Northern America
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Countries and Areas in this Region
Countries and Areas in this Region
  • Bermuda
  • Canada
  • Greenland
  • Saint Pierre and Miquelon
  • United States
Fast Facts
  • 2,150 + Penn alumni located in Northern America (outside of the United States)
  • 7 Penn students on average reported studying abroad annually in North America
  • 180 + Penn faculty reporting over 300 projects and activities in Northern America
  • 58 active agreements with institutions in Northern America

Penn enjoys a close relationship with other parts of Northern America. Each year, several hundred Canadians study at Penn, and Canada is consistently one of the top five countries of origin for international students at the University. There are active Penn alumni clubs both in Canada (the Penn-Wharton Club of Toronto) and in Bermuda. Since 2014, Penn faculty members have spent over $48 million to carry out research with a component in Northern America (outside of the United States).

 

canada
 
Faculty Engagement
Summer Institute
Adapting the Africana Studies Summer Institute for a Virtual Environment
Camille Charles
Africana Studies

Professor of Sociology, Africana Studies, and Education, Camille Charles has directed the Africana Studies Summer Institute for 13 years, but 2020 marked her first virtual Institute. The 7-day program served 77 pre-freshmen this year, including 14 who were internationally-based. Courses offered to students included international components, such as A Borderless Caribbean?: The Creole Geographies of Dominica’s Popular Music taught by Timothy Rommen, and Africa Through Literature taught by David Amposah.

Updated November 2020

Course
Adapting a Global Cinema Studies Course for Virtual Learning
Peter Decherney
Cinema & Media Studies

Professor of English and Cinema and Media Studies, Peter Decherney organized his course, Virtual Reality Lab, around a partnership with the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In the course, students worked with museum curators  to create virtual reality projects centered on objects in the museum’s collections. Following Penn's transition to remote learning, Decherney shifted the course’s focus to the students and their individual experiences of the objects. Student projects included a Japanese tea ceremony filmed at a student’s home in  Mexico City, as well as a semiautobiographical film shot in another student’s hometown of Cairo, Egypt.

Updated November 2020

Research
Tracing Historical Human Migration Patterns in North America
Theodore Schurr
Anthropology

In 2009-12, as part of his work as Director of the North American Regional Center of the Genographic Project, Theodore Schurr (School of Arts and Sciences) worked with Bermudian populations to elucidate the population history of this island nation and explore its links to the history of colonial America and the Trans-Atlantic Slave trade. The Genographic Project, launched in 2005 by the National Geographic Society, was a genetic anthropological study that aimed to map historical human migration patterns through the analysis of genetic variation in populations from around the world.

Updated November 2020

Research
Research on the Canadian Charitable Sector
Femida Handy
Social Welfare Program

Femida Handy of the School of Social Policy and Practice, along with her frequent collaborator Micheal Shier of the University of Toronto (Shier holds a Ph.D. from the SP2 Program in Social Welfare), recently published a paper entitled "Leadership in nonprofits: Social Innovations and blurring boundaries." in 2020 in Voluntas: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations Their findings identifies clear characteristics of leadership that support undertaking social innovations. that may lead to effective partnerships and stakeholder engagement. In 2019, along with Calvin Jennings, an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, they published a paper "Intra-organizational conditions supporting social innovation in human service nonprofits. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly. She sontinues her work in Canada with Shier, the upcoming projects are: "Measuring a Nonprofit’s Civic Footprint" and "Factors shaping public perceptions of market-based activities by Charities in Canada"

Updated November 2020

Symposium
Tepoztlán Institute for Transnational History of the Americas
David Kazanjian
English

David Kazanjian (School of Arts and Sciences) is co-director of the Tepoztlán Institute for Transnational History of the Americas from 2017-'19. The group convenes annually in Tepoztlán, Morelos, México for a weeklong gathering that fosters transnational studies and conversations between scholars, activists, and artists from across the Americas.​ Scholars foreground the circulation of people, culture, and capital operating on registers both greater and smaller than the nation state, reframing discussions of the formation of the new global order in the process.

Research
Lives, Health, and Histories of 36 Enslaved Africans
Theodore Schurr
Anthropology

The city of Charleston, South Carolina partnered with Professor and Graduate Group Chair of the Department of Anthropology, Theodore Schurr on an anthropological project to research the lives, health, and histories of 36 individuals from the 18th century, the remains of whom were found during a renovation of a Charleston cultural center. Many of the individuals originated in sub-Saharan Africa. Professor Schurr’s work, which employed DNA sequencing techniques, contributed to the largest DNA study of its kind to date.

Updated November 2020