School: Arts & Sciences 
General Topic Areas: Arabic Literature & Culture; the Middle East; Islam
 
Sample Talk Topics or Titles: 

• Fiction and History (or vice versa)
• A Thousand and One Nights: A Tale of Two Tale-Collections
  What We Owe to the History of Spain (illustrated)
• ISIS
• Islam: What Muslims Do And Do Not Believe

Web Bio 

School: Arts & Sciences 
General Topic Areas: Architecture and City Planning in Europe and America, 1750-present

Sample Talk Topics or Titles: 

• Frank Lloyd Wright's Beth Sholom Synagogue in Elkins Park
• The Architecture of the Philadelphia Museum of Art
• The Making of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway
• The Two Homes of the Barnes Foundation
• How Victorian Eclectic Architecture Was Modern

Web Bio

School: Arts & Sciences 
General Topic Areas: 19th-Century American Literature,
20th-Century American Literature

Sample Talk Topics or Titles:

• American Bestsellers (fiction and non-fiction)
• American Literature and American Painting
• The Art of Biography
• Edward Hopper’s New York
• The History of Adoption
• The Poetry of Emily Dickinson
• Detective Fiction

 Web Bio

School: Arts & Sciences 
General Topic Areas: Post-1945 American and European Cinema

Sample Talk Topics or Titles:

• Contemporary Documentaries and the Essay Film
• Describing Cinema

Web Bio

School: Law 
General Topic Areas: U.S. Supreme Court and Voting Rights

Sample Talk Topics or Titles: 

• Effects of Recent Changes in Right To Vote Laws
• The Politicization of the Supreme Court
• The Future of the Supreme Court
• Who are the Supreme Court Justices? 

 Web Bio

School: Dental Medicine 
General Topic Areas: Temporomandibular Disorders, Pain of the Mouth and Jaws, Oral Mucosal Diseases

Sample Talk Topics or Titles: 

• Updated Treatment for TMJ
• Treatment of Chronic Mouth Ulcers

 
Web Bio 

School: Perelman School of Medicine 
General Topic Areas: GI/Colorectal Cancer 

Sample Talk Topics or Titles: 

• Advances in Colorectal Cancer Treatment
• Writing and Publishing Medical Journal Manuscripts 

School: School of Social Policy & Practice; Faculty Associate at Penn Institute for Urban Research; Affiliated Faculty, Alice Paul Center--Research on Gender, Sexuality, and Women
General Topic Areas: labor market; low- and middle-income workers and families; ethnography

Sample Talk Topics or Titles:

• What Workers Say about Their Work: 1980s to 2020
• Why Jobs Aren't Enough
• Myths About Work and Workers and What to Do About Them (the Myths)

Web Bio 1
Web Bio 2

School: Arts & Sciences
General Topic Areas: American History

Sample Talk Topics or Titles:

• The Fighting Sullivans of World War Two
• Fascism Comes to America

Web Bio

School: Arts & Sciences 
General Topic Areas: U.S. economic and labor history
Sample Talk Topics or Titles: 

• Philadelphia's Economy: Past, Present, Future
• The U.S. Economy in Historic Global Perspective
• The Rise and Fall of American Trade Unionism

Web Bio

School: Arts & Sciences, Middle East Center, Jewish Studies Program
General Topic Areas: Middle East politics, Arab-Israeli, Palestinian-Israeli politics/conflict/relations; history and political science; US foreign policy; Computer simulation for geopolitical forecasting and analysis; Evolutionary theory, complexity theory, and politics

Sample Talk Topics or Titles:

• Israel and the Palestinians: From Two-State Solution to One-State Reality
• BDS: What is the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement
• Where did Zionism come from and where is it going?
• Why is rationality so often the problem rather than the solution?
• What is a "paradigm" and how does it "shift?" What is "critical theory" and is it dangerous?

Web Bio

School: Arts & Sciences, Wharton, School of Design
General Topic Areas: Race and gender differentials in U.S. labor market

Sample Talk Topics or Titles: 

• Race and NFL Coaching: My Insider's Story of the Implementation and Success of the Rooney Rule
• Race and Gender Differentials in the U.S. Workplace: A Review of the Evidence on the Sources

Web Bio

School: Arts & Sciences
General Topic Areas: Economic forecasting, policy analysis, Southeast Asia
Bio: After 31 years as a member of the Penn Economics faculty, Bobby Mariano became Founding Dean of the School of Economics as Singapore Management University, as well as SMU's Vice Provost for Research. After retirement, he returned to the Philadelphia area. He has been a consultant to multilateral institutions, central banks, government agencies, and private companies in the U.S. and Southeast Asia. He is an elected Fellow of the Econometric Society.

School: Arts & Sciences
General Topic Areas: Elections, Voting Systems, Electoral Reforms

Sample Talk Topics or Titles:

• A Remedy for the Electoral College
• A Plan for Reforming the Pennsylvania General Assembly
• Gerrymandering and Redistricting Reform
• Ranked Choice Voting

Web Bio

School: Arts & Sciences, Biology
General Topic Areas: Plant Development, The Genetics of Food

Sample Talk Topics or Titles:

• Nothing We Eat is Natural
• Turning over a New Leaf: How Plants Develop

Web Bio

School: Arts & Sciences
General Topic Areas: Shakespeare, Shakespeare and Women, Shakespeare's History Plays

Sample Talk Topics or Titles:

• Shakespeare and Women
• Our Shakespeare, Our Selves

Web Bio

School: Arts & Sciences
General Topic Area: Music composition

Sample Talk Topics or Titles

• Composing in Progress: Al Capone and Family
• Composing Rasputin: Opera in Two Acts
• Jay Reise Fairy Tales: The Warrior Violinist and The Selfish Giant
• The Music of Jay Reise

Web Bio

School: Perelman School of Medicine 
General Topic Areas: Auditory Neurobiology 

Sample Talk Topics or Titles: 

• Hearing Loss in the Elderly: Diagnosis, Remediation and Consequences 

Web Bio

School: Perelman School of Medicine 
General Topic Areas: Diabetes, Prediabetes

Sample Talk Topics or Titles: 

• All You Want to Know About Diabetes, but Were Afraid to Ask Your Doctor
• The Time is Right for a New Classification of Diabetes
• Diabetes Medications May Be a Cardiologist's Best Friends
• Dementia as a Complication of Diabetes
• Cancer as a Complication of Diabetes
• A Unified Pathophysiologic Construct of All Diabetes and its Complication
• Incretin Use in Hospitals for the Care of Patients with Diabetes

Web Bio

School: Arts & Sciences
General Topics Areas: European Old Masters

Sample Talk Topics or Titles:

• Rembrandt and the Divine
• Fools and Folly in works by Bruegel and his Contemporaries

Web Bio

School: Arts & Sciences 
General Topic Areas: citizenship and immigration; civil rights and civil liberties; American constitutionalism; American political thought; racial and ethnic politics

Sample Talk Topics or Titles:

• Toward Better Stories of American Identity
• The Crisis of Our Two Constitutions
• Trends and Transformations in American Racial Politics

Bio: Rogers M. Smith has been Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Penn since 2001, after 21 years teaching at Yale. His many publications include Civic Ideals, a 1998 Pulitzer Prize Finalist. Smith has been Penn’s Associate Dean for Social Sciences and President of the American Political Science Association. He was founding director of the Penn DCC Program, the forerunner of the Andrea Mitchell Center, and co-founder of the Teachers Institute of Philadelphia. He received five teaching prizes from Penn and Yale. Smith is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and the American Philosophical Society.