6/7 Van Pelt Closure: Due to needed electrical switchgear and breaker replacement, the Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center will be closed on Saturday, June 7. It will reopen for regular hours on June 8.

Changes coming to Books by Mail: Starting in fall 2025, Books by Mail items will only be shipped to addresses in the contiguous United States 50 miles or further from campus. We will make exceptions for students, faculty, and staff with disabilities. Learn more.

Fisher restoration: Fisher Fine Arts Library is open and operating normally during ongoing exterior work. Find more details about this important restoration project .

Author: Max Dugan

Doctoral candidate, Department of Religious Studies

Max Dugan (he/him) is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania specializing in Islam. His research focuses on Islamic materiality in the twenty-first century, especially in North America. Max’s dissertation project examines Islamic tattooing and Halal consumption using a combination of ethnographic methods and digital humanities.

The collaboration and camaraderie of working on Unstable Archives this summer felt like monsoons after a drought. As anticipated, I acquired or deepened all sorts of skills and helped produce a deliverable of which I’m proud. What I hadn’t seen coming was how the relationships integral to this labor helped heal my academic body after a year-plus of toiling mostly alone.

Partial screenshot of the image gallery of the in-progress Unstable Archives site

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