The final gathering of Wolf’s 2025–2026 Undergraduate Research Fellows brought them to New York City in April. Between stops at some of New York's legendary food spots, the Fellows and Undergraduate Humanities Forum Director Emily Steiner toured Penn alumnus Hubert Neumann’s private collection of modern and contemporary art, were welcomed backstage at Christie’s by post-War specialist William Featherby, and enjoyed the newly-renovated Frick Collection.
Congratulations to our Fellows on a successful year of learning, sharing, and collaborating, and best of luck in all your future endeavors!
The Wolf Humanities Center’s Forum on Truth Mellon Research Seminar hosted its last session on April 28th.
Thank you to Chair, Dr. Ayako Kano and Topic Director, Dr. Julia Verkholanstev for your guindance as we grappled with recognizing and defining truth and its significance across disciplines, methodologies, and contexts.
And to you, the 2025-26 Fellows! What a wonderful experience sharing and building our work together these many weeks. Looking forward to all that is to come as you polish and publish. Let us continue the good work!
*Fellow Spotlight*
2025-26 Wolf Humanities Center Research Associate Caitlin Adkins is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania. She specializes in topics of gender, labor, and media in Japan, with broad interests in feminist and queer theory, law and society, and film and literature. Her dissertation examines figurations of female criminality in 21st-century Japan, clarifying connections between media representation and legal processes that are critical for understanding contemporary social movements in and through Japan. Her research has been awarded generous support, including the Phyllis Rackin Graduate Award and the E. Dale Saunders Council on Buddhism Prize for Excellence in Japanese Studies. She has served in various roles at Penn, most recently as Teaching Fellow (EALC/ RELS) and Graduate Associate (GSWS). She holds an M.A. from the University of Michigan’s Center for Japanese Studies and a B.A. in Japanese Studies summa cum laude from the University of Findlay.
For the Wolf Humanities Center’s Forum on Truth Mellon Research Seminar, Adkins worked on a project titled, "Manufacturing Truths for Trial: Spectacles of a Japanese Woman in Leftwing Politics." This project focuses on Shigenobu Fusako (b. 1945), the former leading member of The Japanese Red Army (JRA). From proletariat-aligned unions to New Left student protests, a domestic social order in 20th-century Japan often precluded women from representative roles in political movements. By comparison, Shigenobu had authority and visibility, domestically and abroad. Adkins’ project examines the vast media coverage of Shigenobu, how she is identified as both an “extremist” and a “revolutionary,” and traces the effects of these portrayals on her 2000s trial on conspiracy charges. The project demonstrates that media spectacle manufacturing competing truths about female embodiment and political agency has consequences for social and legal negotiations in and beyond Japan.
*Fellow Spotlight*
2025-26 Wolf Humanities Center Faculty Fellow Oscar Aguirre-Mandujano is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania historyatpenn. His research focuses on the intellectual and cultural history of the early modern Ottoman world and its connections to literature, poetry, and bureaucracy.
For the Wolf Humanities Center’s Mellon Research Seminar Forum on Truth, Aguirre-Mandujano worked on his current book project, A Sea of Gossip: Truth and Imagination in the Early Modern Mediterranean. The project is a history of various forms of informal exchange of information that today we refer to as gossip, anecdote, or rumor, as they shaped and transformed the early modern Mediterranean. It seeks to understand how Ottoman scholars used gossip and hearsay to acquire truthful information about the world they lived in. The use of fragmentary information, obtained through networks of trust across the empire and the Mediterranean, helped Ottomans understand and justify what others did, such as acts of rebellion, corruption, and betrayal. Gossip and hearsay allowed for a truthful imagination of a world that was too distant for most people to know empirically. Present in a myriad of sources, from literary works, biographies, personal anecdotes, and imperial documents, the information shared and acquired through the exchange of gossip, rumors, and hearsay helped Ottomans explicate an individual’s past choices and their attitudes towards regret, knowledge, defiance, and more importantly, truth.
Aguirre-Mandujano’s first monograph, Occasions for Poetry: Politics, Literature and Imagination Among the Early Modern Ottomans (Penn Press, 2025), is a history of how Turkish poetry became the preferred mode for communicating, debating, and shaping the Ottoman political and social experience after the conquest of Constantinople in 1453. Aguirre-Mandujano is also co-organizer of the Baki Project. In 2011, he co-edited Sephardic Trajectories: Archives, Objects, and the Ottoman Jewish Past in the United States (Koç University Press). During his time as a Faculty Fellow, two new works of his, featured in images, were published.
On April 15, Wolf Humanities Center Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow Ana Lolua and her @penn.rees “Museums, Socialism, and Power” class welcomed artist and @weitzman_school lecturer Patricia Renee’ Thomas for “Race and Class Portrayed in Vanitas: A Drawing Workshop on the Still Life."
With Agustina Hufschmid, Lauren McDowell, Tais Millan, and Henry Planet.
*Fellow Spotlight*
2025-26 Wolf Humanities Center Penn Faculty Fellow Ada Kuskowski is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania ( historyatpenn). Her research interests include French and Mediterranean history, law and literature, court culture, vernacular writing, history of the book, material cultures and conquest and colonial law.
Her book Vernacular Law: Writing and the Reinvention of Customary Law in Medieval France (Cambridge, 2023) explores the transformation of customary law from informal social practices to a formalized field of knowledge. Through this, she reconceptualizes both the origins of customary law and the cultural, social, and intellectual processes that shaped medieval legal knowledge. She is currently writing on law in the so-called "Crusader states," the polities that emerged in the eastern Mediterranean as a result of crusade, as well as on the problem of uncertainty and attempts to establish a legal truth in medieval law.
For the Wolf Humanities Center’s Mellon Research Seminar Forum on Truth, Kuskowski worked on a project titled, “Legal Truth: A History of Law and Uncertainty.” This project explores the development of legal truth in Europe between the eleventh and thirteenth century. It was then that notions of legal truth were in a formative phase, when various modes of certainty creation and thus truth-making were established, ones that formed the basic architecture for modern legal system. Legal truth is not an absolute truth nor an ideal one, but a truth created for the purposes of law and one that fundamentally rests on the notion of certainty. By examining both intellectual and material modes of legal certainty-production in the Middle Ages, this project reveals the creation of legal truth as a way of grasping at certainty such that law seems like a system, a system that works, and one we can trust.
*Fellow Spotlight*
2025-26 Wolf Humanities Center Regional Faculty Fellow Christine Woody is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Textual Scholarship Certificate Program at Widener University. She works on the literature and publishing culture of nineteenth-century Britain, with a particular interest in dynamics like serialization, anonymous/pseudonymous publication, and the professionalization and commodification of authorship. Her work has been published in Studies in Romanticism, Victorian Periodicals Review, Essays in Romanticism, and the Keats-Shelley Journal, as well as in several edited collections.
For the Wolf Humanities Center’s Mellon Research Seminar Forum on Truth, Woody is working on her first book, which explores how the pseudonymous and anonymous publication norms of early nineteenth century British periodicals set the stage for a wide-ranging investigation of what authorship is, what it means, and who is allowed to publish. Her project traces how circuits of reviewing, excerpting, reprinting, and even parody work to shape the meaning and interpretation of literary works and the fortunes of the people who create them. From the slashing pages of the Edinburgh Review to the duelling avatars of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, this period functions as sort of a pre-digital post-truth moment, with counterfactual claims and spurious performances receiving an increasingly enthusiastic reception from the reading public.
*Fellow Spotlight*
2025-26 Wolf Humanities Center Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow Delbar Khakzad ( @delbar.khakzad ) is a social historian of science and religion in the Indo-Persianate world and the Middle East, focusing on how the entanglement of science and religion, particularly Shi’i Islam and Zoroastrianism, shaped the discourse of nationalism in modern Iran during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She earned her PhD from the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto. During her fellowship year, she is affiliated with the Department of History & Sociology of Science.
Khakzad is currently working on her first monograph, Persianate Time: Calendars, Science, and the Making of Modern Iranian Nationalism, which explores the history of time and temporality from the early modern Indo-Persianate world to modern Iran, with a focus on the reform of calendars and different phases of Iranian nationalism. Her dissertation, Iranian Calendric Modernity, which forms the basis of this book project, received an Honourable Mention for the Best Dissertation Award from the Association for Iranian Studies (AIS). Part of her research, “The Time of Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Iran: Cyclical Time (Dawr), Solar Islam, and the Formation of the Solar-Hijri (Hijri-Shamsi) Calendar,” was published in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East (CSSAAME). Her second article, on the history of setting mechanical clocks in Iran, is forthcoming in Isis: A Journal of the History of Science Society.
For the Wolf Humanities Center’s Mellon Research Seminar Forum on Truth, Khakzad is working on a project that addresses how Iranian Shi’i reformers and Indian Zoroastrian missionaries in the nineteenth century pursued a vision of “truth” through a reconstructed Persian cosmology. This project emphasizes how Iranian thinkers remembered the past to inspire cultural pride and intellectual advancement, ultimately forming a unique hybrid identity that honoured both their cultural heritage and scientific achievements.
This Saturday, April 18th: Guests are welcome to attend “Shaken Grounds” Graduate Student Research Workshop. Students from anthropology and beyond will share and discuss ongoing work, building toward a collective conversation on the politics of psychic life.
The world today, if there is "a" world to speak of, has been deeply shaken by the vortex of political transformations and returns of mass violence. How can attention to psychic life register sites and moments of rupture, sustenance, and transformation? Through what modes might we sound out the untimeliness of the "now"?
Featuring presenters
Kaylani Hocog Manglona, Anthropology,
Jenny (Zhuoli) Gao, Anthropology,
Chloe Rong, Anthropology,
Sooah Kwak, Anthropology,
Sohyoon Lee, Comparative Literature,
Ross Perfetti, Anthropology,
Jerry Lucius Pyrtuh, History & Sociology of Science,
Sofie Sogaard, Anthropology,
and Montita Sowapark, Anthropology
And discussants
Stefania Pandolfo, UC Berkeley,
Michael D'Arcy, Haverford College,
and Emily Ng, Penn
Saturday, April 18th
10:00 am - 5:00 pm
McNeil Building 403
3718 Locust Walk
Guests welcome with registration
For more info and to register, visit bit.ly/480AMdO
*Fellow Spotlight*
2025-26 Wolf Humanities Center Penn Faculty Fellow Hardeep Dhillon (she/her/hers) is Assistant Professor of Asian American History ( historyatpenn ) and a core faculty member in the Asian American Studies Program ( @asam.upenn ) at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research examines the history of immigration to the United States, with a particular focus on the laws and legal practices shaping immigrant lives.
Dhillon’s current book project investigates the history of children’s rights, emphasizing the experiences of birthright children born to non-citizen parents. Specifically, it traces the development of U.S. law from the late nineteenth through the twentieth centuries, demonstrating how segregation among children in education, voting, and housing became entrenched even as overt attempts to dismantle birthright citizenship failed.
Further details of Dhillon’s research, teaching, and publications can be found on her faculty webpage: https://live-sas-www-history.pantheon.sas.upenn.edu/people/hardeep-dhillon
For the Wolf Humanities Center’s Mellon Research Seminar Forum on Truth, Dhillon is working on a portion of her book project. This is titled, "America's Children and the History of Immigration." This work focuses on truth claims within the realm of legal history, examining how legal records produced by the courts and legal infrastructure of the United States create their own narratives about the past. It argues that court records and state documents obscure the larger political and legal implications in some of the nation’s most significant cases. Specifically, the scholarship explores the history of attacks on birthright citizenship in the United States and their narration through legal “facts” and “truth.” It explores a range of archival records, including family documents, tracking the historical development of a legal regime that aimed to entrench segregation among children in schools, at the ballot box, and in home ownership even as efforts to thwart birthright citizenship were defeated. It underscores that the legal truths of court records share only one interpretation of the nation’s history.
April 22: Powered by Smart: A Prehistory of Everyday AI, a book talk with Professors Sarah Murray (University of Michigan) and Rahul Mukherjee (Penn). Murray's recently published book reveals an alternative feminist pathway that seeded hospitable ideas about AI by showing how smartness was a techno-cultural ideal long before the digital age.
Wednesday, April 22 - 3:30-5:00pm
Humanities Conference Room, Williams Hall 623, 255 South 36th Street
Cosponsored by Penn's Center on Digital Culture and Society; Department of Cinema & Media Studies; Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies; and Price Lab for Digital Humanities.
Free and open to the public. Registration is required.
*Fellow Spotlight*
2025-26 Wolf Humanities Center Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow Chris Halsted is a historian of early medieval Europe. His research explores subjects including connectivity and trade in eastern Europe and Eurasia, witchcraft, and the intersecting construction of gender and ethnicity. Halsted’s work has been published in venues including Viator, Early Medieval Europe, Medium Ævum, Environment and History, and the Haskins Society Journal, and is forthcoming in Speculum. He has received support from the University of Virginia’s Jefferson Scholars Foundation, the Gerda Henkel Stiftung, the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, and Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. His first book, The Silver Age: Globality, Society, and the Slave Trade among the Baltic Slavs, 750-1050, is currently in process.
For the Wolf Humanities Center’s Mellon Research Seminar, Forum on Truth, Halsted is working on a project titled, “Imagining a World Gone Wrong: Truth, Identity, and Fear in Early Medieval Europe.” The project focuses on the reaction of early medieval Christian thinkers to the transformations of the sixth and seventh centuries. Early medieval thinkers circulated a number of blatant untruths during these turbulent centuries. Many of the thinkers behind these untruths knew them to be incorrect. For example, Maximus the Confessor, an influential Byzantine theologian, lamented after the Islamic conquests “to see our civilization laid waste by wild and untamed beasts who have merely the shape of a human form” — even though he had personal experience with Muslims and had possibly collaborated with them during the conquest of Egypt. Halsted’s project focuses on the function untruths had within their contexts: what did medieval Christian thinkers mean when they disseminated these falsehoods? How did they use these ideas to make political or religious arguments, or to further their own careers? And how did these ideas contribute to the wider development of European and Christian identity during this time?
