Twelve SAS and Wharton undergraduates, enrolled in FREN 300/CPLN300, The Making of Modern Paris are spending their Spring vacation in Paris where they are exploring the city, noting the sites portrayed in the 19th and 20th century fiction they have been reading while tracking the historical development and city planning efforts in the City of Lights. Their course, taught by Andrea Goulet, Associate Professor of French, Department of Romance Languages,, School of Arts and Sciences and Eugenie Birch, Nussdorf Professor of Urban Research, Department of City and Regional Planning, School of Design, assisted by Simon Mosbah, PhD candidate in City and Regional Planning and native of Paris, is funded by Penn’s Humanities, Design and Urbanism (H+U+D) project, funded by the Mellon Foundation to foster the integration of the Humanities and the Design professions around topics of urbanism. The program is sponsoring two international city seminars, this one on Paris and the other focused on Rio de Janiero, is taught by Daniel Barber, Assistant Professor of Architecture and John Tresch, Associate Professor, Department of History and Sociology of Science. In both instances, these courses represent the first time each team has taught together.

In the French/City Planning course field trip, students are engaging in extensive walking tours of old and new Paris and visiting important exhibits – they caught one on Viollet-le-Duc (the restorer of Notre Dame and many other Parisian sites) and another on utopian visions of Paris that closed the day after their arrival. They crawled through the city’s underground limestone quarries and moved quickly through its famous sewers. They have traveled by Metro. streetcar and bus to the Bibliothèque nationale and new development on city’s outskirts and sat in boxes at the Opera Garnier. They have visited the Carnavalet (Museum of the City of Paris) and the Louvre. They have sampled crepes and falafel and are negotiating the local boulangeries for breakfast. They have walked the routes of Quasimodo and Esmeralda (from Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame of Paris) and visited Printemps and Galeries Lafayette to get a taste of the department store featured Emile Zola’s Ladies Paradise – novels they read in class before the trip. They are working in teams of two spending a full day, studying a site of their choice to understand both its physical design and expression in the arts. Student participants are: Daniella Castillo, Danielle Cerepnalkovic, Fangyu Chen, Andrea Davidson, Matthew Degagne, Shuhao Fan, Manuela Gonzalez, Kristen Kelly, Maria Manghi, Ethan Skaggs, Ciara Stein, and James Steitle.

Paris, France

The H+U+D Initiative’s first city seminar courses departed Philadelphia for explorations abroad during Penn’s spring break. In an effort to integrate the humanities and design disciplines around the study of cities, H+U+D sponsored two international courses. Each seminar is co-taught by two faculty, one  from the humanities and one from design. This semester H+U+D’s Co-Director Dr. Eugenie Birch, City and Regional Planning, and H+U+D colloquium participant, Dr. Andrea Goulet, Romance Languages, ventured with students to Paris to study the connections between city planning and French literature. Dr. Daniel Barber, Architecture, also a H+U+D colloquium participant teamed up with Dr. John Tresch, History and Sociology of Science, traveled with their students to Rio de Janeiro to study topics related to cosmopolitanism in the 21st century.

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Applications are now invited for two one-year Junior Fellowships to be held in 2015-2016. One fellow will be selected from the humanities and one from design disciplines. Each will be hosted at Penn by a department in the other discipline. Mellon Junior Fellows will be selected on the basis of their ability to contribute, through research and teaching, to the mission of the initiative. During their nine months in residence, they will have the opportunity to pursue their own research. They will participate in the bi-weekly Colloquium, presenting their research at one of those sessions, and they will also participate fully in the academic life of their host departments. In the spring semester they will teach an undergraduate seminar, which may be co-taught by the two fellows. The deadline to submit applications is January 15, 2015.PennHUD Junior Fellow description  Junior Fellow application cover sheet