Upcoming Events

Join us for an evening celebrating Sumūd: A New Palestinian Reader, an anthology that illuminates the resilience and cultural strength of the Palestinian people in the face of ongoing adversity. Featuring contributions from poets, writers, historians, and artists—alongside twenty-five striking black-and-white illustrations—this collection reflects the unwavering spirit of steadfastness, or sumūd, a deeply ingrained Palestinian value.Go to event

For as long as house ball culture has been around, people have been appropriating it. Long recognized as a nexus of Black trans/queer diasporic performance, ballroom is home to a cluster of embodied practices and movement vocabularies popularly referred to as vogue. Over the past 40 years, vogue, and house ball culture more generally, has faced multiple waves of appropriation within popular culture in the 52 years since ballroom began with femme queens Crystal and Lottie founding the historic House of Labeija.Go to event

Join us on the Penn campus for an enthralling dialogue between the incredible poet and Penn alumnus Joshua Bennett and the dynamic communicator Carlos Andrés Gómez!

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Since photography's invention, black life has been presented as fraught, short, agonizingly filled with violence, and indifferent to intervention: living death—mortevivum—in a series of still frames that refuse a complex humanity. In Mortevivum, Kimberly Juanita Brown shows us how the visual logic of documentary photography and the cultural legacy of empire have come together to produce the understanding that blackness and suffering—and death—are inextricable.Go to event

The 2025 presidential transition continues to generate strong reactions across a diverse spectrum of American voters, along with heightened scrutiny of the vulnerabilities and strengths of U.S. democracy.

Join Peter Struck, Stephen A. Levin Family Dean of the College, and a panel of faculty experts at The Times Center for a wide-ranging and nuanced discussion of what makes for a democracy, whether democracies today—nationally and internationally—are imperiled, and what can be done to strengthen democracy. 
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On February 6th, join us for a compelling dialogue with Jenny Andersson, Professor at Uppsala University, Sweden, and Dr. Troels Skadhauge, a recent PhD graduate from the University of Pennsylvania, for a conversation titled, "Scandinavian Social Democracy as an Alternative to Liberal Democracy?" This event offers an opportunity to explore the distinct principles underlying Scandinavian social democracy and how it diverges from liberal democracy in its approach to economic policy, political organization, and cultural priorities.Go to event

This talk explores the transnational aspects of K-pop, Korean popular music, and the complicated meaning of “K” in K-pop. While K-pop constantly represents a specific ethnic-national identity, it is now common to see non-Korean and non-Asian musicians in the field. There are even K-pop groups consisting entirely of non-Asian members who promote themselves as K-pop. This raises several questions: What is K-pop? What does the K in K-pop mean if there is no Koreanness? How does the expanding ethnic boundary of K-pop affect the way people view the genre? What constitutes K-pop today?Go to event

Historic hurricanes, weeks of fires in major metropolises, the warmest year on record... Climate change has become a unifying crisis in not only the United States but across the globe. Join us to talk to acclaimed writer Malcolm Harris about his new book What's Left, which takes up several alternative ways through the climate crisis. From liberal marketcraft to communist revolution, Harris explores various alternatives for resolving the seemingly unresolvable tensions between the environment and global capitalism today.Go to event

Penn Schools, centers, institutes, student groups, and more host events for Energy Week 2025, ranging from Lightning Talks hosted by the Kleinman Center to a talk about climate change and artificial intelligence, hosted by the Penn Environmental Innovations Initiative.

Energy Week Full Schedule

This collaborative event is sponsored by the Vagelos Integrated Program in Energy Research (VIPER), Vagelos Institute for Energy Science and Technology (VIEST) and the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy. 

Join us on February 10  from 12-1:30 p.m. for this year's Lightning Talks. Hear engaging Ted Talk-style presentations from Penn students across a variety of different fields, including science, engineering, policy, and business. Finalists can earn up to $1,000 in awards. A Judge's Choice Award and Audience Choice Award with be granted at this event.