Welcome

Wendy Steiner, Founding Director
Richard L. Fisher Professor of English

The Penn Humanities Forum was launched with a "Celebration of Philadelphia Writers," a spring weekend in 1999 in which sixty local novelists, poets, and scholars assembled in historic and cultural venues throughout the city. Over 2000 Philadelphians attended the readings, walking tours, performances, and lectures, and thousands across the country saw these re-broadcast on C-Span. The Celebration epitomizes the Forum's mission: to use humanistic knowledge and expertise to promote an ongoing cultural conversation involving the range of university disciplines and the general public.

The Forum provokes its diverse participants to discover common ground through the selection of a yearly theme. Human Nature was the inaugural topic in 1999-2000, enlisting evolutionary biologists, medical ethicists, literary and music scholars, artists, gender theorists, and human rights experts. In this and subsequent themes we have considered how the humanities are linked with many areas of inquiry in medicine, law, business, and the social sciences.

Each topic is explored in a rich program of public lectures, performances, and exhibitions, as well as through faculty and student research. An eager participant in Philadelphia's civic life, we cosponsor and site programs in major cultural and historical venues in the city.

The Forum thus has many beneficiaries. Perhaps most fundamentally, it provides a setting in which humanities scholars and students can put their ideas and values to work. Bringing their research into a rich public conversation, learning from those outside their field, translating the life of the mind into benefit for the community: these are the Forum's underlying goals. Our website reveals a vast tapestry of interconnections, for the Forum is itself a web, a growing system of links binding people and ideas and institutions. We invite you to join this network, extending our most cordial invitation to you to participate in the Penn Humanities Forum.