Wolf Humanities Center at Penn

We are pleased to announce the 33 scholars joining us as Research Fellows for our 2026–2027 Forum on Practice! More on next year's Fellows and their projects coming soon.

https://wolfhumanities.upenn.edu/research-fellows-26-27

Congratulations to the Class of 2026! 🎉

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 Faculty Fellow Oscar Aguirre-Mandujano is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania. 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 a portion of 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.

Image 1. Portrait of Oscar Aguirre-Mandujano (credit )

Image 2-4. Publications by Oscar Aguirre-Mandujano that came out during his time as a Faculty Fellow.

"Erotic Encounters: Beauty and Conversion in the Ottoman Frontier." International Journal of Middle East Studies 57, no. 2 (2025): 278-93. doi: 10.1017/S0020743825100858 [Open Access].

“Is Ottoman Court Poetry Islamic? Secular, National, and Scholarly Approaches to Ottoman Poetry” In Beyond the Rose and the Nightingale: What Makes Islamic Literature Islamic?, edited by Jamal Elias, 92-114. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2026.

On April 15, Wolf Humanities Center Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow Ana Lolua and her University of Pennsylvania Department of Russian and East European Studies' “Museums, Socialism, and Power” class welcomed artist and University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design 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. 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.

Image 1: portrait of Ada Kuskowski.

Image 2: a 13th c. manuscript of Philip de Beaumanoir's lawbook on the legal practice of the area of Beauvaisis, where he is sitting as judge and participating in legal practice.

Image 3-4: images of late medieval iron-bound chests at the Musée de Cluny in Paris, as examples of the type of chests that would have contained precious items that included items important to legal practice such as contractual documents known as charters and, for the larger one, also lawbooks.

*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.

Image 1. Portrait of Christine Woody (credit to Jason Varney).

Image 2. Anonymous review of Lady Morgan's France by JW Croker undergoing editorial review in the Quarterly Review (John Murray Archive, National Library of Scotland.

Image 3. Woody’s Widener textual scholarship program students at work in Penn's Kislak Center.

Coming up this Wednesday, April 22!

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 Digital Culture and Society; Penn Cinema Studies Program; Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies - GSWS at Penn; and Price Lab for Digital Humanities.

Free and open to the public. Registration is required.
https://wolfhumanities.upenn.edu/events/murray

*Fellow Spotlight*

2025-26 Wolf Humanities Center Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow 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.

Image 1: Portrait of Delbar Khakzad (credit Jason Varney)

Image 2: The Dasātīr-i Āsimānī (The Celestial Laws) was attributed to Sāsān the Fifth, the “last pre-Islamic Persian prophet,” and was said to contain the wisdom of pre-Adamite Persian prophet-kings in pure Persian. The work, believed to have been discovered in 1778 in Isfahan by a Parsi Zoroastrian priest, was published in Bombay in 1818 along with an English translation.

Image 3: A copy of the Dasātīr, published in Persian in 1888.

Image 4: The Year of the Horse, a traditional zodiacal (animal-cycle) calendar produced in Qajar Iran in 1262 Hijri (1846 CE), prior to the widespread adoption of lithographic printing for calendar production and the later popularization of the Jalālī calendar.

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 Berkley,
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 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/shaken-grounds-untimely-thoughts-on-psychic-life-tickets-1986324552206