2025 Spring Seminar Program

Diverse Children’s Literature: Literary Art, Cultural Artifact and Contested Terrain
Wanda Brooks, Temple College of Education & Human Development
Thursdays, Temple

The purpose of this seminar is to develop and explore multiple understandings of race and diversity through reading and examining literature that is intended for children and adolescents. We will explore a wide range of historically popular and current picture-books, chapter books, graphic novels and young adult fiction that features characters from traditionally underrepresented racial groups. You will read stories from varied genres, gain an understanding of approaches to content analysis and examine responses readers have to stories. Through key research studies, we will explore the role of literature in identity development and will identify and carefully consider broader ideological beliefs about race and culture raised by the texts.

Robots and Smart Tech for Physical Therapy
Michelle Johnson, Penn Medicine
Thursdays, Penn

Injuries to body parts such as knees, ankles, fingers, hands, etc., can require extensive rehabilitation to prevent loss of life function to the person involved. Increasingly, practitioners are employing robots and smart technologies to assist with such rehabilitation. In this seminar, we will identify exemplary robots used to assess and treat injury to the upper and/or lower limbs. We will discuss the process behind their development, which takes into account the causes of the injuries, the biomechanics of recovery, and the human interactions needed to assess the injury and move the body part. The seminar will touch on the workings of the human body, including the muscle movements, that are relevant to the injuries in question. Participants will also visit the lab to observe and manipulate the technologies under development.

The Soviet World in Literature
Kevin Platt, Penn Russian & East European Studies
Wednesdays, Penn

Within a system that promotes conformity, literature can be a tool for resistance. Such was the case in the Soviet Union. Built by an anti-imperialist political movement on the ashes of the Russian Empire, the USSR came itself to resemble an empire. As part of its program of modernization, it called for the creation of socialist literature for the hundreds of languages, regions, and identities it embraced, from the Baltic states to the Caucasus, and from Ukraine, across Russia, to Central Asia and the far east. Yet literature was as much a means for anti-Soviet subversion as it was a reflection of official Soviet social life. In this course, we will read broadly in the multi-national literature of the USSR and in more recent literature that reflects on the Soviet past, seeking to understand how literature both contributed to and resisted the Soviet project. Our reading will include not only well-known figures of Russian literature, but also many non-Russian voices that have been overlooked as a result of the cultural politics of empire

Introduction to Cognitive Science: Uncovering the Machine in the Mind
Russell Richie, Penn MindCore
Wednesdays, Penn

How do minds work, whether in humans, animals, or machines…or in single-celled organisms, plants, ant colonies, or societies? This course surveys a wide range of answers to this question from disciplines ranging from philosophy to artificial intelligence to neuroscience, on topics including perception, learning, memory, decision making, number cognition, language, and more. The course shows how the different views from the parent disciplines interact and identifies some common themes among the theories that have been proposed. The course will introduce some simple computational and mathematical models (high school algebra will be enough to understand these!), which make clear the ‘mechanics’ of minds. We will also discuss the main directions of current research in the field.