H+U+D Seeking Graduate Student Research Proposals for 2020-21

Deadline: May 15, 2020

The Project in Humanities, Urbanism, and Design (H+U+D), invites graduate students to submit research proposals for Academic Year 2020-21. Small grants will be awarded to support projects that align with the mission of the H+U+D project.

H+U+D is a joint effort among the Schools of Arts and Sciences (SAS) and Design (PennDesign), and the Penn Institute of Urban Research (Penn IUR) whose objective is to promote synergies among the humanities and design disciplines. Beginning in 2018, the initiative takes “The Inclusive City” as its theme, focusing on issues of inclusivity and diversity. For more information on the initiative see: https://live-penn-iur-hud.pantheonsite.io/

Graduate Research

Small research grants will be awarded to support interdisciplinary design/humanities projects undertaken by graduate students in humanities and design disciplines that focus on the built environment. Eligible research must draw from both humanities and design disciplines. Examples of eligible work include master’s thesis projects, independent study projects, and doctoral dissertation research. Preference will be given to projects related to the “Inclusive City” theme. The maximum award is $2,000 per proposal. Allowable research expenses include travel, archival charges, and photography. Previously funded student projects are available to review here: https://live-penn-iur-hud.pantheonsite.io/publication_category/student-research-2/

Application Instructions

The application should include

• Research project proposal (maximum: 500 words)
• Short itemized budget
• Unofficial Penn transcript
• Letter or recommendation from sponsoring faculty member, requested by the applicant via the Letter of Recommendation Request Form

Submit your proposal no later than May 15, 2020, to the Center for Undergraduate Research and Fellowships (CURF) via the student application:

https://www.curf.upenn.edu/content/project-humanities-urbanism-and-design.

A special awards sub-committee will review proposals, and funds will be transferred to successful applicants’ departments for disbursement. Questions? Contact Andrea Goulet (agoulet@sas.upenn.edu) or Daniel A. Barber (barberda@design.upenn.edu)

Mellon Undergraduate Research Fellows

Application deadline: May 15, 2020

The initiative in Humanities, Urbanism, and Design (H+U+D) at the University of Pennsylvania is a ten-year project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to foster critical and integrative consideration of the relationship between the humanities and the design professions in the analysis and shaping of the built environment. Under the renewed grant (beginning in 2108), the initiative takes “The Inclusive City” as its theme, focusing on issues of inclusivity and diversity. The program has a number of component parts, including a bi-weekly Faculty Colloquium, the sponsorship of graduate and undergraduate courses, student research funding, an Undergraduate Research Colloquium, special lectures, participation in conferences, a Doctoral Dissertation (ABD) Fellowship program, and a Junior (postdoc) Fellowship program. For more information on the initiative see: https://live-penn-iur-hud.pantheonsite.io/

Undergraduate Research

Applications are now invited for the Mellon Undergraduate Research Fellowship program for Fall 2020. The renewed program places increased emphasis on the nurturing and mentoring of undergraduate researchers, ranging from sophomores to seniors. The program supports researchers who are working on topics dealing with the built environment of cities, landscapes, and architecture with attention to inclusivity and diversity and who wish to expand the inter-, trans-, and multidisciplinary character of their projects.

In addition to the pursuit of independent research on topics of their choosing under the sponsorship of a faculty advisor, awardees will be meet monthly in the fall semester in a non-credit workshop setting (the Mellon Undergraduate Research Colloquium) under the mentorship of two faculty members of the H+U+D Colloquium. The Colloquium will host speakers, make excursions, and share the work of its members. In the spring, Undergraduate Colloquium members will be invited to continue their research in the established, credit-bearing Undergraduate Urban Research Colloquium (UURC), which is sponsored by the Penn Institute for Urban Research (IUR). https://www.curf.upenn.edu/content/penn-undergraduate-urban-research-colloquium

For the Academic Year 2020-21, the H+U+D initiative will award 6-8 fellowships to students in the schools of Arts and Sciences, Design, Engineering and Applied Sciences, Nursing and Wharton. H+U+D will select the fellows on the basis of the applicant’s expressed research interests in design, humanities or humanistic social sciences. Each fellowship carries a research grant of up to $2,000.

The Mellon Undergraduate Research Fellowship program is also advertised through the Center for Undergraduate Research and Fellowships (CURF) and in cooperation with the recruitment efforts of Penn’s Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship program, whose awards are made to “minority students and others with a demonstrated commitment to eradicating racial disparities” (https://www.vpul.upenn.edu/mmuf-about.php).

Eligibility

Rising sophomores, juniors and seniors in any major in SAS, Design, Nursing, SEAS and Wharton are eligible. The research project must deal with the built environment (cities, landscapes, and architecture), with preference for projects dealing with

• inclusivity and diversity
• inter-, trans-, and multidisciplinary study in design, the humanities, and humanistic social sciences.

Application Instructions

The Center for Undergraduate Research and Fellowships (CURF) administers the Mellon Undergraduate Research Colloquium. All applications are due by 4:00 PM on May 15, 2020, including letters of recommendation (see next section).

On Friday, February 28, 2020, members of the H+U+D Colloquium visited the Athenaeum of Philadelphia’s exhibition, Structure & Purpose: The Legacy of Engineering at Keast & Hood. Curated by architectural historian, Izzy Kornblatt, the exhibition explores the role of the firm’s founding engineers, Carl A. Baumert Jr., Nicholas L. Gianopulos, and Thomas J. Leidigh, longtime principals at the firm of Keast & Hood Co. from the years 1953 – 2007 and examines the scope and importance of their work. Their collaborations with such renowned architects as Louis I. Kahn and Venturi, Scott Brown, and Associates spanned decades and their structural solutions underlie numerous landmark buildings of the 20^th century. Bruce Laverty, the Gladys Brooks Curator of Architecture at the Athenaeum, gave the group a tour of the retrospective exhibition, which includes an array of never-before exhibited drawings, models, and documents related to projects ranging from Louis Kahn’s National Capital of Bangladesh to the restoration of Philadelphia City Hall and Robert Venturi’s Vanna Venturi House in Chestnut Hill.

Photos: Bruce Laverty, Bruce Laverty, the Gladys Brooks Curator of Architecture at the Athenaeum of Philadelphia, gives a tour to H+U+D Colloquium members

On Friday, November 11, 2019, the H+U+D Colloquium visited the Philadelphia Museum of Art and toured their special exhibition, “Designs for Different Futures.” Curated by Kathryn Hiesinger and Michelle Millar Fisher at the Philadelphia Museum, the exhibition focuses on the role of designers in shaping the world of our future. Tasked with problem-solving across multiple disciplines, designers address the values, behavior, needs, and wants of society, not only with physical products, but by creating services, organizational systems, human interactions, speculative propositions, and even virtual experiences. About 80 future-focused projects are organized into subthemes, such as Bodies, Food, Generations, Data, Jobs, Materials, and Power. These projects range from Q, The Genderless Voice (2019), a non-binary blend of voices intended to frustrate gender assumptions, to Seated Design (2016) by Lucy Jones, an assemblage of clothing and accessories for wheelchair users. Other highlights include Orkan Telhan’s Ouroboros Steak (2019), a speculative project featuring meat produced from one’s own cells, and Another Generosity (2018), an inflatable pod that expands, contracts and changes color in response to its environment.

David Hartt, Assistant Professor of Fine Arts at Penn’s Weitzman School of Design and a member of the H+U+D Colloquium, gave a tour of his installation “The Histories (Le Mancenillier)” at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Temple Beth Sholom to members of the H+U+D Colloquium on September 20, 2019. Hartt’s multimedia installation, the first-ever artist commission at this National Historic Landmark, examines and evokes culture, migration and environment of Jewish and Black diasporas in America. Highlights include new recordings of music by 19th-century Jewish-Creole composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk, video and tapestries that evoke the landscapes of Haiti and New Orleans, live musical activations by musicians, including Haitian Philadelphian baritone Jean Bernard Cerin, and orchids and tropical plants positioned throughout the building.

More info about David Hartt’s installation can be found here:  https://franklloydwright.org/event/david-hartt-the-histories-le-mancenillier/

Photos: David Hartt and members of the H+U+D Colloquium tour his installation, “The Histories (Le Mancenillier)”

Michelle Lopez, H+U+D Faculty Member and Assistant Professor in Penn’s Stuart Weitzman School of Design, has created a site-specific installation at the Institute of Contemporary Art, called “Ballast & Barricades,” which was recently featured in Penn Today. Click here for the link.

The installation features construction-derived materials, like steel pipes, chain-link fencing, wooden barricades, and bright orange ropes, that are connected to and precariously counter-balanced by a 1,000-pound piece of a building salvaged from a teardown in Northeast Philadelphia. Lopez pushes these industrial materials to their limits while simultaneously using them to probe socio-political questions relating to nationalism, patriotism, and authoritarianism.

As Alex Klein, Dorothy and Stephen R. Weber (CHE’60) Curator at the ICA, says: “In Ballast & Barricades Michelle Lopez employs a formal, fragmented architectural language to critique symbols of nationalism, power, and consumption. Known for her sculptural works that recast histories of minimalism and everyday objects through a feminist lens, in this exhibition Lopez brings together a selection of recent sculptures alongside a monumental, site-specific installation that creates a suspended cityscape reduced to rubble. Here, blockades, borders, flags, and natural elements bleed together while remnants of construction sites and scaffolding create a delicate system of counterweights and counterbalances—all meticulously crafted by hand. For Lopez, this sculptural terrain is suggestive of an ongoing history of bodies and violence in the absence of figuration. It is an urban landscape fabricated out of the material remains of crisis, teetering on the brink of collapse.”

The exhibition is on view until May 10, 2019. For more information, please visit the ICA website here.

The Project in Humanities, Urbanism, and Design (H+U+D) is pleased to announce the eleven students selected to receive grants to support their research during the 2019-20 Academic Year. Five undergraduates are recipients of the Mellon Undergraduate Research Fellowship and six graduate students will receive grants to support their diverse research projects.

Mellon Undergraduate Research Fellowship

Sebastian Beaghen
Undergraduate, College of Arts and Sciences
Major: Architecture, Minor: History of Art

Hyuntae Byun
Undergraduate, College of Arts and Sciences
Major: Earth Science, Minor: Urban Studies

Makhari Dysart
Undergraduate, College of Arts and Sciences
Major: Health and Societies, Minor: Economics

Antonio Rinaldi
Undergraduate, College of Arts and Sciences
Major: Architecture, Minor: History of Art

Ivy Williams
Undergraduate, College of Arts and Sciences
Major: Fine Arts

H+U+D Mellon Graduate Student Research Awards

Juliana Rowen Barton
Ph.D. Candidate, History of Art
School of Arts and Sciences

Sa Min Han
Ph.D. Candidate, City and Regional Planning
School of Design

Sang Pil Lee
Ph.D. Candidate, Architectural History and Theory
School of Design

Sirus Libeiro
Ph.D. Candidate, City and Regional Planning
School of Design

Kimberly Noronha
Ph.D. Candidate, City and Regional Planning
School of Design

Serena Qiu
Ph.D. Candidate, History of Art
School of Arts and Sciences

For the past five years, we have been privileged to oversee the H+U+D initiative aiming to contribute new sensibilities and collaborations centered on humanities, urbanism and design (hence H+U+D) to Penn’s scholarly climate. As we have worked with faculty and students, promoting interdisciplinary scholarship and building social capital, we have also laid the groundwork a renewed Mellon-sponsored project, “The Inclusive City, Past, Present, Future” (H+U+D 2.0), that will, again bring together faculty and students from the Schools of Arts and Sciences and Design. We found that H+U+D has been successful in three areas that we will replicate, slightly modified in H+U+D 2.0. They are:

The first area, the signature H+U+D project, has been the interdisciplinary, multi-generational H+U+D Faculty Colloquium that met bi-weekly, sometimes around a seminar table and sometimes at a site or exhibition, to explore shared interests and discuss the work of its members. Participants included 36 Penn faculty at all levels of their careers, four visiting Junior (Postdoctoral) Fellows, and several associated postdocs (including two Marie Curie Fellows from the EU) who were already at Penn. The colloquium has been very successful in creating a supportive environment for younger scholars and connecting them with mentors and peers with whom they would not usually come into contact. The scholarly productivity of this group is impressive; to date they have produced 14 books, 9 chapters, 28 refereed journal articles, and 8 exhibitions.

The Colloquium has also hosted a small number of lectures and co-sponsored symposia. We have gone “on the road,” organizing interdisciplinary panels at scholarly conferences (most recently the “Sensing the City” at the last meeting of the Society for American City and Regional Planning Historians).

The second area has been in instruction. The H+U+D initiative sponsored 15 co-taught courses involving 35 faculty members and more than 150 students. These comprised 10 undergraduate “city seminars,” with international and domestic field trips, and an annual “problematics” seminar for graduate students.

The third area has been in research. H_U+D supported 27 undergraduate and graduate student research projects with results presented by the students to the Colloquium. The projects have yielded enriched doctoral dissertations, publications, notably one by an undergraduate in the Smithsonian Magazine, and inspired ongoing career choices and graduate studies.

As we look forward to the next step with “The Inclusive City, Past, Present, Future” (H+U+D 2.0) we will retain the basic structure but adding the thematic dimension focusing on inclusion and diversity both in what we study and who we are. The new project will have at its heart a renewed the Inclusive City Colloquium to explore how the humanities can inform the design professions and how the design professions can inform the humanities with a special focus on inclusion in its many forms. With the course sponsorship effort, we will give preference to courses that are co-taught, likely to reach a large audience, part of the College general education requirement and permanent “gateway” courses, designed to attract a large and more diverse undergraduate audience to the study of cities and the built environment generally. In this area, we will also initiate “Anchor Institution” seminars to take advantage of the opportunities that Philadelphia offers as a laboratory for the study of inclusion and diversity. Here we will select and work with one of Philadelphia’s “anchor” institutions to create the seminar. We expect that these seminars would offer students opportunities to study and work with collections, exhibition design, public programming, policy making and implementation, city planning, architectural design, and management. Finally, in the research arena, we will offer up to 12 graduate and undergraduate fellowships per year with undergraduates being offered a non-credit Undergraduate Student Research Colloquium to enrich their experience.

So the projects of the past five years have nurtured a remarkable treasury of human capital in the Schools of Arts and Sciences and Design as this report illustrates. The Mellon Foundation’s support has made a huge difference in the lives of faculty, undergraduate and graduate students at Penn, Moreover Mellon’s has been field-defining world-wide, seeding creativity and productivity in urban humanities among the many scholars of the participating universities Penn is proud to be among their number.