & Chair: Yoon Sun Lee (Wellesley) 

 

10.15-11.15 “A mouth, a milking-pail, and a threshing machine”: Reproductive Labors in the Novel 

 

Ronny Litvack-Katzman (Harvard) & Koyuki Smith (The Graduate Center, CUNY) 

Comments & Chair: Lilith Todd (University of Pennsylvania) 

 

11.15-11.45 Coffee Break 

 

11.45-12.45 Home Factories in the Novel 

 

Ashley Cullina (Yale) & Eileen Ying (University of Pennsylvania) 

Comments & Chair: David Kurnick (Rutgers) 

 

12.45-1.30 Lunch Break

 

1.30-2.30 Unusual Forms for the Novel & Labor 

 

Brandon Rushton (University of Notre Dame) & Ruoxi Zhu (University of Pennsylvania)

Comments & Chair: Arielle Zibrak (University of Wyoming)  

 

2.45.-3.45 Numbing & Sanitizing: Creative Labor & the Neoliberal Novel 

 

Yoojung Chun (Harvard) & Rachael Mulvihill (Carnegie Mellon University) 

Comments & Chair: Dora Zhang (UC Berkeley)  

 

  

5-7 PUBLIC PANEL:  THE NOVEL AND REPRODUCTIVE LABOR

May 1st, Fisher-Bennett Hall, room 401

See here for more details https://www.english.upenn.edu/events/2026/05/01/novel-and-labor-public-p...

Lilith Todd, "Mary Wollstonecraft's Weaning Forms." 

Dora Zhang, "Reproducing People: On Types and Stereotypes."

Arielle Zibrak, "The Destructive Imagination of the Eugenic Novel Heroine." 

DINNER FOR WORKSHOP PARTICIPANTS AT 4506 Chester Ave.

 

 

Saturday, May 2nd 

Fisher Bennett Hall, Room 222

See here for more details https://www.english.upenn.edu/events/2026/05/02/novel-and-labor-day-2

10.00-11.00 Labor & the Novel in a State of Emergency 

Michael Williamson (Binghamton University) & Xavier Xin (University of Pennsylvania) 

Comments & Chair: Julia Alekseyeva (University of Pennsylvania)

 

11.15-12.00 Round Up (Tina Lupton, Chair)

 

 

 

 

10.00-11.00 Labor & the Novel in a State of Emergency 

Michael Williamson (Binghamton University) & Xavier Xin (University of Pennsylvania) 

Comments & Chair: Julia Alekseyeva (University of Pennsylvania)

 

11.15-12.00 Round Up (Tina Lupton, Chair)