Chatelain, Mani, Marteleto, and Mattern Named Presidential Penn Compact Professors

Marcia Chatelain, Presidential Penn Compact Professor of Africana Studies, researches issues in African American history including African American migration, women’s and girls’ history, and race and food. Her latest book, Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America, received the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in History among numerous other honors. The book examines the intricate relationship among African American politicians, civil rights organizations, communities, and the fast-food industry. She is also the author of South Side Girls: Growing up in the Great Migration, which encompasses women’s and girls’ history and the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, as well as black capitalism. In 2016, The Chronicle of Higher Education named Chatelain a Top Influencer in academia in recognition of her social media campaign #FergusonSyllabus. She has held an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellowship at New America, a National Endowment for the Humanities Faculty Fellowship, and an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship.

Bakirathi Mani is the Presidential Penn Compact Professor of English and core faculty in the Asian American Studies Program.  Her areas of interest include Asian American, American, and South Asian Studies; visual cultural studies; museum and curatorial studies; postcolonial theory; transnational feminist and queer of color theory; and interdisciplinary methods of research in comparative race and ethnic studies. Mani’s book Unseeing Empire: Photography, Representation, South Asian America, earned an Honorable Mention Book Award from the Association of Asian American Studies in 2022. The book considers how empire continues to haunt contemporary photographic representations of South Asians in America. She is also the author of Aspiring to Home: South Asians in America. More recently, she has written on the circulation of photographs of anti-Asian violence during the COVID-19 pandemic, and photography's relation to imperial and settler-colonial archives in the U.S. and South Asia. She has been a visiting scholar at Brown University and Columbia University.

Letícia Marteleto, Presidential Penn Compact Professor of Sociology, is a social demographer who uses data, cultural knowledge, and sociological theory to understand inequality and its intersections with fertility, education, and health. Her work is motivated by the central question of how social and economic disadvantages and demographic change intertwine in low- and middle-income countries with persistently high levels of inequality at times when widely held social and demographic norms are in flux. In her latest research, Marteleto has been examining how structural shocks such as the Zika and COVID-19 novel infectious disease crises impact women’s lives. She is currently the principal investigator of DZC (Demographic Consequences of Epidemics in Brazil), funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). Marteleto’s research has also been funded by sources including the National Science Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the Spencer Foundation. She is a research affiliate of the Population Studies Center and a faculty member in the Graduate Group in Demography.

Shannon Matternas joined Penn’s Department of Cinema & Media Studies as a Presidential Penn Compact Professor. Previously she served on the faculty in both the Department of Anthropology and the School of Media Studies at The New School in New York. Mattern’s writing and teaching focus on archives, libraries, and other media spaces; media infrastructures; spatial epistemologies; and mediated sensation and exhibition. She is the author of four books, including A City Is Not a Computer: Other Urban Intelligences and Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media, which won the Dorothy Lee Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Ecology of Culture and the Anne Friedberg Innovative Scholarship Award. Mattern’s research has been recognized with numerous awards and fellowships, most recently the Kluge Chair in Modern Culture at the Library of Congress, which she will hold in 2025.