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Faculty Fellow

Ken Lum

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Marilyn Jordan Taylor Presidential Professor

Chair of Fine Arts

About

Ken Lum is the Marilyn Jordan Taylor Presidential Professor at the Department of Fine Arts at the Weitzman School of Design. Prior to coming to Penn, Lum was Head of the Graduate Program in Studio Art at the University of British Columbia, Visiting Professor at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and Graduate Professor at the Milton Avery Graduate School of Arts at Bard College. He is co-founder and founding Editor of Yishu: The Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art. Lum was made a Guggenheim Fellow in 1999 and awarded a Killam Award for Outstanding Research in 1998 and the Hnatyshyn Foundation Visual Arts Award in 2007. He has served on the Board of Directors for the The PowerPlant (Toronto), Annie Wong Art Foundation (Hong Kong), Arts Initiative Tokyo, and Centre A (Vancouver). He was co-curator of Shanghai Modern: 1919-1945 and Sharjah Biennial 7. He recently co-curated Monument Lab: A Public Art and History Project in Philadelphia.

Selected Publications

Lum, Ken. 2016. “The Figure in the Carpet.” Catalog essay for the exhibition Wall to Wall: Carpets by Artists, curated by Dr. Cornelia Lauf for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland.

Lum, Ken. 2009. “Dear Steven.” In Art School: (Propositions for the 21st Century), edited by Steven Madoff. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Lum, Ken and Hubert Damisch. 2008. Ultimo Bagaglio. Paris: Three Star Books.

Lum, Ken. 1999. “Canadian Cultural Policy: A Metaphysical Problem.” In Conference 1: Inside Out: Reassessing International Cultural Influence. Wroclaw, Poland: Apexart.

Faculty Fellow

Randall Mason

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Professor, Historic Preservation

About

Randall Mason is Associate Professor in the Department of Historic Preservation in the School of Design. His courses focus on historic preservation planning, urban conservation, history, and cultural landscape studies. Mason’s research interests include theory and methods of preservation planning, cultural policy, the economics of preservation, historic site management, the history and design of memorials, and the history of historic preservation. He leads the Center for Research on Preservation and Society, which undertakes applied research projects on site management and on social, economic and political aspects of historic preservation. Before joining the Penn faculty in 2004, Mason worked as Senior Project Specialist at the Getty Conservation Institute, researching economic and social issues relating to heritage conservation. Previous positions include Assistant Professor and Director of Historic Preservation at the University of Maryland, and adjunct faculty in landscape architecture at RISD. His professional experience includes several years of consulting practice and co-founding the nonprofit research group Minerva Partners (which develops projects to strengthen the connections between heritage conservation and social development). He serves on the Board of Directors of the Preservation Alliance of Greater Philadelphia, and was the 2012-13 National Endowment for the Arts Rome Prize winner at the American Academy in Rome.

Selected Publications

Mason, Randall. 2012. “Broadway as a Memory Site.” In The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan, 1811-2011, edited by Hilary Ballon. New York City: Columbia University Press.

Mason, Randall. 2009. The Once and Future New York: Historic Preservation and the Modern City. University of Minnesota Press.

Page, Max and Randall Mason, eds. 2004. Giving Preservation a History: Histories of Historic Preservation in the United States. Routlege.

Faculty Fellow

Matthew Kenyatta

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Director of Justice and Belonging, Department of City and Regional Planning

About

Dr. Matthew Jordan Kenyatta is the Director of Justice and Belonging in the School of Design’s Department of City and Regional Planning. He is a photographer, storyteller, and geographer who approaches these topics using mixed methods for producing insights that he weaves into his essays, presentations, teachings, and research. Dr. Miller has worked through fellowships and consultancies at governmental agencies such as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the City of Stockton, the City of Los Angeles' Economic and Workforce Development Department, and most recently the National Endowment for the Arts as a Panelist. He is working on his first book, based on his doctoral dissertation, exploring and theorizing around the geography of Black commerce, culture, and creativity in the United States. His intellectual work has been honored by the National Academy of the Sciences and the Association for Collegiate Schools in Planning. His civic work has been recognized by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the California State Legislature. His artistic and cultural work has been featured in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and the Philadelphia Tribune.

Selected Publications

Miller, M.J. (2020, forthcoming). “Need Black joy?” A Temporal, Human, and Economic Geography of Black Millennial Leisure in Los Angeles., in Hawthorne, C., and Lewis, J.S. (Eds.) in The Black Geographic: Praxis, Resistance, Futurity. Durham: Duke University Press.

Miller, M.J. (2018). “If I Built the World, Imagine That: Reflections on World Building Practices in Black Los Angeles.” Journal of Planning Theory and Practice (19.2; Spring 2018): 254-288.

Miller, M.J., 2015. Social Finance in Black Geographies: A Statistical Analysis of Locations in Los Angeles County. Harvard Journal of African American Public Policy, p.78.

Miller, M. J. (2014). Did” Pookie” get a green-collar job?: a critical case study on the East Bay Green Corridor's employment goals, activities, and impacts (Doctoral dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology).

Penn IUR Scholar

Marina Peterson

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Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Texas at Austin

Areas of Interest

    About

    Marina Peterson is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. An anthropologist, her work traces modalities of matter, sensory attunements, and emergent socialities, exploring diverse and innovative ways of encountering and presenting the ethnographic. Her research has explored multi-scalar dimensions of urban space through the study of sensory, sonic, and embodied processes ranging from musical performance to planning and labor. She has conducted ethnographic research in Los Angeles, Singapore, and Appalachian Ohio. Her work has appeared in Anthropological Quarterly, O-Zone: A Journal of Object-Oriented Studies, Space and Culture, Journal of Popular Music Studies, and Urban Anthropology.

    Her most recent book, Atmospheric Noise: The Indefinite Urbanism of Los Angeles traces environmental noise, atmosphere, sense, and matter that cohere in and through noise pollution legislation and the politics of airport noise in the 1960s, addressing key ways in which noise amplifies ways of sensing and making sense of the atmospheric. Engaging with a burgeoning literature on forces, attunements, and forms of containment that bring the atmospheric into focus, she examines crucial ways in which noise has been central to how we know how to feel and think atmospherically. 

    Selected Publications

    Peterson, Marina. 2021. Atmospheric Noise: The Indefinite Urbanism of Los Angeles. Duke University Press.

    Peterson, Marina. 2010. Sound, Space, and the City: Civic Performance in Downtown Los Angeles. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

    Bakke, Gretchen and Marina Peterson (eds.). 2017. Between Matter and Method: Encounters in Anthropology and Art. London: Bloomsbury.

    Bakke, Gretchen and Marina Peterson (eds.). 2016. Anthropology of the Arts: A Reader. London: Bloomsbury.

    Peterson, Marina and Gary McDonogh (eds.) 2012. Global Downtowns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

    Faculty Fellow

    Jennifer Ponce de León

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    Assistant Professor of English

    About

    Jennifer Ponce de León is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research focuses on cultural production and antisystemic movements in the Americas since the 1960s. She works across studies of contemporary visual arts, literature, and performance; transnational Latinx and Latin American studies; Marxist aesthetics; and social theory, including anticolonial and postcolonial thought. She is also faculty in Latin American and Latinx Studies (LALS), affiliated faculty in Gender Sexuality and Women’s Studies (GSWS) and Cinema Studies, a member of the Graduate Group in Comparative Literature, and a Faculty Fellow at Lauder College House.

    Dr. Ponce de León is Associate Director of the Critical Theory Workshop/Atelier de Théorie Critique, which holds an intensive summer research program at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris every summer, as well as annual spring symposia at the University of Pennsylvania, and she is Co-Editor of the book series Reinventing Critical Theory at Rowman & Littlefield International. She is also an independent curator. Most recently, she curated the exhibition and film series Resurgent Histories, Insurgent Futures for the Slought Foundation in Philadelphia. She was a 2018-2019 Ford Postdoctoral Fellow and a Visiting Scholar at the Chicano Studies Research Center at the University of California, Los Angeles.

    Selected Publications

    “Through an Anticolonial Looking Glass: On Restitution, Indigenismo, and Zapatista Solidarity in Raiders of the Lost Crown” in American Quarterly (March 2018)

    “How to See Violence: Artistic Activism & the Radicalization of Human Rights” in ASAP/Journal (May 2018)

    “On the Zapatistas’ Little School of Freedom (A Student’s Notes)” in Dancing with the Zapatistas (Duke U. Press, 2015)

    Voices, Variations, and Deviations: From the LACE Archive of Southern California Performance Art” in Live Art in LA, 1970-1983 (Routledge, 2012)

    Fellow

    Claire Robertson-Kraft

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    Founder and Director, ImpactED

    School/Department

    Areas of Interest

      About

      Claire Robertson-Kraft earned her Ph.D. in education policy and is currently the Founder and Director of ImpactED at The University of Pennsylvania. She is the co-editor of A Grand Bargain for Education Reform: New Rewards and Supports for New Accountability (Harvard Education Press, 2009), which provides a comprehensive framework for evaluating, compensating, and developing teachers. Her research focuses on how these policies influence teachers’ motivation, effectiveness, and retention.

      After graduating from undergrad at Penn in 2004, Claire worked with Teach For America in Houston, first as a third grade teacher and then as a program director supporting elementary and special education teachers. It was during her time as a classroom teacher that she built the passion she has today for working in urban education. Claire is also very active in the civic community. She is the Co-Founder and current President of PhillyCORE Leaders and serves on the boards of Youth Build Philadelphia, Leadership Philadelphia and WHYY. In 2011, she was selected as one of the New Faces of Philly by Philadelphia Magazine, and in 2013, she received the Forum Award for Emerging Executive Women. 

      Selected Publications

      Robertson-Kraft, C. (2014). Teachers’ motivational responses to new evaluation policies. Paper presented at the 2014 Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

      Robertson-Kraft, C., & Duckworth, A. L. (2014). True grit: Trait-level perseverance and passion for long-term goals predicts effectiveness and retention among novice teachers. Teachers College Record.

      Cucchiara, M., Rooney, E., & Robertson-Kraft, C. (2013). I’ve never seen people work so hard! Teachers’ working conditions in the early stages of school turnaround.  Urban Education Journal.

      Robertson-Kraft, C. (2013). Professional unionism: Redefining the role. In M. B. Katz, & M. Rose (Eds.), Public education under siege. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. 

      Hershberg, T., & Robertson-Kraft, C. (Eds.). (2009). A grand bargain for education reform: New rewards and supports for new accountability. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.

      Emerging Scholar

      Mary Rocco

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      Director of Engaged Scholarship, Community Engagement and Inclusion, Barnard College-Columbia University

      About

      Professor Mary Rocco is the Director of Engaged Scholarship, Community Engagement, and Inclusion, at Barnard College-Columbia University and an urban planner whose research focuses on community and economic development, urban revitalization, and neighborhood change processes. She explores the role of civic institutions (civil society organizations, philanthropy, private enterprise, and government) in urban development. Her research explores the influence of philanthropy on the revitalization of older industrial cities where foundations commit millions of dollars to urban improvements, economic development, and capacity building. This study assesses the foundations involved in urban revitalization, the grants made, the organizations that receive them, and the activities they fund toward a comprehensive understanding of how revitalization works on the ground in legacy Cities. Rocco is also interested in global stakeholder involvement in urban development and integrating knowledge about cities across humanities and design disciplines. She currently serves as the project manager for the Mellon Foundation-funded Humanities, Urbanism and Design Initiative (H+U+D) at Penn. 

      Faculty Fellow

      Heather Sharkey

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      Professor

      About

      Heather J. Sharkey is Associate Professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations in the School of Arts and Sciences. She received her Ph.D. in History from Princeton University after conducting research abroad on a Fulbright-Hays fellowship. Before joining the Penn faculty in 2002, she taught at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Trinity College in Connecticut. In 2011 she won the Charles Ludwig Distinguished Teaching Award from the School of Arts and Sciences of the University of Pennsylvania. During the 2012-13 year, she was a Visiting Professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris.

      Selected Publications

      Sharkey, Heather. 2017. A History of Muslims, Christians and Jews in the Middle East. Cambridge University Press.

      Sharkey, Heather. 2013. Cultural Conversions: Unexpected Consequences of Christian Missions in the Middle East, Africa and South Asia. Syracuse University Press.

      Sharkey, Heather and Mehmet Ali Doğan, eds. 2011. American Missionaries and the Middle East: Foundational Encounters. University of Utah Press.  

      Sharkey, Heather. 2008. American Evangelicals in Egypt: Missionary Encounters in an Age of Empire. Princeton University Press.

      Sharkey, Heather. 2003. Living with Colonialism: Nationalism and Culture in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. University of California Press. 

      Affiliated PhD Student

      Rachael Stephens

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      PhD Candidate in the Anthropology Department

      About

      My main interests are U.S. political economic inequity, social change (in relation to politicization, ideology, discourse, etc.), and social ethics. l am committed to trying to better understand—and more effectively transgress—the ways we learn to continually re-make our inequitable realities. I examine how many of us—particularly those who identify as “liberal”—learn to construct the “causes” of various social dynamics in ways that disavow our complicity in and responsibility for its “solutions.”  I also consider how normative social scientific knowledge production is itself grounded in analytical paradigms that make it frighteningly easy to reproduce inequity.  

      My dissertation explores these dynamics as they are manifested in the concrete interactions that sustain the so-called “real estate market,” property relations (including valuation and taxation), public finance (especially school finance), and perhaps most especially, the public discourses that narrate such phenomena. This focus also allows me to consider contemporary technologies of social differentiation (particularly race-making and related taxonomies of citizenship) as they relate to the late liberal mode of production and to the social ethics with which it is enmeshed. 

      Faculty Fellow

      Domenic Vitiello

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      Associate Professor

      About

      Domenic Vitiello is Associate Professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning in the Weitzman School of Design. He researches the history and contemporary practice of community and economic development; immigrant communities; and urban agriculture and food system planning. His recent and current projects focus on immigration and civil society in Philadelphia, including a book titled The Sanctuary City that examines Central American, Southeast Asian, Liberian, Arab, and Mexican immigration since the 1970s; urban agriculture and poverty in the global North and South, including comparative research on the community economic development impacts of urban farming and gardening around the world, and a book on the social impacts of community gardening in Camden, Chicago, and Philadelphia; and the planned destruction and preservation of Chinatowns in the U.S. and Canada since c.1900.

      Selected Publications

      Domenic Vitiello and Zoe Blickenderfer (Penn Urban Studies alum), “The Planned Destruction of Chinatowns in the United States and Canada since c.1900,” Planning Perspectives (2020). 

      Domenic Vitiello, “Sanctuary and the City,” The Metropole (2019). 

      Arthur Acolin (Penn Urban Studies alum) and Domenic Vitiello, “Who Owns Chinatown: Neighborhood Change and Preservation in Boston and Philadelphia,” Urban Studies (2018). 

      Vitiello, Domenic and Thomas J. Sugrue, editors. 2017. Immigration and Metropolitan Revitalization in the United States. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.

      Vitiello, Domenic and Arthur Acolin. 2017. “Institutional Ecosystems of Housing Support in Chinese, Southeast Asian, and African Philadelphia.” Journal of Planning Education and Research 37(2): 195-206.

      Acolin, Arthur and Domenic Vitiello. 2017. “Who Owns Chinatown: Neighborhood Change and Preservation in Boston and Philadelphia” Urban Studies.

      Vitiello, Domenic. 2017. “Infrastructure: Lifelines, Mobility, and Urban Development.” In Planning History Handbook, edited by Carola Hein. Routledge.

      Vitiello, Domenic, Jeane Ann Grisso, Rebecca Fischman, and K. Leah Whiteside. 2015. “From Commodity Surplus to Food Justice: Food Banks and Local Agriculture in the United States.” Agriculture and Human Values 32(3): 419-430.

      Fellow

      Lily Yeh

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      Global Artist and Founder, Barefoot Artists

      Areas of Interest

        About

        Lily Yeh is Global Artist and Founder of the organization Barefoot Artists. Her expertise is in community healing and building through the arts. Yeh was Professor of Painting and Art History at the University of Pennsylvania from 1968 through 1998. She is a founder of The Village of Arts and Humanities in North Philadelphia where she worked as Executive and Artistic Director from 1968 to 2004. Yeh’s mission at Barefoot Artists is to use art as a transformative power to foster community empowerment, improve the physical environment, promote economic development, and preserve indigenous art and culture. Her ventures at Barefoot Artists have led her through North America, Europe, Africa, China, and India. Using art as a medium for social revival and change, she has positively influenced many impoverished communities worldwide.

         

        Selected Publications

        Yeh, Lily. 2011. Awakening Creativity: Dandelion School Blossoms. Oakland, CA: New Village Press.

        Yeh, Lily. 2011. “Painting Hope in the World.” In Dream of a Nation: A Vision for a Better America, edited by Tyson Miller, designed by Kelly Spitzner.

        Yeh, Lily. 2011. Creativity Blossoms in the Great Migration. Yes! Online Magazine, November. 

         

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