Penn Libraries News

Sample the cookbooks featuring food of the Middle East that you can find at the Penn Libraries.

A selection of materials in Indigenous languages from the Penn Libraries, produced from the 17th to the 21st centuries.

Since the early 1800s, Penn Libraries has collected materials from across South Asia. To date, this collection includes materials in more than 20 of the 74 languages spoken in Pakistan. The strength of this collection is both in its eclecticism and expansiveness, with more than 19,000 items in Urdu alone

There are multiple ways to investigate the concept of “ethnicity” in the ancient world. The first is to examine how (or whether) ancient cultures thought about ethnicity or race. Scholars generally concur that Greek and Roman cultures did not think in terms of race and ethnicity

In recent weeks, unjust, unfair, and unwarranted acts of violence against the Black community have galvanized the United States — and the world — into protest against the insidiousness and perpetuity of racism in American society. These protests have been a clarion call for individuals to examine their own racial conditioning. 

The Emancipation Proclamation — the executive order which abolished slavery in the Confederacy — went into effect on January 1, 1863. However, the news was kept from enslaved African Americans living in Texas until June of 1865, when Union General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston with 2,000 federal troops.

If you were to go into a library fifty years ago and browse the card catalog, under the subjects “homosexuality” and “lesbianism” you would find a card that read, “see also sexual perversion.” Under “sexual perversion,” another card would suggest that you also consult “homosexuality” and “lesbianism.” It wasn’t until 1973, in fact, that the American Psychiatric Association ceased to classify homosexuality and lesbianism as pathologies.

Penn Libraries celebrates Asian Pacific American Heritage Month with an online pop-up exhibit. Current and former Penn students have recommended and described their favorite pieces of Asian Pacific American literature. Asian and Pacific Islander authors are diverse in origin and background and include writers whose ancestries reach back to East Asia, South Asia, and the Pacific Islands.

From the Annenberg Center to the Albrecht Music Library, performing arts play a leading role in research and pedagogy  at the University of Pennsylvania. “Performance is core, of course, to the Music, English, and Theater Arts Departments,” explains Nick Okrent, Coordinator and Librarian for Humanities Collections. “But performing arts are also important for fields like education, anthropology, law, and design.” 

Rigid hierarchies of caste in South Asia have sanctioned the subjugation and exploitation of so-called “untouchable” communities for centuries. Now frequently referred to by the term Dalit (a word derived from the Sanskrit dalita, meaning “scattered” or “broken”), these oppressed peoples are fighting for greater recognition and equality.