Reading period access: From April 30-May 12, access to the Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center and the Fisher Fine Arts Library will be limited to PennCard holders and other Penn affiliates. See our Service Alerts for more information.

Books on the move: Materials on the fifth floor of the Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center are being temporarily moved to our off-site storage facility. For your safety, please avoid browsing the fifth-floor stacks. See our Service Alerts for information about requesting books during the transition.

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

Maps and More

Campus Libraries Map

Staff Information

Resources for Staff Committees