Upcoming Events

Any English majors or minors who want to participate in the English Undergraduate Advisory Board (UAB) should fill out this form: https://forms.gle/f8W4aL8vi1mkpTAV6. Please note that submissions are due by 11:59pm on October 31st.

Join us at Public Trust for Poetry After Barbarism, a conversation with scholars Jennifer Scappettone, Paul Saint-Amour, Christos Kalli, and Jean-Michel Rabaté exploring literary verse as a form of agency and resistance, on Monday, November 3, 2025 from 5:30-7:00pm. Presented with the Theorizing Colloquium Series in the Program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory and the Mod/Con Working Group in the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania.

For more information, please visit: https://publictrust.org/poetry-after-barbarism

“In the cinema, a society that has lost its gestures tries at once to reclaim what it has lost and to record its loss... For human beings who have lost every sense of naturalness, each single gesture becomes a destiny.”— Giorgio Agamben, "Notes on Gesture"

Join us at Public Trust for The Space of Gestures, a series of film screenings on Thursday, November 6, 2025 from 5-8:00pm revisiting the work of Italian filmmakers Cecilia Mangini and Pier Paolo Pasolini. The screenings will be followed by a lecture by Professor Noa Steimatsky connecting Pasolini and Mangini to explore how cinema reimagines history, politics, and the body.

Presented in partnership with the Departments of Francophone, Italian, and Germanic Studies, Cinema and Media Studies, and the Center for Italian Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. With support from Cineteca di Bologna and Penn Libraries.

About the Program

In 2025 we mark fifty years since the death of Pier Paolo Pasolini, one of the most radical voices in Italian and global art cinema. Poet, novelist, and filmmaker, Pasolini’s artistic trajectory was driven by a desire to render visible — in language and on screen — the lives and bodies marginalized by the political logic of Western modernity: from the peasants of Northern Italy to the sub-proletariat of Rome’s peripheries, and the dispossessed communities of the global South. His cinema is inseparable from his acute attention to gestures — everyday movements, postures, and faces — through which history itself inscribes its trace.

This program places Pasolini’s work in dialogue with that of Cecilia Mangini, the first Italian woman documentary filmmaker, whose lucid eye captured the transformations of a country undergoing rapid social and anthropological change. Ignoti alla città (Unknown to the City, 1958) and La canta delle marane (The Ballad of the Marshes, 1962), both of which will be screened at Public Trust, confront the realities of Roman youth on the margins, where gestures of survival and resistance speak louder than words. Pasolini collaborated with Mangini as writer of La canta delle marane, bringing his own poetic sensibility to her militant documentary vision. Alongside Mangini’s shorts, Pasolini’s La terra vista dalla luna (The Earth Seen from the Moon, 1967) will also be screened. Starring Totò and Ninetto Davoli, the film recasts the popular comic tradition as a fable of poverty and dispossession. Its carnivalesque rhythms of movement and ritual expose the persistence of marginal lives within Italy’s so-called economic miracle, staging death and survival as collective conditions of existence on the edges of modernity.

The screenings will be followed by a talk by Professor Noa Steimatsky, a leading voice in film studies whose work has profoundly redefined how we understand cinema’s relation to space, place, and the human face. From her groundbreaking study of film locations in postwar Italian cinema to her influential writings on the visage as a site of history and aesthetics, Steimatsky has opened new ways of thinking about the politics and poetics of the moving image. Steimatsky will trace the threads connecting Pasolini and Mangini, showing how their films, read together, turn gesture into a language through which cinema reimagines history, politics, and the body.  Steimatsky's talk will be followed by a discussion moderated by Filippo Trentin, a Senior Lecturer in Italian at the University of Pennsylvania, who has also organized this program.

This program inaugurates the Robert Cargni Lecture, in memory of a beloved figure who for more than three decades enriched Philadelphia’s film and Italian culture. As a curator, Robert introduced audiences to rare and exceptional art films from across the world, fostering a community of cinephiles and opening windows onto traditions often absent from commercial screens. The series honors his devotion to independent and international cinema by bringing together screenings and critical reflection in his spirit.

Co-sponsored by Latitudes and the Asian American Studies Program (ASAM) at Penn.

Join the English UAB for a Study Break: snacks, crafts, and fun amidst the finals prep. 

More details to come!

This event will be co-sponsored by the AmLit, Latitudes, and Latinx Studies Working Groups in the Department of English, and by the Center for Latin American and Latinx Studies (CLALS).

Ruben Reyes, Jr. will give a reading from his novel, Archive of Unknown Universes (HarperCollins 2025), at American Grammar followed by a discussion and Q&A.

On Archive of Unknown Universes:

Cambridge, 2018. Ana and Luis’s relationship is on the rocks, despite their many similarities, including their mothers who both fled El Salvador during the war. In her search for answers, and against her best judgement, Ana uses The Defractor, an experimental device that allows users to peek into alternate versions of their lives. What she sees leads her and Luis on a quest through Havana and San Salvador to uncover the family histories they are desperate to know, eager to learn if what might have been could fix what is.

Havana, 1978. The Salvadoran war is brewing, and Neto, a young revolutionary with a knack for forging government papers, meets Rafael at a meeting for the People's Revolutionary Army. The two form an intense and forbidden love, shedding their fake names and revealing themselves to each other inside the covert world of their activism. When their work separates them, they begin to exchange weekly letters, but soon, as the devastating war rages on, forces beyond their control threaten to pull them apart forever.

Ruben Reyes Jr.’s debut novel is an epic, genre-bending journey through inverted worlds—one where war ends with a peace treaty, and one where it ends with a decisive victory by the Salvadoran government. What unfolds is a stunning story of displacement and belonging, of loss and love. It’s both a daring imagining of what might have been and a powerful reckoning of our past.

More details to be announced!