Our final episode of this Omnia podcast season offers a conversation between Stephanie Perry, Executive Director of the Penn Program on Opinion Research and Election Studies, and Rogers M. Smith, Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Political Science. They discuss the implications of Trump’s second term as president, as well as…

The results of last week’s presidential election are in and Donald Trump will have a second term after earning 312 Electoral College votes and some 75 million votes overall. Republicans also re-gained a majority in the Senate and are poised to maintain control of the House of Representatives. In the fifth episode of Democracy and Decision 2024, the…

In this season of Democracy and Decision 2024, we take a close look at the state of U.S. democracy in the context of the 2024 election. The fourth episode, “The Gears of Democracy,” features Marc Meredith, Professor of Political Science, in conversation with podcast host Stephanie Perry, Executive Director of the Penn Program on Opinion Research an…

In this season of Democracy and Decision 2024, we take a close look at the state of U.S. democracy in the context of the 2024 election. The third episode, “The Fight for Democracy,” features Matthew Levendusky, Professor of Political Science and Stephen and Mary Baran Chair in the Institutions of Democracy at the Annenberg Public Policy Center, in …

In this season of Democracy and Decision 2024, we take a close look at the state of U.S. democracy in the context of the 2024 election. The second episode, “The Voice of Democracy,” features Diana Mutz, Samuel A. Stouffer Professor of Political Science and Communication, in conversation with podcast host Stephanie Perry, Executive Director of the P…

Our new season of Omnia, Democracy and Decision 2024, examines the state of U.S. democracy in the context of the upcoming presidential election. The first episode, “Truth and Democracy,“ features Sophia Rosenfeld, Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History, in conversation with podcast host Stephanie Perry, Executive Director of the Penn Program on O…

Many people know Philadelphia for the Declaration of Independence, Rocky, and cheesesteaks. Philly’s deep musical history is less familiar, but its influence continues to inspire audiences and artists across the globe. For Carol Muller’s graduate-level ethnomusicology field methods class, students focused on documenting the city’s Black music histo…

After the enormous success of her translation of Homer’s The Odyssey, Emily Wilson spent another five years translating The Iliad. The book was released this fall, again to tremendous acclaim. Wilson is the College for Women Class of 1963 Term Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Classical Studies. She is the recipient of two prestigious fe…

This July, global temperatures soared to the warmest ever recorded. Ocean surface temperatures hit record highs. Extreme weather-related events are becoming ever more common, seen this spring and summer with the wildfires in Canada and Hawaii, flooding in Vermont, and a tropical storm in Los Angeles dumping almost three inches of rain in one day. R…

The 2022 midterm elections took place on Tuesday, November 8th in the United States, and are still being decided in many parts of the country. Historically, the president’s party loses in the midterms. And yet this year, Democrats – the party of President Joe Biden – maintained their control of the Senate and may only lose their majority in the Hou…

The pandemic has had a pronounced impact on mental health. Participating in activities that benefit well-being is crucial, but Katherine Cotter and James Pawelski, experts in the field of positive psychology, say being conscious of these benefits, and optimizing participation, is the end goal. In this final episode of the season, we speak with both…

Music is undeniably one of oldest and most essential art forms. The power of song and dance has been the pulse of social movements throughout the world and a source of collective and individual healing during difficult times for millennia. In this episode we speak with ethnomusicologist Carol Muller about the power of song and dance during the apar…

For as long as humans have had voices, trauma has been told and processed through stories, poetry, and music. In this episode, we speak with author Lorene Cary, Senior Lecturer in English, and poet Fatemeh Shams, Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, on the ability of words to move people, create a community, and help us …

The legacy of trauma resulting from more than 200 years of slavery in North America, and colonialism abroad, has yet to be fully comprehended. In this episode, Breanna Moore discusses her engagement with fellow student collaborators to recreate the history of Penn’s connections to slavery, which began with a memory book and a journey through her ow…

In coping with the stresses of recent times, many people are finding respite in connecting with nature. Writers extolling the virtues of wellness travel, ecotherapy, and going for a long walk are just one spin on a long tradition of reflections on how to find health, happiness, and wisdom through nature in any of its manifestations, from herbs and …

In 1346, bubonic plague began to spread through northern Africa and Eurasia. In seven years, it had become the most fatal pandemic recorded in human history, killing between 75 and 200 million people. In this episode, we hear from a specialist in medieval literature about the bubonic plague and how artists like Boccaccio and Chaucer documented the …

In Mary Shelley’s novel, The Last Man, the protagonist—one of the few survivors of a plague—searches for meaning in a world of loss, concluding that, “there is but one solution to the intricate riddle of life; to improve ourselves, and contribute to the happiness of others.” In 2022, as COVID-19 lingers on, the climate threat looms larger, and war …

This is an episode about big things. Big like the ocean, which, thanks to its size, absorbs about 30% of all CO2 emissions. Big like the scale of our Earth’s 4.6 billion history, and big like our responsibility to future generations. Can an understanding of and appreciation for the size of our world and the scope of its history, from the beginning …

This episode addresses early concerns in the public sphere, the media, and even the scientific community, surrounding high-energy particle collision experiments at particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider. These concerns culminated in lawsuits accusing researchers of conducting experiments that could cause the creation of mini black hol…

The phrase “better things for better living through chemistry” began life in 1935 as a DuPont advertising slogan–an enthusiastic expression of optimism about science, and its potential to solve virtually any human problem. It’s clear that without chemistry, the world would be a very different place. So why, out of all the sciences, is chemistry so …

New medications, treatments, and implants that affect our brains have helped thousands overcome ADD, ended seizures, and even show promise for restoring memory lost to brain trauma. But these enhancements have implications for individuals and society. How far can we go? Who gets the enhancements? In this episode, we'll hear from a psychology profes…

If you were writing a book about the history of science denial, the chapter on Darwin would have to be one of the longest. But why? You can argue that we see evolution all the time – it is, after all, why we’re worrying today about the emergence of new variants of COVID-19. Does it boil down to a divide between religion and science that just can’t …

This episode is about the science of how people talk. We'll get into some of the nitty gritty science, like prosody and intonational variation, but we're really interested in why people resist changes to language. Why did France try to ban "le weekend," and why do some people, like, get so, like, upset when people use the word "like"? An expert in …

On this season of the Omnia podcast, we talk to scientists and other scholars about scientific ideas that cause big reactions. We’ll look at stories of science getting knocked around, and standing back up again, in a world full of polarization, politics, misrepresentation, and simple misunderstanding. Welcome to In These Times: Fear and Loathing an…

In Episode 1: Facts vs. Feelings, Mark Trodden commented that most of what we would call modern cosmology is a very recent vintage, including many discoveries from just the past few decades. In this bonus segment, Professor Trodden discusses what this recent research has to say about the Big Bang, gravitational waves, and the expanding universe. Ma…

In our final episode, we're continuing the conversation about how institutions can perpetuate racial inequalities and the work that remains. We talk to a graduate student whose family has been touched by Penn and slavery across generations, a philosopher who weighs the past and future when it comes to the case for reparations, and a political scien…

This season, we’ve spoken to experts about how institutions have perpetuated racial hierarchies. Higher education is no exception. In our final two episodes, we’re talking to students and faculty about the work that comes next. This episode features an undergraduate student whose research with the Penn and Slavery Project reveals truths about the r…

When Covid-19 delivered a disproportionate blow to communities of color, environmental hazards like air pollution, that are all too frequently present in these communities, was one of the contributing factors cited by experts. The idea that race is a factor in determining who has access to resources that allow a community to thrive is not so much n…

During the worldwide protests that followed the death of George Floyd, demonstrators mobilized to challenge the representations of history presented by some of the monuments and memorials that occupy our public squares. In this episode we hear from an anthropologist, a sociologist, and an art historian, who reflect on why there has been such a focu…

Racism and discrimination are more than individual problems—they are part of institutions that have far-reaching impact. In this episode we hear from a professor of sociology, education, and Africana Studies who delves into discusses discrimination in higher education and explores how modern racial attitudes shape and are shaped by the places in wh…

As we worked on our third episode, the news broke about the shooting in Atlanta that left eight people dead, including six women of Asian descent. This tragic event comes after more than a year of rising violence against members of Asian, Asian American, and Pacific Islander communities. In this special episode, we talk to Josephine Park, Professor…

The enslavement of Black people was supported by a legal system that including everything from laws preventing legal marriage to those restricting movement and access to education. When slavery was abolished, this system did not go away. Instead, it evolved to include Jim Crow laws and 20th centuries policies including redlining and urban renewal. …

Last fall we launched our podcast, “In These Times” with an examination of COVID-19 and its far-reaching impacts. We spoke with students and faculty who shared their personal experiences with the epidemic, along with perspectives drawn from history, science, politics and beyond. A recurring theme of our first season was the crisis within the COVID …

On Wednesday, January 6, 2021, as legislators counted and confirmed the votes in the Electoral College, rioters breached the Capitol building, forcing an evacuation of the House floor, including Vice President Pence. The events unfolded amidst President Trump having urged his supporters to fight against the ceremonial counting of the votes. The rio…

The worldwide scale and scope of discontinuity, loss, and uncertainty has made the year of the pandemic like no other in recent memory. How are we processing this moment, and how do we move forward? In this episode, we talk to three students, who share how the COVID crisis has reshaped their undergraduate experience at Penn and their visions for th…

COVID-19 wasn’t the only health crisis of 2020. In June, the American Medical Association and the American Public Health Association declared that police violence, particularly against Black and brown communities, is a public health crisis that demands attention and action. Widespread protests drew attention this summer, but where do we go from the…

With rates of diagnoses and death disproportionately affecting racial minorities and low-income workers, experts in this episode address how COVID-19 has further exposed already dire health outcome inequalities. We begin with a political scientist discussing how governmental policy drives health inequality, especially during times of crisis. Then, …

The coronavirus pandemic does not exist in a vacuum. We look at other urgent issues of our time, and examine how they affect and are affected by COVID-19. We start this episode—as most things seem to now—with the partisan polarization in the U.S., asking a political science professor if people really are seeing everything in red or blue. Then a his…

“In these times” has been a handy turn of phrase in 2020, with varying adjectives used to modify it. Challenging. Unique. Strange. What started as a useful shorthand for the COVID-19 pandemic and the surreal nature of stay-at-home orders became used describe world-wide protests and calls for racial justice. This fall, the OMNIA podcast goes beyond …

Details from the yellow fever epidemic of 1793 or the quarantines during the bubonic plague sound familiar today. In our second episode, we talk to historians about how past societies dealt with disease, and what happened when a new understanding of germs revolutionized our approach but led us to overlook the larger picture of health. A legal histo…

In this episode of the OMNIA Podcast, we recap the 60-Second lectures from the spring of 2019 and highlight two favorites from our archive. You’ll learn about race in the USA from a philosophical perspective, the psychology of why we quit, why truth matters to democracy, and new pedagogies for teaching in the age of climate change. Our dip into the…

In this episode, we talk to Charles Bernstein, inventive poet, writer of libretti, translator, archivist, and, since 2003, a member of Penn's faculty. Bernstein is the Donald T. Regan Professor of English and Comparative Literature and co-director of PennSound. He retired from the Department of English at the end of the spring 2019 semester. In 201…

Quayshawn Spencer asks a simple question about race with a not-so-simple answer: what kind of thing is it? Spencer, the Robert S. Blank Presidential Associate Professor of Philosophy at Penn, poses the question to undergraduates in his Philosophy of Race course. As a specialist in the philosophies of science, biology, and race, his course examines …

In our new series, OMNIA 101, we talk to faculty members about integral aspects of their research, shedding light on their biggest challenges and their strategies for conquering them. Mark Trodden, Chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy and the Fay R. and Eugene L. Langberg Professor of Physics, and Masao Sako, Associate Professor and Und…

Since 2003, the 60-Second Lecture Series has challenged Arts and Sciences faculty to distill a wealth of knowledge into a one-minute talk. Every Wednesday in September and April sees Penn Arts and Sciences faculty members standing at a podium on College Green and lecturing on topics ranging from human history, to fractions, to fly fishing—all in un…

In this episode, we explore a potential watershed moment in American politics: the unprecedented number of women running for office in 2018. Dawn Teele, Janice and Julian Bers Assistant Professor of Political Science, researches women and politics, voting rights reform, and candidate recruitment. Right now, she’s studying Emerge, the largest Democr…

In December 2017, The New York Times revealed the existence of a Pentagon program investigating unidentified flying objects. For many people, the continued existence of such a program on UFOs came as a surprise, though the military has historically been known to conduct such studies. Most notably, the Air Force’s Project Blue Book investigated more…

Taije Silverman is an award-winning poet and faculty member in the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of English where she teaches classes on poetry, creative nonfiction, and translation. Before coming to Penn, she taught at the University of Bologna in Italy, where she was a Fulbright Scholar, and at Emory University, where she was the Creati…

Concerns over lead poisoning were heightened in the U.S. after the contamination of a city water supply in Flint, Michigan. In Philadelphia and southeastern Pennsylvania, rates of lead exposure in children are high—especially in low-income communities. Thanks to a Making a Difference in Diverse Communities grant from Penn Arts and Sciences, a team …

On May 9th, 2017, President Trump fired then-FBI director James Comey. This decision has intensified the debate of whether the U.S. is in a “constitutional crisis” given the numerous controversies swirling around the Trump administration. Rogers Smith, the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Political Science and a presidential histori…