H+U+D kicked off  its fourth year of programming on Friday, September 9 with the Fall semester’s first colloquium meeting. Over the past three years, the colloquium served as the centerpiece of the initiative’s efforts to integrate research and practice from the humanities and design disciplines around the study of cities. Colloquium members come from disciplines across the Penn campus. This year, four new and several returning faculty were accepted into the 2016-17 membership group. New members include: Andrew Saunders, Architecture; Nancy Steinhardt, East Asian Languages; Orkan Telhan, Fine Arts and Liliane Weissberg, Germanic Languages and Literatures. For the second year, the initiative is hosting two Mellon Junior Fellows in Humanities, Urbanism and Design. Shiben Banerji joins the initiative from the Art Institute of Chicago. He is appointed to the Department of History in the School of Arts and Sciences.  Anna Vallye is a historian of modern art and architecture. She is appointed to the Department of Architecture in the School of Design. More information on the H+U+D Colloquium membership.

On Monday, February 22, H+U+D Colloquium members participated in a special event hosted by Penn Institute for Urban Research (IUR) and PennPraxis in conjunction with the Philadelphia Museum of Art and its exhibition, Work on What You Love: Bruce Mau Rethinking Design (on view through April 3, 2016). At this event, Mau led Penn faculty and students in a workshop setting to apply new ways of thinking to long-standing urban challenges. He works in a field called geodesign, applying design principles to social, political, and urban problems. As part of the exhibition, Mau — who is based in Chicago — is leading three workshops with Philadelphia organizations, guiding them through his problem-solving method.

Applications are now invited for two one-year Junior Fellowships to be held in 2016-2076.

One fellow will be selected from the humanities and one from design. 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 ten 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.

For full job description,
HUD Junior Fellow JobDescript 2016-17
Junior Fellow application cover sheet

For Spring 2016, H+U+D will sponsor several new course for undergraduates and one graduate seminar. Thanks to our new Mellon H+U+D Jr. Fellows, we will add two new courses to our multidisciplinary offerings.

Back by popular demand, The City: Baltimore co-taught by Professor Eric Schneider, History and Professor Michael Nairn, Urban Studies will once again explore the history of the city and its institutions using HBO’s series The Wire as a core text.

URBS/HIST 210- The Wire and The City
This semester Urbs/Hist 210 will focus on Baltimore and use The Wire as one of its core “texts.” The course will explore the history and development of the city and its institutions, with a topical focus on issues such as industrialization and deindustrialization; urban renewal and the role of universities; public education; policing and the criminal justice system; drugs and underground markets; institutions; public housing; and Baltimore’s so-called renaissance amidst persistent poverty. The seminar will include field trips both in Philadelphia and a concluding all-day trip to Baltimore.

Finally, we will be offering a graduate student seminar, co-taught by Professor Naomi Waltham-Smith, Music and Professor Francesca Ammon, City and Regional Planning.

HSPV 638 / MUS 621 Cities and Sound: The Spatial Politics and Practices of Sound in Modern Urban Life This seminar will examine the role of sound in shaping modern urban spaces and life. While music plays a large part in the sounds of the city, we will focus on soundscapes more broadly. From the late 19^th century through the present, and in geographies spanning from Paris to Philadelphia, we will explore the making, meaning, and experience of sound for varied populations; the politics of sound as an instrument of power; and the policies of noise regulation.

The Mellon Humanities, Urbanism and Design Initiative at Penn (H+U+D)  is pleased to announce the arrival of its first two Junior Fellows.

Dr. Helen Gyger and Dr. Christina Svendsen have been named H+U+D Junior Fellows for the 2015-2016 academic year, in a program support by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. They were selected from a highly competitive pool of applicants from the humanities and design disciplines. In keeping with the mission of H+U+D to bring together scholars and students to explore cities at the intersection of the humanities and design, Dr. Svendsen, a scholar of comparative literature, is being hosted by the School of Design, and Dr. Gyger, an architectural scholar, is hosted by the School of Arts and Sciences.

Helen Gyger joins the Mellon H+U+D Initiative from Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University, where she received her PhD in 2013 and has taught courses on architectural history and theory. Her research focuses on the architecture and built environments of modern Latin America  and contemporary patterns of “informal” urban development, which is a global phenomenon. She is the co-editor (with Patricio del Real) of Latin American Modern Architectures: Ambiguous Territories (Routledge, 2012) and is currently working on a book project titled The Informal as a Project: Self-Help Housing in Peru, 1954–1986. While at Penn, her research will focus on the urban development programs of the Alliance for Progress. She is appointed in the Department of History (SAS).

This fall, the initiative also welcomes Christina Svendsen, who completed her PhD in 2010 at Harvard University, where she has taught in the Department of Comparative Literature and co-directs “Rethinking Translation,” a Mahindra Humanities Center seminar in collaboration with Peter Waterhouse’s Versatorium (a translation collective) and the Akademie der Lesende Künste in Vienna. She has published the first English translations of architect Paul Scheerbart’s Lesabéndio: an Asteroid Novel (2012) and the surrealist Unica Zürn’s The Trumpets of Jericho (2015). Her research interests include modernist literature, architectural and critical theory, and new materialisms. Currently, she is revising a book manuscript titled Stone, Steel, Glass: Architectures of Time in European Modernity. Her newest project, on which she will work while at Penn, is a conceptual history of transparency and virtual space, tentatively called “Aesthetics of Transparency: Glass Culture as Threat and Desire.” She is appointed in the Department of City and Regional Planning (Design).

Both Junior Fellows will participate in the H+U+D faculty colloquium and teach interdisciplinary undergraduate seminars in spring 2016.

Students from the H+U+D sponsored city seminar, “Cosmopolitan Urbanism: Rio de Janeiro,” created a website that explore the uneven ways in which urban development proceeds through international and universalist models. The course was taught by Daniel Barber, Assistant Professor of Architecture in the School of Design, and John Tresch, Associate Professor in History and Sociology of Science in the School of Arts and Sciences. Students and faculty traveled to Rio over spring break and visited  a number of buildings and sites to explore the richness and diversity of the city. The website expands the experience into an atlas of  the buildings and sight along with commentary created by the students. Click her to visit.

David Brownlee has been named a Fellow of the Society of Architectural Historians. Brownlee was inducted into the SAH at its 68th Annual International Conference Awards Ceremony in Chicago on April 16. He is the the Frances Shapiro-Weitzenhoffer Professor of 19th Century European Art and chair of the Graduate Group in the History of Art Department in the School of Arts & Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. Brownlee co-direct the Mellon Humanities, Urbanism and Design (H+U+D) initiative at Penn.

A non-profit membership organization that fosters the study, interpretation and conservation of architecture, design, landscapes and urbanism worldwide, the Society recognized Brownlee’s lifelong devotion to this industry by selected him as one of four fellows for the 2015 society induction. Brownlee has previously won publication prizes from the Society for his work as a historian of modern architecture. His publications have been awarded the Alice Davis Hitchcock Book Award from the Society of Architectural Historians and the Society of Historians of Great Britain.

Brownlee served as director of SAH in 1989-92, editor of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians in 2007-11 and president and vice president of the Philadelphia Chapter. In 2010, as editor of theJournal, he helped the Society launch one of the first multimedia publishing platforms for scholarly journals, with the release of JSAH Online.

Eugenie Birch, co-director of the Humanities, Urbanism and Design (H+U+D)  Initiative as well as the  University of Pennsylvania’s Institute for Urban Research and the , has been elected as the first president of the new General Assembly of Partners (GAP), a special initiative of the United Nation’s World Urban Campaign. Birch was elected at the GAP’s inaugural meeting, held in Nairobi, Kenya in mid-April. At the same meeting, New Delhi’s Shipra Narang Suri, Vice President of the International Society of City and Regional Planners, was elected as GAP’s vice president.

The General Assembly of Partners is a new global initiative that will play an important role in the preparation process for the United Nation’s Habitat III conference, the world’s premier conference addressing urban issues, to be held in Quito, Ecuador in October 2016. Through a process of engaging groups of diverse of stakeholders— including city policymakers, organized groups of women, academics, indigenous peoples, foundations, farmers, and the media—GAP will seek to identify and address new and emerging urban challenges in advance of the Habitat III conference.

GAP has identified 14 “partner constituent groups” to engage in this process, most of whom have elected chairs and will be electing co-chairs at the GAP’s upcoming October meeting.

“Habitat III is about creating a vision and plan for the future of urban communities around the world,” says Birch. “In order to really understand the depths and nuances of urban issues, we must bring together the diverse constituents who have a stake in making cities better, stronger, and more livable in the 21stcentury. And that’s exactly what the new General Assembly of Partners hopes to do.”

In her role as GAP’s president, Birch, with the help of the United Nations Division of Economic and Social Affairs Major Group Programme Manager, is launching a wide-ranging engagement effort to bring together members from the 14 major constituent groups, and beyond. The GAP will work with these members to engage in dialogue, propose actionable recommendations, and publicize outcomes and collective positions to the Habitat III conference.

The deadline for undergraduate and graduate student research awards has been extended to May 15, 2015!

The Project in Humanities, Urbanism, and Design (H+U+D), invites undergraduate and graduate students to submit research proposals for Academic Year 2015-16.
Small grants will be awarded to support projects that align with the mission of the H+U+D project.

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, 2015, to the Center for Undergraduate
Research and Fellowships (CURF) via the student application. See

http://www.upenn.edu/curf/research/grants/mellon-humanities-urbanism-and-design-project