News

• March 22, 2021

  The 34th Annual Women of Color Award Ceremony Honors Individual Achievements

  The annual Women of Color award ceremony celebrated its 34th year in an online event led by the Women of Color at Penn (WOCAP) Planning Committee and the African American Resource Center (AARC). The awards recognize individuals who have worked to increase respect for women of color at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Pennsylvania Health System, Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, Pennsylvania Hospital, and the Delaware Valley community. There is also a community member award, as well as the Joann Mitchell Legacy Award, named for the senior vice President for institutional affairs and chief diversity officer at Penn.

• March 20, 2021

  Diversity in the Stacks: Bollywood and Hindi-language Cinema

  The Penn Libraries collects film and media from South Asia broadly, giving researchers across campus access to a wide-ranging and world-class collection of films from the Indian Subcontinent. Such films are relevant to the work of faculty and students in Cinema & Media Studies, as well as those interested in ideas of representation, globalization, visual anthropology, popular Indian culture, nationhood, and decolonization.

• March 15, 2021

  An Interview with Liza Vick, President of the Music Library Association

  This month, Liza Vick took the reins as president of the Music Library Association, the primary professional organization for music librarians in the United States. Vick, who is the head of the Penn Libraries’ Otto E. Albrecht Music Library and Eugene Ormandy Music Library and Media Center, has contributed significantly to the profession of music librarianship throughout her career, having served previously in a number of organizational leadership positions and as book review editor of publications like Notes, the Music Library Association’s quarterly journal. We recently sat down with her to talk about her career, the challenges and opportunities she is looking forward to tackling in this new position, and her hopes for music librarianship as a whole.

• March 1, 2021

  Penn’s Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw Curates Exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery about The Nations First Ladies

  During an 18-month leave from Penn, Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw was the senior historian and director of history, research, and scholarly programs at the Portrait Gallery. Shaw’s research and scholarship are woven throughout the exhibition on first ladies, which features 55 women in more than 60 works, spanning the more than 250 years from Martha Washington to Melania Trump. Described as the largest exhibition outside the White House on the portraiture of first ladies, the items include paintings, photographs, engravings, miniatures, sculptures, campaign buttons, and garments.

• February 26, 2021

  Sherisse Laud-Hammond was Named the New Director of the Penn Women’s Center (PWC)

  Sherisse Laud-Hammond was named the new director of the Penn Women’s Center (PWC), a position in which she is the first Black woman and woman of color to serve. A 2005 graduate of the Master of Social Work program at Penn’s School of Social Policy & Practice (SP2), Laud-Hammond’s prior social work education and career, as well as her ongoing dedication to social justice and change, are unmistakably evident when she describes her goals and vision for PWC.