humorous history research project

The European Journal of Humour Research

Current Issue

The EJHR is an open-access, academic journal published by Cracow Tertium Society for the Promotion of Language Studies and endorsed by The International Society for Humor Studies (ISHS) . The EJHR publishes full research articles, shorter commentaries, which discuss ground-breaking or controversial areas, research notes, which provide details on the research project rationale, methodology and outcomes, as well as book reviews. The journal has a special focus on supporting PhD students and early career researchers by providing them with a forum within which to disseminate their work alongside established scholars and practitioners.

The EJHR welcomes submissions that combine research and relevant applications as well as empirical studies detailing their usefulness to the study of humour. All contributions received (apart from book reviews) undergo a double-blind, peer-review process. In addition to established scholars within humor research, we invite those as yet unfamiliar with (or wary of) humor research to enter the discussion, especially based on less known or less covered material. The elaboration of joint methodological frameworks is strongly encouraged. For further details or inquiries you may contact the Editors.

No charges are applied either for submitting, reviewing or processing articles for publication.       

The journal is now listed in important international indexing bases including Scopus and Scimago ranking :

This publication is supported by the CEES and ELM Scholarly Press.

Announcements

Interesting scillit data on the ejhr journal.

Browse and enjoy some statistics on our journal in the decade from 2014-2024.

EJHR has joined the Reviewer Credit system

We are pleased to announce that the European Journal of Humour Research  is now registered with ReviewerCredits, the system for supporting and appreciating journal reviewers for their work. 

Most read and cited papers 2013-2024

Here is the updated list of papers published in EJHR in the years 2013-2024  that received most views. Below is also the list of most cited papers . Congratulations to the Authors.

International Society for Humor Studies Journal

The Society's journal, HUMOR , provides an interdisciplinary forum for the publication of high-quality articles on humor as an important and universal human faculty. Contributions include theoretical papers, original research reports, scholarly debates, and book reviews. The journal is currently published by DeGruyter, and all submissions are peer reviewed. Since 1988, HUMOR has published over 1000 articles and book reviews.Below are links to sample articles and book reviews with free online access on the DeGruyter website.

Comedy Bootcamp: Stand-up Comedy as Humor Training for Military Population Authors: Andrew Olah, Janelle Junkin, Thomas Ford, and Sam Pressler (2022: HUMOR 35.4)

Satire without Borders: The Age-Moderated Effect of One-Sided versus Two-Sided Satire on Hedonic Experiences and Patriotism Authors: Mark Boukes and Heather LaMarre (2023: HUMOR : 36.1)

The Humor Transaction Schema: A Conceptual Framework for Researching the Nature and Effects of Humor Authors: Jessica Milner Davis and Jennifer Hofmann (2023: HUMOR : 36.2)

Laughing to Keep from Dying: African American Satire in the Twenty-First Century Author: Danielle Fuentes Morgan Reviewers: Danielle Bobker and Catherine Sauvé Dowers (2022: HUMOR 35.4)

Political Humor in a Changing Media Landscape: A New Generation of Research Editors: Jody C. Baumgartner and Amy B. Becker Reviewer: Sara Polak (2022: HUMOR 35.4)

That’s not funny: how the right makes comedy work for them Editors: Jody C. Baumgartner and Amy B. Becker Reviewer: Sara Polak (2022: HUMOR 35.4)

Sexual Humour in Africa: Gender, Jokes, and Societal Change Author: Ignatius Chukwimah Reviewer: Tessa Dowling (2023: HUMOR 36.1)

Current Editor-in-Chief Christian F. Hempelmann Literature & Languages Department Texas A & M University, Commerce humorjournal-at-gmail.com

Former Editors-in-Chiefs Salvatore Attardo Literature & Languages Department Texas A & M University, Commerce Thomas E. Ford Psychology Department Western Carolina University Giselinde Kuipers Sociology Department University of Amsterdam Lawrence Mintz American Studies Department University of Maryland Victor Raskin Linguistics Department Purdue University

ISHS Executive Secretary Martin D. Lampert Psychology Department Holy Names University humorstudies-at-outlook.com

Editorial Board Members Salvatore Attardo Texas A & M University, Commerce Nancy Bell, Washington State University Delia Chiaro University of Bologna Wladislaw Chlopicki Jagiellonian University Jessica Milner Davis University of Sydney Thomas E.Ford Western Carolina University Gil Greengross Aberystwyth University Giselinde Kuipers University of Amsterdam Liisi, Laineste, Estonian Literary Museum Sharon Lockyer Brunel University Moira Marsh Indiana University John Morreall College of William & Mary Alleen Nilsen Arizona State University Don Nilsen Arizona State University Elliott Oring Cal State University, Los Angeles Rene Proyer Martin Luther Univ. Halle-Wittenberg Victor Raskin Purdue University Willibald Ruch Zürich University Limor Shifman Hebrew Univ. of Jerusalem Villy Tsakona National and Kapodistrian Univ. of Athens

ARTS & CULTURE

Finding the humor in history.

The irreverent take on the giants of literature, science and politics could only have come from the brain of cartoonist Kate Beaton

Megan Gambino

Senior Editor

In just four years, Kate Beaton has made a name for herself as a cartoonist. She launched her webcomic “ Hark! A Vagrant ” in 2007 and has since published two books. Her strips, which look like doodles a student might draw in the margins of her notebook, read as endearing spoofs on historical and literary characters. In one , Joseph Kennedy overzealously goads his sons’ aspirations for presidency, and in another, the Brontë sisters go dude watchin’ .

Beaton, 28, started penning comics while studying history and anthropology at Mount Allison University in New Brunswick, Canada. Her cartoons, about the campus and its professors at first, ran in the school newspaper. “I don’t know how well I ingratiated myself among the faculty,” she says. But now the New York City-based cartoonist hears of educators who serve up her witty comics as aperitifs to what might otherwise be dry lessons.

Just a few months after the release of her latest book Hark! A Vagrant , Beaton took a break from sketching Heathcliff of Wuthering Heights fame to discuss her work with us.

What do you look for in a subject? Are there certain character traits or plotlines you look for?

A certain amount of conflict makes it easier. But there are no red flags really. In general, you just sort of become very familiar with the subject and then you poke fun at it like you would a friend of yours that you know very well.

You once said that your approach is directly related to the old Gaelic-style humor of Nova Scotia. How so?

My hometown [of Mabou, Nova Scotia] is very small. It is 1,200 people or so, and it is really well known for its Scottish heritage. It was so culturally singular in a way. That culture grew because it was so isolated there for such a long time. There is just a certain sense of humor. They talk about it like it’s a thing. I read once in a book that it was a knowing wink to the human foibles of the people that you know. Usually someone is just sort of being a little hard on you or someone else, but in a friendly way. You have to live with these people. No one is a jerk about it. But it is jokes at the expense of everyone’s general humanity. You could call it small-town humor.

So what kind of research does it take to attain a friendly enough rapport with figures in history and literature to mock them in your comics?

For every character it is totally different. It is not just a character. It is the world around the character or the book or the historical thing. People take history very personally, so an event might have a second or third life depending on who is reading about it and who is writing about it and who cares about it. It is fascinating. I don’t really have a particular process. I just try to find the most credible and interesting sources that I can to read about things and I go from there.

Before you went full steam as a cartoonist, you worked in museums, including the Mabou Gaelic and Historical Society, the Shearwater Aviation Museum and the Maritime Museum of British Columbia. Do you visit museums or nose through their digital collections for inspiration?

Yeah. I recently went to the Museum of the Moving Image to see the Jim Henson exhibit here in New York. I like museums a lot. I like visiting them, more to see how they present information than the information inside. That is usually the most interesting part. What do you choose to leave in? What do you leave out? I think the idea of public history is really interesting. What people know about and what they don’t. What is part of the story publicly? Who do you make a statue of and where do you put it and why?

The bulk of my research is online, although I have quite a few books of my own. You learn how to Google the right things, I guess, either a phrase that you think will work or any kind of key words that will bring you to an essay someone wrote or to Google Books. Archive.org has all kinds of books as well. You can find a lot of university syllabi. You can find so much. Go to the Victoria and Albert Museum website . They have all kinds of costuming stuff there. I needed to find a flintlock pistol recently for a strip about pirates, and there was this person’s website. He has one for sale and has pictures of it from all angles for some collector. It was great. The Internet is pretty wonderful for that kind of thing.

How do you make a comic appeal to both someone who has never heard of the figure you are lampooning and someone who is that figure’s biggest fan?

You try and present figures as plainly as you can, I suppose. That’s why my comics got bigger than just a six-panel comic about one subject. It became six smaller comics about one subject or something like that because there is too much information to put in. Maybe the first couple might have a bit more exposition in them so that by the time you get to the bottom, you are familiar with the characters even if you don’t know them from a book or from studying them. If I did a breakdown, you could see that maybe one comic especially will hit it big with someone who doesn’t really know much about it. It might be a sight gag or something, a face or a gesture, and then one will really hopefully pay some kind of tribute to somebody who knows a bit more about it. It would still be funny but it would have a more knowledgeable joke that goes over some people’s heads, and that would be fine.

Is there someone you really want to make a comic about but haven’t figured out the hook?

Yeah. I have been reading a lot about Catherine the Great lately. But she is so larger-than-life; it is difficult to take in all of that information. In some ways, you think it would make it easier, because she is somebody that everybody knows. But she is liked by some people, disliked by others. She had some good qualities and some bad qualities. What do you pick? What do you go with? If I made, say, six comics, what would they be, from a life this large?

What has been the most surprising response from readers?

Emotional responses, definitely. I think that one of the most emotional responses was in doing  one  about Rosalind Franklin, the DNA research scientist whose work was stolen by James Watson and Francis Crick and put in their Nobel Prize-winning book. That was just a huge deal in the beginnings of DNA research. They didn’t give her credit for her photographs that they took of the double helix. They won Nobel Prizes, and she died. It is so tragic and awful and people really responded to it, because she is just representative of so many people you read about and you can’t believe were overlooked. The joke is respectful to her. It is not the most hilarious comic. But it does give Watson and Crick kind of a villainous role, and her sort of the noble heroine role. It is nice to see people really respond to history that way. It is nice to touch a nerve.

I especially like when you use  Nancy Drew covers as springboards for comic strips . How did you get started with that?

I started with  Edward Gorey covers . I was trying to think of a comic idea one day, and I was going nowhere. I was so frustrated, and someone on Twitter was like, check out all these Gorey covers, a collection on a website. I looked at them and thought you really could extrapolate from this theme that is on the cover and make a comic about it. So I did, and they went over really well. I started to look for some other book covers that had an action scene on the front that were available in a set. I read all of the Nancy Drew books in two weeks when I was 10 because I was in the hospital and that is the only thing that they had. I read the heck out of those books and probably remember them in a weird haze of a two-week megathon Nancy Drew reading while being sick. Perhaps that weird memory turned Nancy into kind of a weirdo in my comic.

What is on the cover is like, “Here is what’s inside.” Be excited about this. There is no abstract stuff, because kids would be like who cares. There are people doing things and that is why you pick it up. You are like, I like the look of this one. Nancy looks like she is in a real pickle.

Have you ever felt that you went too far in your reinterpretation of history or literature?

Not really. I think I toe a safe line. I don’t really get hate mail. I respect the things that I poke fun at and hopefully that shows. Earlier on, I suppose I went for the more crude humor because you are just trying to figure out your own sense of humor and what your strengths are. It takes a long time to figure out comedy, to figure out what it is that you are capable of in it and what your particular voice is in humor and comedy.

Who do you find funny?

Oh, a lot of people. The same Tina Fey, Amy Poehler crowd that everybody seems to like nowadays. But I also really enjoy the old-style humor. Stephen Leacock is one of my favorites. He was a Canadian humorist around the turn of the century. And Dorothy Parker’s poems are so good and funny. It is hard to be funny. I like to take influences from all over the board. Visually, I have a lot of collections from  Punch  magazine and that type of stuff, where the visual gags are so good. I respect that level of cartooning.

When you do public readings of your comics, obviously, you are in control of how they are read, where the dramatic pauses are and everything. Do you ever worry about leaving that up to the readers?

You try to engineer it in a certain way. People are going to read it the way they do. My sister reads the end of the book as soon as she starts one. It drives me crazy. Why would you read the last chapter? She can’t stand waiting for the joke or waiting for the end. I try to construct my comics in a way that no one can do that. A joke hits them in the face before they can get to the end.

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Megan Gambino | | READ MORE

Megan Gambino is a senior web editor for Smithsonian magazine.

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From I to we in humor research: a systematic review of the antecedents and consequences of humor in groups

Andreea Gheorghe holds a PhD in Psychology from Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania and she is interested in research topics related to group dynamics and the study of humor from a relational perspective.

Petru Lucian Curșeu is professor at Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca Romania and at Open Universiteit, The Netherlands, his research interests include team dynamics, social cognition (in particular the study of stereotypes and prejudice in organizational settings), multiparty collaboration as well as decision-making in organizations.

While most of the literature has focused on the individual-level effects of humor, the number of studies addressing and analyzing humor in its social context as a group-level phenomenon has also started to increase. Yet there is still increased heterogeneity of results, as well as problems regarding conceptualization and measurement of humor in groups. To further our understanding of humor as an emergent multilevel construct, we conducted a systematic literature review on the antecedents and consequences of humor in groups. The findings indicate that factors such as group composition, interpersonal familiarity, task structure, trust, cohesion, positive team environment, communication norms, communication channels, and timing dynamics play important roles in the emergence and type of humor expressed within groups. The consequences of humor in groups include the emergence of cohesion, the delineation of group boundaries and identity formation, influence on group atmosphere and affective dynamics, facilitation of collective coping and team engagement, and potential effects on team performance. We discuss research progress and gaps, and conclude by outlining future research directions.

About the authors

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The Art of History

Where's the Humor in History?

Dane Kennedy | Feb 1, 2011

Why is the history we write so serious? The dismal science of the 19th century may have been political economy, but history has to rank right up there as one of our own era’s more doleful disciplines. Granted, we often deal with pretty depressing subjects—war, imperialism, genocide, slavery, famine—oh, how the list of depredations and disasters goes on. But in recent decades we have given a lot of attention to happier topics as well—sports, shopping, sex, drugs, and, yes, even rock-and-roll. One might expect these subjects to inspire a lighter tone, but more often than not we approach them with the same high seriousness as the grimmest stories we tell.

It isn’t as if historians as human beings lack all sense of humor. In fact, I can testify that some of my colleagues are exceptionally funny. They are quick with quips in personal conversations; their classrooms often echo with laughter; their wit even manages to lighten the mood in department meetings, which is saying something. Some of us find amusement in the malapropisms and other bloopers we read in student exams and papers (as when euthanasia is miraculously transformed into “youth in Asia”). We’re even capable of laughing at ourselves and our professional tribulations, especially after we’ve had a few beers. We read academic satires with relish, and although it is our colleagues in English who usually get mocked by Kingsley Amis, David Lodge, James Hynes, and other masters of the genre, it’s easy enough to see ourselves in their spot-on satires. Yet we can’t seem to see the humor in those peoples, events, and processes of the past that we ourselves write about.

Let me stress that I’m not urging us to direct our energies to the kinds of publications that range from that old favorite 1066 and All That to the countless compilations of historical trivia with titles like Presidential Anecdotes and The Wit and Wisdom of the Founding Fathers . I’m talking about serious historical scholarship. And there’s the rub—we find it hard to describe the sort of history we are trained to do without resorting to the adjective “serious.” We are prisoners of our professional pretentions. How can we persuade one another that our work is important if we don’t insist on its seriousness? How can we stay in good standing in that exclusive club of academic historians if we intentionally elicit laughter? (The fact that we all too often unintentionally do so is another matter entirely, of course.) Thomas Babington Macaulay, who didn’t have to worry about these sorts of professional prohibitions, wrote a wickedly witty account of British society in chapter three of his History of England , which is surely the most widely read and best loved portion of that five-volume tome. But if Macaulay has any modern counterparts, I haven’t come across them. 

Sure, humor’s hard to pull off. But sometimes the evidence we come across is ready-made for comedy. I recently wrote an intellectual biography of the famed Victorian explorer and translator Sir Richard Burton, some of whose ideas were so wacky that the sensible response was to hoot with laughter. How could anyone take seriously his claims that homosexuality was caused by the hot climate in places like Greece, India, and, you guessed it, California, or that some African peoples had physiognomies that could be classified as “semitic” from the eyes up and “negroid” from the nose down? Yet I discussed this nonsense in a responsible academic fashion, doing what we historians are taught to do—contextualize, interpret, explain. More recently, I was doing research in the National Library of Scotland, where I came across some entertaining letters by Christopher Rigby, a British consul in mid-19th-century Zanzibar. It turns out this fearless empire-builder was utterly unmanned by the terrifying task of finding an English wife. “A friend of mine,” he reported at one stage in his search for a spouse, “discovered after his marriage that his wife had a glass eye; and some time back I was at a dinner party… when a young lady at table fainted & was carried out. Whilst they were rubbing her feet to restore animation, it was suddenly discovered that she had a cork leg! And really what with false hair & false eyes and cork legs and false calves and Madame Rachel painting the eyebrows & enamelling the cheeks, no one can tell what he is marrying.” Here was someone who could have been a character in one of Oscar Wilde’s plays. By the time I’d finished reading Rigby’s correspondence, my inadequately stifled laughter had drawn more than a few angry glares from the dour Scots who shared the reading room with me.

Recovering the humor in history isn’t merely a matter of finding funny material, of course. It’s also a function of the tone we take in discussing that material. As professional historians, we’re supposed to adopt an objective, balanced stance toward our subjects.  That’s all well and good, but it isn’t terribly conducive to the comedic touch. And how many of us actually abide by that ideal anyway? We’re more likely to adopt one of two subjective approaches. One is stern and prosecutorial, exposing the crimes and criminals of the past. It’s hard to see any humor in someone like Hitler, I’ll grant you. But rather than always resorting to the censorious rhetoric of history’s high court, there’s something to be said for the occasional use of ironic understatement. Hitler’s problem, one of my mentors once wryly remarked, was that he lacked flexibility and good will.

The other form of subjectivity that often creeps into our scholarship is the redemption narrative, which is equally at odds with amusement. We’ve all taken too much to heart E. P. Thompson’s famous injunction that we must rescue our subjects from the condescension of history. Maybe, just maybe, a little condescension is in order. After all, what’s the point of having the benefit of hindsight if we can’t condescend to those who lacked our privileged position toward the past? A lot of humor—parody, caricature, farce, satire—actually hinges on condescension. It’s what makes poor Rigby’s plight funny. Unfortunately, it’s also why we so often leave stories like his on the cutting-room floor of our scholarship.

The question I’ve been asking myself of late is whether there isn’t some way to bring stories of this sort back into our histories, or, to put it more precisely, to rethink the way we write our histories in light of these stories. The fact that I’m working on a book about British explorers in Africa and Australia may have made me more susceptible than usual to how preposterous the past can seem on occasion. I’ve found it increasingly difficult to take those oh-so-earnest, suicidally brave, self-deluded explorers entirely seriously. The great anthropologist Johannes Fabian got it right, I think, with the title of his book on German and Belgian explorers in Africa— Out of Our Minds . If we acknowledge that these men were indeed in some sense out of their minds, then the challenge is to write a history of exploration that is attentive to the ways it was a black comedy.

So how can we bring a bit of humor back into history? Not having actually accomplished this feat in my own work, I’m hardly one to offer advice to others. Nor am I aware of any especially compelling models to recommend. But a few observations seem obvious enough to offer up as points of departure for those daring souls who might be tempted to take up this call for comedy. First, start small. Let’s face it, if you try to knock the ball out of the park with your first at-bat, you’ll probably strike out. On the other hand, the occasional waggish aside or droll character sketch can work wonders, causing your reader to perk up and take notice. Second, don’t discount the mundane. Just as comedians’ best riffs often come from their everyday experiences, your most promising sources might seem commonplace or insignificant at first glance. To find the humor in this material is in turn to alert us to its significance, to tell us something illuminating about the human condition or, alternatively, about the past as a different and very strange place. Rigby’s anxieties reveal a bit of both. Finally, don’t try this until you have tenure! Some of your senior colleagues, alas, may not have a sense of humor.

The point, then, is this: just because the people we study tended to take themselves and their dilemmas seriously doesn’t mean we too always have to do the same. Wouldn’t it be refreshing to read a latter-day Macaulay, someone who wasn’t afraid to wield wit and satire when writing history?  True, it may be a tall order to expect another Macaulay any day soon. But at least the rest of us can lighten up a little.

Dane Kennedy is the Elmer Louis Kayser Professor of History at George Washington University. He is currently holding a resident fellowship at the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle, North Carolina. His publications include The Magic Mountains: Hill Stations and The British Raj and The Highly Civilized Man: Richard Burton and the Victorian World .

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Palmer, Marcus S. "History, humor, and introspection experiencing "Argentinidad" /." abstract and full text PDF (free order & download UNR users only), 2007. http://0-gateway.proquest.com.innopac.library.unr.edu/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:1442853.

Vanderford, Audrey L. "Political pranks : the performance of radical humor." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2000. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/11764.

Bouteneff, Peter. "The history, hagiography and humor of the fools for Christ." Theological Research Exchange Network (TREN) Access this title online, 1990. http://www.tren.com/search.cfm?p015-0201.

Chik, Pik Yuk. "Some correlates of children's humor." Monash University, Institute of Human Development and Counselling, 2001. http://arrow.monash.edu.au/hdl/1959.1/9144.

Pavam, Rosane Barguil. "O cineasta historiador: o humor frio no filme Sábado, de Ugo Giorgetti." Universidade de São Paulo, 2011. http://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/8/8138/tde-25052012-164144/.

Argent, William T. "Humor Recognition: A Comparative Analysis." PDXScholar, 1996. https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/open_access_etds/4955.

Martin, Ralph S. "Laughing Our Way To Revolution: A History and Analysis of African American Humor." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2013. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/599.

Johnson, Courtney C. "Nobody Else Was Laughing: Dani Levy's Use of Film Humor to Approach German History." Thesis, The University of Arizona, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/193365.

Bartholomew, Sherlene Hall. "An Annotated Bibliography of Literary Mormon Humor." Diss., CLICK HERE for online access, 1998. http://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/u?/MTAF,40619.

Heili, Benjamin J. "Humor and Cynicism in the German Democratic Republic." Bowling Green State University / OhioLINK, 2013. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1383309234.

Perego, Elizabeth Marie. "Laughing in the Face of Death: Humor during the Algerian Civil War, 1991-2002." The Ohio State University, 2017. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1492608880090522.

Vosloo, Jan 1934. "Die manifestering van humor in geselekteerde Afrikaanse kortverhaaltekste." Thesis, Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2003. http://hdl.handle.net/10019.1/53382.

Mullen, Emily. "Fighting against Indigenous Stereotypes and Invisibility| Gregg Deal's Use of Humor and Irony." Thesis, University of Colorado at Boulder, 2018. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=10793926.

Stereotypes of Indigenous peoples, formed according to Western notions of cultural hierarchy, as savage, exotic, and only existing in a distant past, are still prevalent in the popular imaginary. These stem from misunderstandings and misrepresentations of Indigenous peoples that developed after contact between Indigenous peoples and European settler communities, and exist in concepts such as the noble savage, the wild heathen, or the vanishing Indian. In this thesis I argue that contemporary artist Gregg Deal (Pyramid Lake Paiute) successfully challenges and disrupts such stereotypes by re-channeling their power and reappropriating them through his strategic use of humor and irony in performances, paintings, and murals. Through these tools, Deal is able to attract audiences, disarm them, and destabilize their assumptions about Indigenous peoples. I frame Deal’s use of humor and irony outside the trickster paradigm, drawing instead on Don Kelly’s (Ojibway) theorization of humor as a communicative tool for making difficult topics accessible, and Linda Hutcheon’s theorization of irony as a discursive strategy for simultaneously presenting and subverting something that is familiar.

In a second line of argument, I foreground Deal’s agency as an artist through analysis of his strategies to reach audiences and gain visibility for his art. Contemporary Indigenous artists are often excluded from mainstream art institutions, and can struggle to find venues to exhibit their work. I argue that Deal’s strategic use of public space and the internet to show and publicize his art is significant. It has helped him to reach audiences and gain recognition for his work. He now exhibits and performs in university and state museums. I argue that the authority of museum space, in turn, gives him a greater opportunity to disrupt stereotypes and educate people about misperceptions of Indigenous peoples.

Bond, Nathaniel Peter. "Lessons in Immorality: Mishima's Masterpiece of Humor and Social Satire." PDXScholar, 2013. https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/open_access_etds/988.

Espilotro, Tiago P. Ferro. "A moral da história: a produção humorística de Millôr Fernandes na revista Veja (1968-1982)." Universidade de São Paulo, 2015. http://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/8/8138/tde-14122015-115746/.

Pellegrini, Leonidas. "Album da Rapaziada : o humor obsceno de Francisco Moniz Barreto." [s.n.], 2008. http://repositorio.unicamp.br/jspui/handle/REPOSIP/270273.

Prussing-Hollowell, Andrea Shannon. "Standup comedy as artistic expression Lenny Bruce, the 1950s, and American humor/." unrestricted, 2007. http://etd.gsu.edu/theses/available/etd-04192007-125027/.

Barckett, Ashley. "Bumbling Biddies and Drunken Pats: Anti-Irish Humor in Antebellum New Orleans." ScholarWorks@UNO, 2008. http://scholarworks.uno.edu/td/865.

Verster, F. P. (Francois Philippus). "'n Kultuurhistoriese ontleding van pikturale humor, met besondere verwysing na die werk van T.O. Honiball." Thesis, Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2003. http://hdl.handle.net/10019.1/53521.

Boswell, Brian T. "From scat to satire toward a taxonomy of humor in twentieth century American media /." Muncie, Ind. : Ball State University, 2009. http://cardinalscholar.bsu.edu/637.

André, José Carlos Mendes. "Quem não chora não mama! Panorama do design gráfico brasileiro através do humor 1837-1931." Universidade de São Paulo, 2010. http://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/16/16133/tde-04102010-100708/.

Mironenko, Dmitry. "A Jester with Chameleon Faces: Laughter and Comedy in North Korea, 1953-1969." Thesis, Harvard University, 2014. http://dissertations.umi.com/gsas.harvard:11604.

Swanson, Michael David. ""The Vehicle of Delight and Morality": Humor and Sentiment in the Plays of John O'Keeffe as a Reflection of Late Eighteenth-Century English Theatrical Comedy." The Ohio State University, 1991. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1382014382.

Balisch, Loretta Faith. "Scrub growth, Canadian humour to 1912, an exploration." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1994. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk3/ftp04/NQ36198.pdf.

Cunha, Fabiana Lopes da. "Caricaturas carnavalescas: carnaval e humor no Rio de Janeiro através da ótica das revistas ilustradas Fon-Fon! e Careta (1908-1921)." Universidade de São Paulo, 2008. http://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/8/8138/tde-08072008-145100/.

Waters, Leah E. "The Persuasive Power of Ridicule: A Critical Rhetorical Analysis of Gender and Humor in U.S. Sitcoms." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2017. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc984248/.

Moore, Emily R. "Shocco Jones, "A North Carolinian of the Olden Times," "Distinguished... Son of Rip Van Winkle," and "Veritable Hoarder of Fun": A Nineteenth-Century Southern Gentleman's Sense of Identity, History, Honor, and Humor." W&M ScholarWorks, 2015. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd/1539720305.

Silva, Rogério Souza. "Modernidade em desalinho: costumes, cotidiano e linguagens na obra humorística de Raul Pederneiras (1898-1936)." Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo, 2014. https://tede2.pucsp.br/handle/handle/12840.

Lucas, Anne M. "Strategic Nonviolence and Humor: Their Synergy and Its Limitations: A Case Study of Nonviolent Struggle led by Serbia’s Otpor ." Kent State University Honors College / OhioLINK, 2010. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ksuhonors1292889981.

André, José Carlos Mendes. "Elementos para uma leitura da obra de Aparício Torelly, o Barão de Itararé: humor, projeto & design gráfico." Universidade de São Paulo, 2004. http://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/16/16131/tde-06052010-113840/.

Karlén, Jessica. "Skrattets makt : En filosofisk undersökning av komiken som meningsskapande existentiell nödvändighet." Thesis, Södertörns högskola, Institutionen för kultur och lärande, 2019. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:sh:diva-40027.

Aston, Richard Michael. "The role of the fool and the carnivalesque in post-1945 German prose fiction on the Third Reich." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2005. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:10b3780b-66bd-4467-849f-8648ec969c55.

Moreira, Cíntia Brunetta. "A geração do humor no conto "No Kaddish for Weinstein" de Woody Allen : scripts semânticos e construção identitária." reponame:Repositório Institucional da UCS, 2014. https://repositorio.ucs.br/handle/11338/919.

Bush, Lawrence Ray. "More than Words: Rhetorical Devices in American Political Cartoons." Scholar Commons, 2012. http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/3924.

Webb, Joel C. "Drawing Defeat: Caricaturing War, Race, and Gender in Fin de Siglo Spain." Amherst, Mass. : University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2009. http://scholarworks.umass.edu/theses/283/.

Augusto, José Carlos. "Um provinciano na corte: as aventuras de \'Nhô-Quim\' e a sociedade do Rio de Janeiro nos anos 1860-1870." Universidade de São Paulo, 2008. http://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/8/8138/tde-30032009-144332/.

Schein, Marie-Madeleine. "The Evolution of Survival as Theme in Contemporary Native American Literature: from Alienation to Laughter." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1994. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc278840/.

Magnani, Elena. "It Happened One Decade: An Analysis of Screwball Comedy's Humour through its History, Characteristics and Masterpieces: It Happened One Night, The Philadelphia Story and Bringing Up Baby." Bachelor's thesis, Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna, 2019.

Borges, Augusto Cesar Mauricio. "A sátira política em O Pirralho: Juó Bananére e o Hermismo - 1911 a 1915." Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo, 2009. https://tede2.pucsp.br/handle/handle/13160.

Andrade, Arlete Fonseca de. "As estrambóticas aventuras de Cornélio Pires e a cultura caipira no cenário hegemônico da cultura brasileira." Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo, 2012. http://tede2.pucsp.br/handle/handle/2343.

Sands, Zachary Adam. "Film Comedy and the American Dream." Bowling Green State University / OhioLINK, 2017. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1483612711940071.

Bianchi, Alessandro. "Their swords were brushes : instances of political satire in eighteenth-century Japan." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2015. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.709168.

Ohali, Avigail. "Le rire des sages : l'humour dans la Mishna et la Tosefta." Thesis, Sorbonne Paris Cité, 2017. http://www.theses.fr/2017USPCA082.

Jakobsson, Gunilla. "Skratt till förändring : gyckel och dårskap i kristendomens historia: uppsats med exempel ur medeltida gycklartradition." Thesis, University of Gävle, Ämnesavdelningen för religionsvetenskap, 2005. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:hig:diva-3600.

Syftet med denna uppsats är att beskriva skrattets, humorns och komikens roll inom religionen i allmänhet och kristendomen i synnerhet.

Min frågeställning är : Har skratt, humor och komik påverkat och förändrat förhållanden inom religionen, tron, kyrkan? Har skrattet påverkat det bestående, den regerande uppfattningen som förfäktades av dem som innehade makten inom samhälle och kyrka?

Min tes är att skratt och humor tillsammans med många andra fysiska och kroppsliga uttryck har en viktig roll i att budskapet tolkas rätt och rättvist.

För att uppnå detta syfte vill jag

• ge en bakgrund där jag beskriver några teorier om skrattets och humorns väsen och funktion med särskild fokus på förändring och påverkan.
• beskriva ett antal exempel ur kyrkohistorien som beskriver hur humor, ironi och gyckel använts dels för att tydligare förmedla budskapet och dels för att visa på hur makt och överhet förvanskat detta budskap. Exemplen är valda utifrån att det kan tas för troligt att de har påverkat sin samtids utveckling.

Utifrån frågeställningen om förändring av rådande förhållanden i sin tid har jag valt

• att återge i referatform samt analysera fyra gycklarspel från medeltiden, sammanställda av Dario Fo, där gycklet i komik och allvar verkade förändrande i sin ursprungsmiljö men också skulle kunna påverka och förändra i vår tid.

Ferguson, Kelly K. "What Are You Going to Do with the Rest of Your Life?" Ohio University / OhioLINK, 2014. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1396604400.

Ghazvinian, John H. "'A certain tickling humour' : English travellers, 1560-1660." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2003. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:92106603-8325-4eab-a2bb-a1f1808c0437.

Koehle, Natalie. "Phlegm (Tan 痰): Toward a History of Humors in Early Chinese Medicine." Thesis, Harvard University, 2016. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:26718766.

Davison, Kate. "Ned Ward and a social history of humour in early eighteenth-century England." Thesis, University of Sheffield, 2016. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/13457/.

Alvsten, Per, and Lucas Lindahl. "Didaktik och humor i ett epistemologiskt perspektiv (En epistemologisk undersökning kring möjligheten av ett teoretiskt utrymme för humor visavi didaktik)." Thesis, Malmö högskola, Fakulteten för lärande och samhälle (LS), 2016. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:mau:diva-31489.

Petry, Michele Bete. "Entre desenhos, aquarelas e expressões gráficas de humor." Florianópolis, SC, 2011. http://repositorio.ufsc.br/xmlui/handle/123456789/94832.

Cool History Topics: 151 Great Historical Events & Ideas

History is one of the most fascinating and influential fields of study. It’s not merely a narration of the events of the past but a constant search for answers. It’s a re-examination of our human experience and understanding of how far we have come.

There are thousands of interesting history topics that a student can write an essay about. From ancient tribes to the modern world issues, there are plenty of things to explore. However, you might still find it challenging to work on your history project, presentation, or research paper.

There are a few reasons why:

First of all, there are too many choices to pick one. Secondly, when it comes to history, saying something new and genuinely original is tough. A lot of people try to find a research topic that will be fun to write about. You can feel as if all the ideas were already examined.

This is why our team has come together to provide you with this list of cool history topics to write about. Find some unique and fresh ideas on our page!

For some students, picking a popular topic in history is not enough. They want something unique and cool. If you are one of these students, this list can give you some fresh ideas on cool history topics to write about.

• ✨ Top Interesting Topics
• 😎 What Idea is Cool?
• 🥇 Important Events
• 📌 10 Cool Events
• ✨ Popular Topics
• 💡 American History
• 🌍 World History
• 🏺 Ancient History

✨ 15 Interesting History Topics

• World Wonders.
• Chernobyl Disaster.
• Ancient Egypt.
• The Cold War.
• The Red Scare.
• The Holocaust.
• Edo Period.
• Famous Italian Painters.
• The Civil War.
• The 20 th Century.
• Thirty Years’ War.
• South African Apartheid.
• Modern World History.
• Eiffel Tower.
• The Great Depression.

😎 What Is a Cool History Topic?

You may still wonder whether the topic you chose to talk about is cool enough. Well, you can ask people around you to determine. Don’t settle for a random history topic. Make sure it is worth your time.

Talk to your friends, your family, and people you know. Question them about the most important event in world history. It is a good topic to talk about with your friends and learn about exciting events in history. Another great option would be looking up free college essays collected in a samples database. They usually cover a variety of topics and include numerous paper types.

If you don’t have time, this list will give you ideas about some cool history topics to write about. Consider the options, pick the most engaging one, and start your paper.

🥇 Most Important Historical Events

Selecting one of the events that changed the world is a daunting task for anyone. You might ask, with everything that has happened in the past 5000 years, how can you choose what was the most important?

Here is our list of the most important historical events ever:

• Alexander the Great: the political and cultural impact of Alexander the Great’s Conquest . Alexander the Great was one of the most influential kings of the ancient world. In the essay about his political and cultural impact, talk about his military campaigns. How did he, by the age of 30, create one of the biggest Empires in the world? Allow the readers to see how big and powerful the empire was. Elaborate on the legacy that Alexander the Great left after his death.
• The Factors that contributed to the dissolution of the Roman Empire . Historians agree on several factors that contributed to it. At the beginning of the essay, identify them. You can also decide to focus on several factors that seem the most important.
• Islam and Christianity Impact on the Middle Ages
• Nudity in the paintings of the Italian Renaissance
• Leonardo Da Vinci: Artist, Scientist, Inventor . An essay about this person is destined to be intriguing. Leonardo Da Vinci was one of the most captivating figures in the history of humankind. Just imagine: he was an artist, a scientist, and an inventor at the same time. You can pick several most important paintings to talk about. How about The Mona Lisa or The Last Supper?
• Could World War II be prevented?
• How will historians remember the 2010s?
• Heroes after the Middle Ages
• Impact of the Black Death: the greatest population disaster
• American family’s changes since the 20th century
• Racism and Education in the United States . In this essay, students should focus on the history of discrimination in the United States. You can talk about Brown versus The Board of Education but try to go a bit further. Think about disproportionate funding in the public education sector. See if there is a connection with the minorities. Where do they live and go to school?
• Was there a need to drop the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
• The Fall of Constantinople – the greatest capital in the world. Your tutor will most probably expect you to write about the greatness of the city. But this essay topic should focus on the fall of it. Talk about the last decades of the city and about the most important factors that contributed to the fall of it.
• What were the effects of Gutenberg’s Printing Press? The printing revolutions started after Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press. It’s another transformational event in world history. It was crucial in the development of the Renaissance, Reformation, and the Age of Enlightenment. This topic has a lot of things you can talk about.
• The Ideology of Colonialism
• Paradoxicality of Christianity and Slavery. Not many people know, but Christian slaveholders used religion to justify slavery. They usually picked up verses from the book of Genesis and interpreted them in the manner that served their needs. Sometimes they used the New Testament to justify slavery. You could compare the attitude early Christians had towards slaves and how it changed.
• The scar of colonialism and the presence of post-colonialism
• Impact of the American revolution on women. Women played an integral part during the revolution. Depending on their social status, their involvement varied. They affected the revolution a lot, but also the revolution had a great impact on them. Women did not have any political voice in Colonial America. So, see how it changed after the American Revolution was over.

• The Rise and Fall of Napoleon
• Culture, work, and social change after the Industrial Revolution
• Why was the Declaration of Independence written?
• French Revolution: why Marie Antoinette lost her head?
• The importance of the Berlin Wall in the Cold War
• Communism Collapse in the USSR . Write about what caused the collapse of the Soviet Union. Discuss Gorbachev’s decision to democratize the Soviet Union and how people reacted to it. Write about the impact that the collapse of the Soviet Union had around the world.

📌 10 Cool Events in History to Write About

• The Apollo 11 Landing – 1969.
• Formation of the UN – 1945.
• The Suffrage Movement – 1847-1920.
• The American Revolution – 1775-1783.
• Fall of the Wall – 1989.
• The Gunpowder Plot – 1605.
• Discover of DNA – 1860s.
• 20th Century Space Race – 1955-1975.
• The Trojan War – 12th Century BCE.
• The Renaissance – 15th-16th Century.

✨ Most Popular History Topics

This list is great if those who want to pick one of the famous topics in history. The selected ideas have a great depth to them. They are relevant and will be excellent to write about. You will be able to find information in history encyclopedias, journals, articles, and podcasts.

Moreover, your classmates and teacher will like your research too. Here’s our list of popular history essay topic:

• The Industrial Revolution and how did it change England
• The Civil Rights Movement in the United States . Elaborate on the political climate before the civil rights movements. Discuss the events that triggered it in the United States. What was the movement able to achieve? If you choose this essay topic, be ready to have a strong opinion about it.
• Martin Luther King: the life and death. Another idea that, in a way, relates to the civil rights movement essay topic. It’s impossible to explore race relationships without talking about Martin Luther King. He was a bright and influential individual. For sure, this essay topic is among the most popular ones.
• The autobiography of Malcolm X
• French Revolution and the Napoleonic Era
• Causes of the 1812 war . Write about the immediate causes and the remote causes of the 1812 war. You can also talk about the groups that opposed the war and the groups that supported it.
• Why did William win the battle of Hastings?
• Mongol’s Conquest Causes, Battles, and Results
• Music and paintings during the Renaissance in Italy
• Compare British and American slavery. Examine the differences and similarities between British and American slavery. For a very long time, historians believed that the Southern type of slavery was harsher. Think about it and examine the evidence that you have. You can use slave diaries and the novels they wrote about their experiences.
• Dehumanizing psychology of slavery: does it still exist?
• Transatlantic Slave Trade: from West Africa to the Americas
• African-American cultural identity
• The history of Buddhism
• The lasting impact of Karl Marx’s works. Karl Marx was not a politician, nor he ever considered implementing his ideas. However, not that long after his death, his works were picked up. They were interpreted and revolutionized. This is a great essay topic for everyone who is looking for an engaging theme to write about.

• The history of math
• The fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of feudalism
• When did Pearl Harbor become a naval base?
• Economic Recession in the United States in the 2000s
• Mental Illness in America: Nellie Bly, Kate Chopin, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman
• Canadian history through sports. Canada is all about sports. In this essay, write about how the image of Canada was continuously shaped by sports victories. It’s a fascinating and cool topic to explore.
• The space race during the Cold War
• Positive and Negative Effects of the Cold War. The Cold War was a different type of conflict. While it created a lot of calamity and negativity, there were some positive sides to it as well. Talk about those effects. For instance, focus on political stability, or economic growth, or the space race.
• The history of aviation
• Post-Civil war reconstruction in American history
• The role of Capitalism and the life of workers
• Arab-Israeli conflict

🔥 Top 76 Coolest History Topics

If you are looking for the coolest history topic, you are in the right place. Find a title that interests you personally and start writing. Be sure the process of writing won’t be tedious. Instead, it should make you curious about more historical events of the past.

We combined this list of topics to help you get inspired.

💡 Cool American History Topics

• How did the Civil War affect the distribution of wealth in the United States?
• The 1992 Los Angeles Riots
• African Communities in America . African Communities in America have a long history. It’s full of discrimination, slavery, the oppression. Despite all of that, African communities in the United States are among the fastest-growing.
• Condition of Women and Minorities During the War
• The first wave of immigration to the United States
• Racism and segregation in the US
• The first civilizations of the Native Americans
• Did Barack Obama change America? Barack Obama was the first African American President in the United States. Look at the political reforms, foreign and immigration policies implemented during his presidency. Then, try to answer this question for yourself.
• A bill of rights and an amendment
• The origins of automobile drag racing in the U.S.

• How did the highway system change US culture? America has one of the best highways in the world. All thanks to the 1921 Federal-Aid Highway Act and 1956 Federal-Aid Highway Acts. They led to a highway system to become faster and even more efficient. It allowed America to be interconnected. Talk about the effects it had on economic, political, cultural life.
• Events after the Pearl Harbor invasion
• The American red and blue state divide . Every single state had both conservative and liberal voters. However, since the 2000 United States Presidential elections, blue and red states were referred. The respective voters predominantly choose the Democratic party or the Republican party. In this essay, write about this divide. Talk about the differences between both groups of voters.
• The development of clinical psychology in America
• The founders of clinical psychology in the United States. In this essay, talk about the founders of clinical psychology in the United States. Discuss what is clinical psychology and what makes it different from general psychology. Explore how this field evolved in the world and how it started in the United States.
• African American soldiers during the Vietnam War
• Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War
• How did the media shape Americans’ perceptions of the Vietnam War?
• Native American Weaponry
• History of American Stock Market
• How did the Great Depression end?

🌍 Cool World History Topics

• How Capitalism beat Communism
• The Cold war and its consequences for the world
• How Genghis Khan conquered Persia
• How Aborigines made Australia
• The history of the Mayan Civilization
• How did women’s rights in America change over the last century. In this essay, talk about how far women’s rights advanced in the previous century. Look at the 1920 and 2020 to see what actual steps were taken and what has been changed.

• The most important events in the history of the Ottoman Empire.
• Enlightening and Revolution: Europe and India
• Gender Inequality and Socio-Economic Development
• The Decolonization of Africa. The road to independence for African countries was paved with blood and tears. The decolonization of Africa is a period between 1950 and 1975. During this time, African countries fought for independence. Examine the external and internal causes. Elaborate on the economic and political effects of decolonization.
• The influences between Greece, Egypt, and Rome.
• Nuclear Arms Race between the US and the USSR
• Chairman Mao and the Great Chinese Revolution
• History of Modern South Africa. This beautiful Southern African nation had extremely upsetting pages in its modern history. From nationalism to apartheid, terrorism, and racial segregation and oppression. Nowadays, South Africa is among one of the strongest economies in Africa. In this essay topic, you have a lot to talk about.
• The importance of teaching boys and girls about gender equality
• The social psychology of gender inequality
• Women in World War II
• China in Revolution
• History of Jews and the Holocaust
• European Image of the African 1400-1600
• American and French Revolution
• What happened at the Nuremberg trials? Talk about the Nuremberg trials and what is the importance of it. Gladly, we have the trials recorded, so you can just see it for yourself.
• History of the Cuban Missile Crisis. This moment during the Cold War is crucial. The confrontation is considered the closest the Cold War came to escalating into a nuclear war. Comment on the blockade, the international response. How did the crisis end? What effect did this event have for the people of Cuba?
• The European Union and the European crisis
• East versus West
• Totalitarian regimes in Germany and USSR

🏺 Cool Ancient History Topics

• Mesopotamian influence on the Oman Peninsula
• Why were the pyramids built? This essay will be fun to write about. Who isn’t intrigued by the Egyptian pyramids? There are plenty of legends, stories, and myths that surround the architectural monuments. We suggest you look into the facts. Make your arguments based on proven historical findings and evidence.
• The kings of Ancient Egypt
• Alexander the Great’s Reign
• Fall of the Ancient Roman Empire. The fall of the Ancient Roman Empire, without any doubt, is one of the most important historical topics. Explore how gradual the process of decline was. Discuss the military, political, and financial reasons for the fall.
• The culture of Ancient Greece
• Race in Ancient Egypt
• Religion in Ancient Greece
• The government organization of Ancient Rome
• Life of Julius Caesar. Julius Caesar wasn’t only an Emperor. He was a writer, philosopher, and historian. In this essay, talk about military victories of the Roman leader. Explore his influence on the rise of the Roman empire and the demise of the Roman Republic.
• Agricultural aspects of ancient Egypt
• Social issues of ancient Egyptians
• History of Athenian democracy
• Factors that influenced the development of human civilizations
• The military forces of the Roman Empire
• Famous scholars of Ancient Greece. Some of the most influential and prominent philosophers of all time were from Ancient Greece. Socrates, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, and many others. Don’t try to write about each one of them. Instead, elaborate on the position the poets and the philosophers had in the Ancient Greek Society.
• Evolution of Greek Acropolis

• The societies of Ancient Mesoamerica
• Romans and Barbarians: the decline of the Roman Empire
• The daily life of the ancient Maya
• Maya, Aztec, and Inca collapse
• Civilization in Mesopotamia and Egypt
• Historical analysis of Sparta and its pop-culture depiction. Do you have a favorite movie or a book about Sparta? Compare the depiction with historical facts. Write about the differences and similarities between these two representations. Think about why it is so frequently used in pop culture.
• Hunting and gathering societies in the Americas
• The fall of Pompeii. Pompeii was an ancient city buried under the ashes left after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Due to this sudden event, historians can examine the life of the people of Pompeii. It remained almost untouched. Several historians recorded first-hand accounts of Mount Vesuvius’ eruption. Read them to have a vivid picture of what was going on in the city before the tragedy.
• The battle of Pharsalus
• The Western Roman Empire: the significance of its collapse
• The Great Wall of China: cultural and historical analysis

Being able to select your essay topic can seem like a lot of fun at the beginning. However, it is also a big responsibility and a challenge at times. Hopefully, one of these essay topics will help you with the ideas for your essay.

Thank you for reading it, and the best of luck with your assignment! Leave a comment below and share the article with those who may need it.

🔗 References

• The 10 Most Important Moments and Events in History: Rebecca Graf for Owlcation
• Psychology Research Paper Topics, 50+ Great Ideas: Kendra Cherry for Verywell Mind
• Historical Topics: In-Depth Articles from HistoryExtra
• History Topics: National Women’s History Museum
• Hot Topics in World History: World History Center, University of Pittsburgh
• World History Topic: Newspapers.com
• Effective Writing: Grammar Rules
• Cliché, Examples and Definition of Cliché: Literary Devices
• Writing Guides: Colorado State University
• What Good Writers Know: Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning
• Resources: University of Alberta
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5 Super Fun History Project Ideas: Bring the Past to Life with Creativity

Uncovering the Past with Creativity and Fun for Curious Learners

History is awesome! By adding creativity and incorporating art into your history lessons, teachers can engage and inspire their students to get excited about the past. In this article, we'll share five super fun history project ideas that you can use in your classroom to bring the past to life with creativity:

Medieval European Society and the Coat of Arms

Explore the origins, development and significance of the coat of arms in medieval times and how it played a vital role in shaping the identity and legacy of early medieval European society, particularly the noble class.

Lesson suggestion:

• Research: Students will learn what coat of arms are and what symbols they can have. They will understand that coat of arms were used in medieval times to show who a person was and what family they belonged to.
• Analysis: Students will learn about how people in medieval Europe used coat of arms and why it was necessary. They will know that different colours and symbols on a coat of arms have different meanings.
• Creation: Students will create their own coat of arms by choosing symbols and colors representing themselves. They can also create a coat of arms for their family.
• Presentation: Students will present their coat of arms to the class, explaining what their symbols and colours represent.
• Reflection: Students will think about what they have learned about medieval times and coat of arms, and how people today use symbols to represent themselves.

This project is meant to give a general idea on how the subject of coat of arms can be introduced to elementary students, but as every class is different, the teacher might want to adjust it to the level and interest of the students.

Incorporate art and creativity into this history project idea by using our creative printable worksheet below:

History of Time Keeping, Clocks and Watches

The history of timekeeping is intriguing for various reasons—particularly the progression of timekeeping devices and the advancement of technology and precision throughout the centuries.

• Research: Students will learn how people have measured time throughout history, such as through sundials and clocks. They will also understand how time has been used in different cultures and historical periods.
• Analysis: Students can explore how people use timekeeping devices in their daily lives and how people use the concept of time in their daily activities, such as scheduling, planning, and punctuality.
• Creation: Students can design a clock or watch representing a specific historical period or cultural style
• Presentation: Students will present their clock or watch to the class and explain what they have learned about timekeeping.
• Reflection: Students will think about how knowing how to tell time is important in their daily lives and why it is essential to measure time.

The History of the US Postal Service

Throughout its history, the US Postal Service has played an essential role in the expansion and development of a young United States by connecting people and businesses across the country and helping to bind the nation together.

• Research: Students will learn about the history of the Postal Service in the United States, such as when it started, key figures and milestones, and how its role has changed over time.
• Analysis: Students will learn how the Postal Service helps people and businesses communicate and send things to each other. They will learn about the different types of mail that can be sent, and how mail is sorted and delivered.
• Exploration: Students will learn about new technology and how it has changed how we send mail today, such as email and online messaging. They will explore new ways of communicating and sending things in today.
• Creation: Students will create a picture or a craft that represents the future of the US Postal Service and what it will do.
• Presentation: Students will present their creations to the class and explain what they have learned about the Postal Service.
• Reflection: Students will explore the role of the Postal service in their own lives and how it continues to be important in the modern era.

Incorporate art and creativity into this history project idea by using our creative printable worksheet to tie up your project with an activity involving a reimagining of the US Postal Service:

History of Chinese Ceramics and the Ming Period

The history of Chinese porcelain is rich and varied. This ancient craft stretches back thousands of years. One of the most significant and notable periods in Chinese porcelain was the Ming dynasty, which ruled China from 1368 to 1644.

• Research: Students will learn about Chinese ceramics, what they are and how they were made. They will learn about the different types of Chinese ceramics and the patterns, colours and designs that are used.
• Analysis: Students will learn about how Chinese ceramics have changed over time. They will also explore why ceramics were important in the past for people in China.
• Creation: Students will create and design their own ceramics inspired by the Chinese ceramics from the Ming period.
• Presentation: Students will present their ceramic designs to the class and explain what they have learned about Chinese ceramics from the Ming period.
• Reflection: Students will think about how Chinese ceramics have changed over time, how they were used in ancient China, and also how different cultures have different ceramics.

Ancient Egypt: Famous Sites, People and Icons

Ancient Egypt is one of history's most iconic and fascinating ancient civilizations. Its hieroglyphs, mummies, and impressive monumental architecture have captured the imagination of people for centuries and continue to be a source of fascination and study for historians, archaeologists, and the general public alike.

• Research: Students will learn about ancient Egypt, and some of its most famous landmarks, such as the pyramids and the sphinx. They will also learn about some famous people from ancient Egypt, such as the pharaohs, and some symbols and art such as hieroglyphs.
• Analysis: Students will learn about how ancient Egyptians lived and how they built their famous landmarks. They will also learn about some of the most famous pharaohs and their accomplishments.
• Creation: Students can draw famous sites, people, or symbols from ancient Egypt and understand the symbolism and meaning behind different elements in these artworks.
• Presentation: Students will show their illustrations to the class and explain what they have learned about ancient Egypt and its famous sites, people, and symbols.
• Reflection: Students will think about how the ancient Egyptians built the famous landmarks and discuss which the landmarks, people and icons today will last a thousand years.

The five super fun history project ideas shared in this article are just a starting point and can be adapted and expanded upon to suit the needs and interests of your students. By making history come to life, we can help students develop a love for learning and an understanding of how the past shapes the world we live in today.

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PBL and Genius Hour Supplement Printable Bundle (K-3) - 2023 Edition

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The 10 Most Ridiculous Scientific Studies

I mportant news from the world of science: if you happen to suffer a traumatic brain injury, don’t be surprised if you experience headaches as a result. In other breakthrough findings: knee surgery may interfere with your jogging, alcohol has been found to relax people at parties, and there are multiple causes of death in very old people. Write the Nobel speeches, people, because someone’s going to Oslo!

Okay, maybe not. Still, every one of those not-exactly jaw-dropping studies is entirely real—funded, peer-reviewed, published, the works. And they’re not alone. Here—with their press release headlines unchanged—are the ten best from from science’s recent annals of “duh.”

Study shows beneficial effect of electric fans in extreme heat and humidity: You know that space heater you’ve been firing up every time the temperature climbs above 90º in August? Turns out you’ve been going about it all wrong. If you don’t have air conditioning, it seems that “fans” (which move “air” with the help of a cunning arrangement of rotating “blades”) can actually make you feel cooler. That, at least, was the news from a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) last February. Still to come: “Why Snow-Blower Use Declines in July.”

Study shows benefit of higher quality screening colonoscopies: Don’t you just hate those low-quality colonoscopies? You know, the ones when the doctor looks at your ears, checks your throat and pronounces, “That’s one fine colon you’ve got there, friend”? Now there’s a better way to go about things, according to JAMA, and that’s to be sure to have timely, high quality screenings instead. That may be bad news for “Colon Bob, Your $5 Colonoscopy Man,” but it’s good news for the rest of us.

Holding on to the blues: Depressed individuals may fail to decrease sadness: This one apparently came as news to the folks at the Association for Psychological Science and they’ve got the body of work to stand behind their findings. They’re surely the same scientists who discovered that short people often fail to increase inches, grouchy people don’t have enough niceness and folks who wear dentures have done a terrible job of hanging onto their teeth. The depression findings in particular are good news, pointing to exciting new treatments based on the venerable “Turn that frown upside down” method.

Quitting smoking after heart attack reduces chest pain, improves quality of life: Looks like you can say goodbye to those friendly intensive care units that used hand out packs of Luckies to post-op patients hankering for a smoke. Don’t blame the hospitals though, blame those buzz-kills folks at the American Heart Association who are responsible for this no-fun finding. Next in the nanny-state crosshairs: the Krispy Kreme booth at the diabetes clinic.

Older workers bring valuable knowledge to the job: Sure they bring other things too: incomprehensible jokes, sensible shoes, the last working Walkman in captivity. But according to a study in the Journal of Applied Psychology , they also bring what the investigators call “crystallized knowledge,” which comes from “knowledge born of experience.” So yes, the old folks in your office say corny things like “Show up on time,” “Do an honest day’s work,” and “You know that plan you’ve got to sell billions of dollars worth of unsecured mortgages, bundle them together, chop them all up and sell them to investors? Don’t do that.” But it doesn’t hurt to humor them. They really are adorable sometimes.

Being homeless is bad for your health: Granted, there’s the fresh air, the lean diet, the vigorous exercise (no sitting in front of the TV for you!) But living on the street is not the picnic it seems. Studies like the one in the Journal of Health Psychology show it’s not just the absence of a fixed address that hurts, but the absence of luxuries like, say, walls and a roof. That’s especially true in winter—and spring, summer and fall too, follow-up studies have found. So quit your bragging, homeless people. You’re no healthier than the rest of us.

The more time a person lives under a democracy, the more likely she or he is to support democracy: It’s easy to fall for a charming strong-man—that waggish autocrat who promises you stability, order and no silly distractions like civil liberties and an open press. Soul-crushing annihilation of personal freedoms? Gimme’ some of that, big boy. So it came as a surprise that a study in Science found that when you give people even a single taste of the whole democracy thing, well, it’s like what they say about potato chips, you want to eat the whole bag. But hey, let’s keep this one secret. Nothing like a peevish dictator to mess up a weekend.

Statistical analysis reveals Mexican drug war increased homicide rates: That’s the thing about any war—the homicide part is kind of the whole point. Still, as a paper in The American Statistician showed, it’s always a good idea to crunch the numbers. So let’s run the equation: X – Y = Z, where X is the number of people who walked into the drug war alive, Y is the number who walked out and Z is, you know, the dead guys. Yep, looks like it adds up. (Don’t forget to show your work!)

Middle-aged congenital heart disease survivors may need special care: Sure, but they may not, too. Yes you could always baby them, like the American Heat Association recommends. But you know what they say: A middle-aged congenital heart disease survivor who gets special care is a lazy middle-aged congenital heart disease survivor. Heck, when I was a kid, our middle-aged congenital heart disease survivors worked for their care—and they thanked us for it too. This is not the America I knew.

Scientists Discover a Difference Between the Sexes: Somewhere, in the basement warrens of Northwestern University, dwell the scientists who made this discovery—androgynous beings, reproducing by cellular fission, they toiled in darkness, their light-sensitive eye spots needing only the barest illumination to see. Then one day they emerged blinking into the light, squinted about them and discovered that the surface creatures seemed to come in two distinct varieties. Intrigued, they wandered among them—then went to a kegger and haven’t been seen since. Spring break, man; what are you gonna’ do?

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Write to Jeffrey Kluger at [email protected]

30 of the Most Bizarre Research Paper Topics of All Time

For many postgraduate students, a Ph.D. thesis will be their magnum opus – the zenith of their academic achievement. And with such a significant amount of time and effort being invested, it’s important that study topics are chosen wisely. Hence, it’s comforting to know that the world of academic research is a far more inclusive, eclectic and remarkably unusual place than one might first assume. However left-field a particular subject might seem, there are almost certainly countless other research papers that wipe the floor with it in the weirdness stakes. Here are 30 of the very strangest.

30. Ovulation: A Lap Dancer’s Secret Weapon

To investigate the theory that estrus – the interval of amplified fertility and sexual awareness often referred to as “heat” in mammals – is no longer present in human females, researchers turned to an unlikely source: lap dancers. A team from the University of New Mexico led by evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller enlisted the help of 18 professional dancers. These dancers documented their ovulatory cycles, shift patterns and the amount of tips they received over the course of 60 days. Published in 2007 in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior , “Ovulatory cycle effects on tip earnings by lap dancers: economic evidence for human estrus?” noted a distinct correlation between estrus and greater income from gratuities, representing what the researchers called “the first direct economic evidence for the existence and importance of estrus in contemporary human females.”

29. Which Can Jump Higher, the Dog Flea or the Cat Flea?

Froghoppers aside, fleas are the overachieving long jumpers of the animal kingdom. Fleas have body lengths of between 0.06 and 0.13 inches but can leap horizontal distances more than a hundred times those figures. But were all fleas created equal in the jumping stakes? To find out which would triumph between the dog- and cat-dwelling varieties, researchers from the Ecole Nationale Vétérinaire de Toulouse , France meticulously recorded the leaping efforts of a collection of both species of flea. Published in 2000, the resulting paper, “A comparison of jump performances of the dog flea, Ctenocephalides canis , and the cat flea, Ctenocephalides felis felis ,” declared the dog flea the winner. Yes, the canine-inclined insect jumps both higher and further than its feline-partial opponent. In 2008 the research team scooped the Annals of Improbable Research ‘s Ig Nobel Prize in the biology category – the Ig Nobel Prizes being awards that recognize the feats of those who “make people laugh… and then think.”

28. On Ethicists and Theft

Death row pardons, lottery wins and rain on your wedding day – all (arguably non-ironic) subjects referenced by Alanis Morissette in her 1996 single “Ironic.” One topic that would probably merit inclusion – despite the research not being published until 2009 (in Philosophical Psychology ) – is the revelation that books on ethics are more liable to be absent from the shelves of university libraries than comparable books on other philosophical subjects. “Do Ethicists Steal More Books?” by University of California, Riverside professor of philosophy Eric Schwitzgebel revealed that the more recent, esoteric ethics books “of the sort likely to be borrowed mainly by professors and advanced students of philosophy” were “about 50 percent more likely to be missing” than their non-ethics counterparts. However, Professor Schwitzgebel believes this is a good thing, as “the demand that ethicists live as moral models would create distortive pressures on the field.”

27. Wet Underwear: Not Comfortable

Even babies know it: wet underwear is uncomfortable. Yet precisely why this is so is a question that went unanswered by hard science until 1994, when the journal Ergonomics published “Impact of wet underwear on thermoregulatory responses and thermal comfort in the cold.” The authors were Martha Kold Bakkevig of SINTEF Unimed in Trondheim, Norway and Ruth Nielson at Kongens Lyngby’s Technical University of Denmark . Bakkevig and Nielson had investigated “the significance of wet underwear” by monitoring the skin and intestinal warmth, as well as weight loss, of eight adult male subjects wearing wet or dry underwear in controlled cold conditions. Apart from the obvious “significant cooling effect of wet underwear on thermoregulatory responses and thermal comfort,” the research also discovered that the thickness of the underwear exerted a greater effect on these factors than the material used to make the garment. So now you know.

26. Do Woodpeckers Get Headaches?

In much the same way that we’d presume dragons don’t get sore throats, it would be a reasonable assumption that woodpeckers don’t suffer from headaches – but assumptions are a poor substitute for the authoritative grip of scientific fact. Published in 2002 in the British Journal of Ophthalmology , “Cure for a headache” came courtesy of Ivan Schwab, an ophthalmologist at the University of California, Davis . Schwab’s paper details the raft of physiological traits that woodpeckers have developed to avoid brain damage and bleeding or detached eyes when hammering their beaks into trees at up to 20 times a second, 12,000 times a day. In addition to a very broad but surprisingly squishy skull and sturdy jaw muscles, the woodpecker has a “relatively small” brain – which probably explains a lot.

25. Booty Calls: the Best of Both Worlds?

Compromise, according to U.S. poet and author Phyllis McGinley at least, is what “makes nations great and marriages happy.” It’s also the backbone of the booty call, if research published in 2009 is anything to go by. Appearing in The Journal of Sex Research , “The ‘booty call’: a compromise between men’s and women’s ideal mating strategies,” was written by researchers from the department of psychology at New Mexico State University . The study analyzed the booty-calling behavior of 61 students from the University of Texas at Austin . What’s more, it confirmed its central thesis that “the booty call may represent a compromise between the short-term sexual nature of men’s ideal relationships and the long-term commitment ideally favored by women.” Lead researcher Dr. Peter K. Jonason, now working at the University of Western Sydney , shared follow-up papers in 2011 and 2013, for The Journal of Sex Research and Archives of Sexual Behavior , respectively.

24. Mosquitoes Like Cheese

The mosquito is a formidable and destructive pest. And while it’s known that exhalation of carbon dioxide by its victims acts as a highly compelling invitation to dinner, other smelly signals have been less well documented. Published in The Lancet , Bart Knols’ 1996 research, “On human odor, malaria mosquitoes, and Limburger cheese,” changed that. The entomologist described how Anopheles gambiae , Africa’s most prolific malaria-spreading mosquito, exhibited a keen partiality for biting human feet and ankles. Crucially, the research also showed that these mosquitoes can be attracted to Limburger cheese, a stinky fromage that shares many characteristics with the whiff of human feet, offering potential use as a synthetic bait for traps. Interestingly, Knols is one of the few people to have won an Ig Nobel (for entomology in 2006) and a Nobel Peace Prize (shared in 2005 as part of the International Atomic Energy Agency).

23. Weighing Up Lead and Feathers

It doesn’t require a degree in physics – or philosophy – to understand that a pound of lead and a pound of feathers weigh the same. Yet the question of whether or not they feel the same is rather less straightforward. To examine this, researchers from the department of psychology at Illinois State University enlisted the help of 23 blindfolded volunteers, recording their perceptions of the weight of either a pound of lead or a pound of feathers contained within boxes of precisely the same shape and size. Published in 2007, the paper – “‘Which feels heavier – a pound of lead or a pound of feathers?’ A potential perceptual basis of a cognitive riddle” – discovered that participants rated the pound of lead as seeming weightier with an “above chance” frequency. The suggestion is that factors such as the “muscular forces” required to handle an object could also play a role in perceptions of weight.

22. Cat Food – Yummy?

Despite their notorious penchant for fully, or sometimes partially, dead rodents in their mouths, cats are surprisingly fussy eaters. What’s more, the pet food industry has found that kitties themselves represent unreliable and expensive test subjects in the pursuit of more appealing cat food flavors. Professor Gary Pickering of the department of biological sciences at Brock University in Ontario, Canada detailed a better option in 2009: the human palate. “Optimizing the sensory characteristics and acceptance of canned cat food: use of a human taste panel” describes the bizarre methodology for human tasters to “profile the flavour and texture of a range of cat food products” – including evaluating “meat chunk and gravy/gel constituents.” The impact of this on the number of job applications to the beer- and chocolate-tasting industries remains to be seen.

21. The Unhidden Dangers of Sword Swallowing

While “cat food taster” is unlikely to appear on anybody’s dream job list, at least that profession is unencumbered by the daily risk of serious injury. Sword swallowing, on the other hand, though occupying a similar position on the league table of tastiness, is a rather more hazardous occupation. In order to establish just how hazardous, radiologist Brian Witcombe and world champion sword swallower Dan Meyer analyzed the “technique and complications” of 46 members of the Sword Swallowers’ Association International. Published in 2009 in the British Medical Journal , their research, “Sword swallowing and its side effects,” found that performers had a heightened chance of injury when “distracted or adding embellishments” – as in the case of one unfortunate swallower who lacerated his throat after being disturbed by a “misbehaving macaw on his shoulder.” In 2007 Witcombe and Meyer together received the Ig Nobel Prize in medicine in view of the pair’s “penetrating medical report.”

20. Beer Bottle vs. Human Skull

Common weekend warrior tales would suggest that a beer bottle makes a good weapon in the event of a bar brawl. But would a full or an empty bottle inflict the most damage, and would that damage include fracturing a human skull? These important questions were answered in 2009 by a team of researchers from the University of Bern with their seminal paper, “Are full or empty beer bottles sturdier and does their fracture-threshold suffice to break the human skull?” Dr. Stephan Bolliger and his colleagues tested the breaking energy of full and empty beer bottles using a drop tower. Moreover, they discovered that a “full bottle will strike a target with almost 70 percent more energy than an empty bottle,” but that either is capable of breaking a human skull. Good to know. In a great twist of irony, Dr. Bolliger and co. picked up a 2009 Ig Nobel Prize in the “Peace” category.

19. The Propulsion Parameters of Penguin Poop

The titles of scientific research papers can sometimes be fairly impenetrable to the layman; other times they may take a more direct approach. Published in 2003, “Pressures produced when penguins pooh – calculations on avian defecation” certainly belongs to the latter category. The paper’s authors, Victor Benno Meyer-Rochow of the then International University Bremen (now Jacobs University Bremen ) and Eötvös Loránd University ‘s Jozsef Gal, decided to address the question of how much internal pressure penguins generate for poop-firing purposes. With knowledge of just a few parameters – including the thickness of and distance covered by the fecal matter – the researchers were able to calculate that the birds employed pressures of up to 60 kPa (kilopascal) to eject their bodily waste. The project was inspired by a blushing Japanese student who, during a lecture, asked Dr. Meyer-Rochow how the penguins “decorated” their nests.

18. Lady Gaga and Pop Art

Lady Gaga clearly sees herself as something of an artist: her third album is called Artpop , and last year she voiced her desire to “bring art culture into pop in a reverse Warholian expedition.” But does anyone else agree? In 2012 University of Cambridge student Amrou Al-Kadhi decided to write a few words – 10,000 to be precise – on the subject for his final year undergraduate dissertation. The paper, looking at Lady Gaga’s place in the history of pop art and her role as a voice of cultural criticism, initially encountered some resistance from the Cambridge history of art department. However, after several meetings, the provision of a barrage of YouTube links to Gaga videos such as “Telephone” (which apparently demonstrated her postmodern aesthetic) and “a bit of work,” permission for Al-Kadhi to undertake the research was granted.

17. Even Chickens Prefer Beautiful People

A 2002 research paper by Stefano Ghirlanda, Liselotte Jansson and Magnus Enquist at Stockholm University decided to make inroads into the question – most likely contemplated by very, very few people – of whether “Chickens prefer beautiful humans.” The study saw six chickens trained to “react to” images of an ordinary male or female face. They were then tested on a series of images ranging from the average face to a face with exaggerated male or female characteristics, and a group of 14 (human) students were given the same test. Perhaps surprisingly, the chickens “showed preferences for faces consistent with human sexual preferences.” The researchers claim this offers evidence for the hypothesis that human preferences stem not from “face-specific adaptations” but from “general properties of nervous systems” – perhaps overlooking the possibility that their human test group just had very unusual tastes.

16. Erase Bad Memories, Keep Good Ones

Painful, embarrassing, or traumatic memories have an annoying habit of accumulating over the course of an average lifetime. As Courtney Miller, assistant professor at the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute , puts it, “Our memories make us who we are, but some of these memories can make life very difficult.” With that in mind, Miller led a team of researchers to try and find out whether certain unwanted memories – specifically, drug-related ones – could be erased without damaging other memories. Published in 2013, “Selective, Retrieval-Independent Disruption of Methamphetamine-Associated Memory by Actin Depolymerization” found that, in mice at least, this kind of bespoke amnesia is entirely possible. How? By means of inhibiting the formation of a particular molecule in the brain. “The hope is,” said Miller, “that our strategies may be applicable to other harmful memories, such as those that perpetuate smoking or post-traumatic stress disorder.”

15. The Rectal Route to Curing Hiccups

When beset by a flurry of hiccups, a few minutes of putting up with the involuntary jolting is usually sufficient to get them to subside. However, other times they can become a far more unmanageable problem, beyond the healing scope of even the oldest of wives’ tales. In such situations there’s a surprising but highly effective cure. Published in 1990, “Termination of intractable hiccups with digital rectal massage” details the case of a 60-year-old patient whose seemingly non-stop hiccups were brought to an immediate halt by a massaging finger in the rectum. A second occurrence a few hours later was curbed in a similar fashion. The research from the Bnai Zion Medical Center in Israel notes that “no other recurrences were observed.” The inspiration for the report was Dr. Francis Fesmire, who penned a medical case report with the same title in 1988 and with whom the researchers shared an Ig Nobel in 2006. Fesmire passed away in 2014, and one fitting epitaph from an entertainment-oriented research magazine mused, “Dr. Fesmire found joy and fame by putting his finger on – nay, in – the pulse of his times.”

14. Can Pigeons Tell a Picasso From a Monet?

Theirs is a list dominated by flying, pecking and defecating, and pigeons can now add “appreciation of fine art” to their skill set. Published in 1995, “Pigeons’ discrimination of paintings by Monet and Picasso” came courtesy of Shigeru Watanabe, Junko Sakamoto and Masumi Wakita at Keio University in Japan. And sure enough, the paper presents evidence that pigeons are indeed able to distinguish between works by the two artists. The birds were trained to recognize pieces by either Monet or Picasso; and crucially they then demonstrated the ability to identify works by either creator that had not been shown to them during the training period. Not bad for rats with wings. Professor Watanabe – who went on to explore paddy birds’ appreciation of the spoken word – put the paper into context, saying, “This research does not deal with advanced artistic judgments, but it shows that pigeons are able to acquire the ability to judge beauty similar to that of humans.”

13. The Nature of Navel Lint

It’s a phenomenon that most people will be familiar with: small balls of lint accumulating in the belly button. Still, until fairly recently the mechanism behind this process lacked a satisfactory explanation from the realm of science. Fortunately, that all changed in 2009 when Georg Steinhauser, a chemist and researcher at the Vienna University of Technology , published a research paper entitled “The nature of navel fluff.” After gathering 503 samples of navel lint, Dr. Steinhauser concluded that the culprit behind this common occurrence is hair on the abdomen, which dislodges small fibers from clothing and channels them into the belly button. As the Austrian himself has pointed out, “The question of the nature of navel fluff seems to concern more people than one would think at first glance.”

12. The Effects of Cocaine on Bees

The effects of cocaine on human body movement can be observed in nightclubs the world over on just about any given weekend. And as it turns out, the tediously familiar overestimation of dancing prowess is not just limited to humans. In a 2009 paper entitled “Effects of cocaine on honey bee dance behavior,” a team of researchers led by Gene Robinson, entomology and neuroscience professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign , analyzed how honey bees are affected by low doses of cocaine. Honey bees are known to perform dances when they locate an abundant food source; and the team found that administering the drug prompted bees to circle about 25 percent quicker as well as dance more exuberantly and for longer. The bees also exaggerated the scale of their bounty. No surprise there then.

11. Fruit Bat Fellatio

Though its contents are difficult at first to make out, the grainy black and white image above actually depicts two bats engaged in some X-rated nocturnal activity. And that’s precisely the topic that a group of researchers from China and the U.K. chose to explore in their 2009 paper, “Fellatio by fruit bats prolongs copulation time.” The group looked at the copulatory behavior of the short-nosed fruit bat and observed that “females were not passive during copulation but performed oral sex.” More interestingly, the researchers also discovered that the longer the bats spent engaged in fellatio, the longer the copulation itself lasted – and that when fellatio was absent, pairs spent much less time mating.

10. The Possibility of Unicorns

It’s a question that has plagued the internet for decades: could unicorns really exist? The short answer, at least, is no. Still, King’s College London philosophy undergraduate Rachael Patterson decided to investigate whether a full dissertation on the more theoretical aspects of the subject would yield the same conclusion. Her paper, “The Possibility of Unicorns: Kripke v Dummett,” picks up on previous theses by British philosopher Michael Dummett and American logician and philosopher Saul Kripke. Why? In order to see if any more rainbow-hued light could be shed on this important question, of course. Reassuringly, perhaps, neither Kripke nor Dummett claim that these mythical creatures live in reality – although Dummett does posit the idea that in another world they might.

9. Does Country Music Make You Suicidal?

Country music is one of the most popular genres of music in the United States, with a huge audience that encompasses all age ranges. Yet given its recurrent themes of wedded disharmony and excessive drinking, Steven Stack of Wayne State University and Auburn University ‘s Jim Gundlach decided to probe whether country music might have an influence on municipal suicide rates in America. Published in 1992, their research paper, “The Effect of Country Music on Suicide,” actually discovered a strong link between the amount of country music radio airplay in any particular city and the suicide rate among the white population in that area. The reaction was mixed: Stack and Gundlach initially received hate mail, but in 2004 they won the Ig Nobel Prize for medicine.

8. Do Cabbies Have Bigger Brains?

The notoriously demanding exam that London’s black cab drivers must pass is called the “Knowledge” – and with good reason. Covering around 25,000 streets inside a six-mile radius of central London, the test generally requires three to four years of preparation and multiple attempts at the final exam before success is achieved. University College London neuroscientist Eleanor Maguire was inspired to take a closer look at this feat of memory after researching similar examples in the animal kingdom. Published in 2000, the resulting study, “Navigation-related structural change in the hippocampi of taxi drivers,” discovered that “cabbies” had physically larger posterior hippocampi – the areas of the brain responsible for spatial memory – than their non-cabbie counterparts. Professor Maguire’s follow-up study (with Dr. Katherine Woollett) in 2011 confirmed that trained cabbies were better at remembering London landmarks but not as good at recalling complex visual information compared to the unsuccessful trainees.

7. Shrews: To Chew or Not to Chew?

Ever felt so hungry that you could eat a horse? How about a shrew? While such scenarios are never likely to present themselves to the average person, scientists can be an altogether more experimental bunch. Take 1995 paper, “Human digestive effects on a micromammalian skeleton,” by Brian Crandall and Peter Stahl, anthropologists working at the State University of New York . Said paper investigated what would happen to a shrew – which was first skinned, disemboweled, parboiled and cut into segments – if it was swallowed, sans chewing, by a human. Interestingly, many of the rodent’s smaller bones “disappeared” on their transit through the human digestive system, while other portions of the skeleton showed “significant damage” despite the lack of chewing – a promising result to those studying human and animal remains. Following this peculiar paper, Brian Crandall became a science educator hoping to motivate future generations of (hungry) scientists.

6. Gay Dead Duck Sex

In 1935 Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger tried to highlight the absurdity of newly developed aspects of quantum theory. In his thought experiment, the strange quantum properties of a system are drawn on to suspend a hypothetical cat in a state of being simultaneously dead and alive. Sixty-six years later, a new piece of research saw the cat replaced by two ducks, in far less paradoxical though no less opposing states of life and death – but now with the crucial addition of gay sex. Published in 2001, “The first case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard Anas platyrhynchos” describes Kees Moeliker’s bizarre experience. The Dutch ornithologist witnessed a male duck administering a 75-minute raping of the corpse of another male duck, freshly deceased after flying into a window. More recently, Moeliker has presided over an annual commemorative event and public conversation on how to make sure birds stop flying into windows. The event’s name? Dead Duck Day.

5. Love and Sex With Robots

“Intimate Relationships With Artificial Partners” – ludicrous science fiction, or serious science fact? According to the paper’s author, and British International Master of chess, Daniel Levy, “It may sound a little weird, but it isn’t.” Levy earned a Ph.D. from Maastricht University for his thesis, which covered sociology, psychology, artificial intelligence and robotics, among other fields. He conjectured that human-robot love, marriage and even consummation are “inevitable” by 2050. Roboticist Ronald Arkin from Atlanta’s Georgia Institute of Technology points out, “Humans are very unusual creatures. If you ask me if every human will want to marry a robot, my answer is probably not. But will there be a subset of people? There are people ready right now to marry sex toys.”

4. A Better Approach to Penile Zipper Entrapment

Unfortunately, the horror injury that befalls Ben Stiller’s character Ted, in 1998’s There’s Something About Mary , often traverses the realm of fiction to bestow real-world agony upon boys and men who wish they’d opted for a button fly. A 2005 paper by Dr. Satish Chandra Mishra from Charak Palika Hospital in New Delhi, India looked at reported methods of intervention for this most unpleasant of problems and found that many common approaches either take too long or can actually make the circumstances worse. The researchers’ paper, “Safe and painless manipulation of penile zipper entrapment,” details instead a “quick, simple and non-traumatic” method using wire cutters and a pair of pliers – though “painless” does seem a highly ambitious adjective in this particular context.

3. Flatulence As Self-Defense

The idea of a correlation between fear and bodily emissions of one variety or another is not surprising, but a 1996 paper by author Mara Sidoli detailed a much more extreme example of this relationship. In “Farting as a defence against unspeakable dread,” Sidoli described the miserable tale of Peter, a “severely disturbed adopted latency boy” who endured a difficult and traumatic early life. Despite various setbacks in his later growth, Peter demonstrated “considerable innate resilience.” However, he also developed what Sidoli called a “defensive olfactive container,” using his flatulence “to envelop himself in a protective cloud of familiarity against the dread of falling apart, and to hold his personality together.” With such a vivid and prose-rich approach to scientific research, it should come as no surprise that SIdoli scooped the Ig Nobel for literature in 1998.

2. Harry Potter = Jesus Christ

Putting an end, once and for all, to the notion that literary theory sometimes lacks real-world application, “Jesus Potter Harry Christ” is a thesis by Ph.D. student Derek Murphy that looks at “the fascinating parallels between two of the world’s most popular literary characters.” What’s more, after successfully exceeding his Kickstarter funding goal of $888, Murphy’s thesis has been transformed into a commercially available book, published in 2011, which won the Next Gen Indie Book Award for Best Religious Non-Fiction that same year. Though the idea of analyzing the similarities between J.K. Rowling’s boy wizard creation and the Son of God might seem like a frivolous endeavor, Murphy – who is currently doing his Ph.D. at Taiwan’s National Cheng Kung University – assures his public that the book’s contents are “academic and heavily researched.” Now, where’s the fun in that?

1. Rectal Foreign Bodies

Published in the journal Surgery in 1986, “Rectal foreign bodies: case reports and a comprehensive review of the world’s literature” does exactly what it says on the tin. The research, by doctors David B. Busch and James R. Starling, based in Madison, Wisconsin, looked at two cases of patients with “apparently self-inserted” anal objects, as well as available documentation on the subject. Other factors taken into account included the patient’s age and history and the number and type of objects removed. The resulting list of 182 foreign bodies makes for an eye-watering read: of particular note are the dull knife (“patient complained of ‘knife-like pain'”) and the toolbox (“inside a convict; contained saws and other items usable in escape attempts”). The doctors’ paper was recognized for its literary value with an Ig Nobel Prize in 1995. One person’s pain is clearly another’s pleasure.

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• Family Healthy Weight Programs
• Public Health Strategy
• CDC-Recognized FHWPs

CORD 1.0 and 2.0 History

CDC's Childhood Obesity Research Demonstration (CORD) projects fund research about implementing evidence-based strategies for child obesity prevention and treatment. Their focus is children in families with lower incomes in diverse communities. CORD 1.0 was designed to improve child health through community settings that influence nutrition and physical activity. CORD 2.0 focused on Family Healthy Weight Programs that help children with overweight or obesity and their families.

The first CORD project from 2011 to 2015 focused on children from families with lower incomes. This project researched how to improve children's dietary and physical activity behaviors and ultimately reduce obesity among children from families with lower incomes.

CORD 1.0 was designed to cover various levels of the socioecological model . The projects combined efforts from pediatric health care settings with public health interventions in schools, early care and education centers, and communities.

CORD 1.0's three funded recipients worked in rural and urban communities in Texas, California, and Massachusetts. One evaluation center supported all the sites.

Building on research findings from CORD 1.0, CORD 2.0 funded two recipient research teams to focus on implementing the US Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) recommendations for child obesity in health care and community settings. Projects enhanced clinical-community collaborations to improve pediatric primary care obesity screening and, when appropriate, refer children with obesity to family healthy weight programs .

CORD 2.0 served children 6 to 12 years from families with lower incomes in Arizona and Massachusetts. CORD 2.0 recipients worked with state and community partners on issues such as access to and costs of family healthy weight programs. Researchers also identified program strengths and weaknesses from the perspective of providers, attendees, and other partners, including state Medicaid offices.

CORD 1.0 project summaries

Key findings.

CORD 1.0 researchers found that implementation of the USPSTF recommendation for obesity screening in children and adolescents and referral to intervention in the health care or community settings was feasible. They also found that:

• Parents were satisfied with the program.
• Improvements in children's health occurred in both community and health care settings.
• Prevention interventions cost less than treatment-related interventions.
• Interventions were sustainable.

Recipient activities

Researchers at the University of Texas tested community and health care-based obesity prevention and treatment programs in Austin and Houston. These programs coordinated care among children from families with lower incomes and who were members of racial and ethnic minority groups. Tested programs included:

• The Mind, Exercise, Nutrition Do It (MEND) program
• The Coordinated Approach to Child Health school program (CATCH)

This CORD project was known as The Imperial County Childhood Obesity Project (ICCOP): An Ecological Approach to Addressing Childhood Obesity. Researchers were from:

• The Institute for Behavioral and Community Health at San Diego State University
• Clínicas de Salud del Pueblo, Inc.
• Imperial County Public Health Department

They implemented interventions in early care and education settings, schools, municipal recreation settings, and Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) in Brawley Calexico and El Centro, California.

Massachusetts

This collaboration delivered a multidisciplinary clinical intervention called Mass in Motion Kids. Researchers were from the Massachusetts Department of Public Health and Harvard School of Public Health. They partnered with the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women Infants and Children (WIC), early care and education programs, schools, and FQHCs.

CORD 2.0 project summaries

Arizona State University implemented an existing parenting program called the Family Check-Up 4 Health (FCU4Health) . CORD researchers worked with three primary care clinics. They tested behavioral and physical health effects of FCU4Health in a community with a large number of residents who were Hispanic and had lower incomes.

The State Department of Health built on experiences in CORD 1.0 to optimize the clinical care of children with overweight or obesity in families with lower incomes. Two communities implemented multidisciplinary Healthy Weight Clinics in Federally Qualified Health Centers and family healthy weight programs in YMCAs.

Select publications

An individually tailored family-centered intervention for pediatric obesity in primary care: Study protocol of a randomized type II hybrid effectiveness-implementation trial

Rationale and design of the Clinic and Community Approaches to Healthy Weight randomized trial

Costs of preparing to implement a family-based intervention to prevent pediatric obesity in primary care: A budget impact analysis

Effects of a Pediatric Weight Management Intervention on Parental Stress

Effects of the Family Check-Up 4 Health on parenting and child behavioral health: A randomized clinical trial in primary care

Report to Congress on CDC's CORD Project

Healthcare Strategies for Child Obesity

These safe, effective treatments for childhood obesity focus on nutrition, physical activity, and behavior change strategies.

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National Humanities Center selects two A&S professors as 2024-25 Fellows

By kate blackwood.

Two faculty members in the College of Arts and Sciences have been named as National Humanities Center (NHC) Fellows for the 2024-25 year. Kim Haines-Eitzen , the Paul and Berthe Hendrix Memorial Professor of Near Eastern studies, and Mostafa Minawi , associate professor of history and director of Critical Ottoman and Post-Ottoman Studies, will pursue research projects in residence at the NHC in Durham, North Carolina.

“NHC fellowships are highly selective. It is a real honor to have two scholars from Cornell Arts and Sciences recognized with fellowships in the same year,” said Deborah Starr , professor of Near Eastern studies and chair of the department. “Near Eastern Studies is particularly excited to see the research of our department and graduate field faculty supported by this prestigious fellowship.”

Minawi and Haines-Eitzen are among 31 Fellows appointed for the 2024-25 academic year, chosen from among nearly 500 applications.

Read the full story on the College of Arts and Sciences website .

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Explorations in Humor Studies: Humor Research Project

Working towards a multifaceted debate on humor and related phenomena, this book is a comprehensive reflection of the contributors’ shared interest in various dimensions of humor and its manifold applications. It is composed of a selection of writings that provide important insights into language used for humorous purposes. Theoretical discussions are complemented by an assortment of case studies in linguistics, culture, literature, and translation, as well as in visual and media studies.

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Svetlana Vuksanovic

The European Journal of Humor Research 1: 22-60

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World Building: Discourse in the Mind (Gavins, J. and Lahey, E., eds)

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Review pp.9-10

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The paramount objective of the present work is to analyse selected types of jokes in the light of Relevance Theory. The point of departure for the empirical investigation is Yus’ (2008) taxonomy of canned jokes. The work is divided into three main parts. The first two chapters constitute the theoretical introduction to the analysis undertaken in Chapter 3. Chapter 1 sets out to present the theoretical assumptions of Relevance Theory (RT), originated and developed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson (1986 [1995]) in their book entitled Relevance: Communication and Cognition and a wealth of articles. The theory of relevance assumes that human cognition and communication are geared towards the maximization of relevance. Chapter 2 characterises two accounts grounded in RT, which have been offered by Francisco Yus (2003, 2008, 2010) and Maria Jodłowiec (1991ab, 2008). Chapter 3 centres on the practical applicability of Yus’ (2008) categorisation of jokes into my data culled from collections of jokes and Internet sources.

Comedy for dinner – and other dishes

Jolita Horbacauskiene

Humour may be used for gaining, protecting or sharing power. It may also be employed as a means to attack, undermine or criticise adversaries or ideas. In political discourse especially, humour may be considered as an ambiguous and clear-cut concept. The study seeks to explore the instances of usage and goals of humour in political discourse in a country with no long and deep democratic political traditions. Theories of humour and superiority serve as a basis for theoretical framework as well as ground the interpretation of empirical data, which is collected through content analysis. The results of the study may be beneficial for politicians, their public relations representatives and general public

In this thesis, I examine some of the ways in which humour is created in comic novels. I combine concepts from cognitive stylistics and psychology to address the question: ‘How does the construction of narrative worlds contribute to the creation of humour in narratives?’ I suggest that the narrative world can be designed to enhance the humour of particular elements which appear in it by encouraging a playful interpretation of those elements. I call the narrative worlds which are constructed to elicit an overall experience of humour humorous worlds and outline some of the techniques which writers use to build them, focusing on three aspects: Disrupted Schemata. In the first chapter, I discuss the elements which are used to build humorous worlds. I outline the ways in which representations of settings, objects, characters and situations which make up humorous worlds can be manipulated to achieve an amusing effect. I demonstrate some of the applications of schema theory in the stylistics of humorous texts, including Cook’s schema disruption and schema refreshment (1994), Gibbs’ soft-assembling of schemata (2003) and Schank and Abelson’s notion of scripts thrown off normal course (1977). I link those to McGhee’s concept of fantasy-assimilation (1972). Repetition and Variation. I then outline some of the ways in which the disrupted elements are combined. I write about repetition and variation, which in humorous narratives operates in two ways (conceptual/stylistic) and on two levels (local/extended). I discuss the cognitive mechanisms involved in them (by drawing on, for example, Emmott’s 1997 contextual frame theory) and hypothesise about their amusing effect by basing my work on classic research in psychology (Berlyne 1972, Suls 1972). Humorous Mode. Finally, I discuss the devices which mark humorous worlds as humorous. I point out that comic narratives need to be labelled as humorous discourse and that the humorous cueing/keying in novels is less explicit than that in jokes. I apply Triezenberg’s model of humour enhancers (2004) to humorous extracts, analyse narrative strategies in the opening paragraphs of a number of humorous novels and suggest some ways in which a manipulation of distance (e.g. Leech and Short 2007) between the writer and the reader can be seen as a humorous cueing strategy. I argue that while creating humour in narratives requires a skilful stylistic manipulation on the part of the writer, making sense of it demands a considerable cognitive effort from the reader. Through a range of examples from nine humorous novels (by authors including Heller, Fielding, Pratchett, Amis, Roth and Vonnegut) and relevant secondary literature, I illustrate how a cognitive stylistic analysis of humour in narratives has the potential to offer some hypotheses not only about reading comprehension, but also about the pleasure of reading.

Developments in Linguistic Humour Theory (Dynel, M., ed)

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Campus & Community

Celebrating family firsts and resourcefulness in the Class of 2024

Lynn larabi, crystal marshall, and jason chu all entered penn as first-generation college undergraduates and the children of immigrants and pursued different paths: political science, film, and finance and accounting..

Lynn Larabi recalls that growing up in Northeast Philadelphia some of her earliest school memories involved students at the local library looking over her writing assignments, at her parents’ request. A few years later, her mother—who works at the local elementary school—paid the favor forward by offering Larabi’s help with homework to younger students. Larabi says this emphasized for her the cyclical nature of public service and community involvement.

“I’ve developed a passion for education policy and a passion for workforce development because you really see that spaces like libraries and community centers are needed for families like my own,” she says, in reference to the Free Library of Philadelphia, considering her parents—immigrants from Morocco—faced a language barrier and didn’t attend college. Larabi, a fourth-year student in the College of Arts and Sciences , channeled these passions into a political science major, public service internships, and community engagement.

She also says that observing her father’s experiences as a taxi driver has shaped her views of labor rights. Abderrahim Larabi says he has kept his “Penn Dad” hat in his car for the past four years, and that he’s a lucky dad to have her as his daughter.

“She works hard,” he says, saying she made his dreams of higher education and community impact come true. “In her, I see myself. She is my eyes. What she’s going through, it’s like I am going through.”

Larabi is among the one-in-five members of Class of 2024 who are first-generation college students, according to Penn First Plus . The resource hub uses this term for students whose parents or guardians did not complete a bachelor’s degree.

First-generation students at Penn have a diversity of interests and accomplishments, but from childhood through university they share some attributes and experiences: Resourcefulness in seeking out information, the navigation of unspoken social norms and the implications of generational wealth and, especially in the case of second-generation immigrants, self-imposed pressure to make the most of opportunities their parents provided.

Those in the Class of 2024 navigated all this on top of the unusual experience of beginning college remotely, due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We’re a population that is sprinkled everywhere. We all have different talents, different skills,” says Larabi, who, as president of the First-Generation/Low-Income Dean’s Advisory Board , surveyed students involved in athletics, Greek life, music, and more. “It’s an identity that you honor because it is a triumph to be at an institution like Penn as a first-generation student, and it’s up to us to have a community and have a support system.”

Her resilience as a first-generation student gave her the guts to start a pop-rock band, Menagerie . She says starting it alongside a group of friends has allowed her to show the Penn community that students of a variety of musical backgrounds and experiences can unite under a shared desire to perform and produce music.

Larabi says one of her favorite experiences at Penn has been her involvement in Ase Academy , a mentorship group for Black middle and high school students from West Philadelphia. “I am one of two mentors from Philly who is involved in this program, and that’s important to me because it’s almost like getting a chance to serve as a mirror to versions of my younger self that I didn’t have,” she says.

Larabi says she always believed in public service and the power of policy to enact change. She learned about the importance of local government interning at the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs , saw how to uplift youth as a United Nations Foundation intern, and saw her faith in public service increase serving as a campaign fellow for U.S. Rep. Gabe Amo of Rhode Island, also a child of African immigrants.

One of nine Thouron Scholars , Larabi is headed to the University of Oxford to pursue a master’s degree in evidence-based social intervention and policy evaluation.

Studying representation in films and festivals

As a communication major with a minor in cinema and media studies, Crystal Marshall says she began to have questions in film classes about who she was watching and why. Taking a course her second year on Black joy—with Chaz Antoine Barracks, an Annenberg School for Communication postdoctoral fellow at the time—provided further direction.

For the final paper for an independent study her third year, supervised by former Annenberg postdoctoral fellow Perry B. Johnson and funded by the Center for Undergraduate Research and Fellowships , Marshall examined the film canon, which she describes as a “subset of films people expect you to see to give yourself a degree of credibility.” Looking at lists from entertainment outlets, she found “there were very few films by women, very few films by women of color, and almost no films by Black women, so that was very concerning to me.”

She says going to the Cannes Film Festival last summer changed her life and she subsequently “went down a film festival rabbit hole,” volunteering at BlackStar Film Festival in Philadelphia and attending the Philadelphia Film Festival. She was co-director for this year’s Bifocal Film Festival, Penn’s first student-led film festival, and is co-president of Monolith Arts Collective, a group dedicated to showcasing the work of Black artists in West Philadelphia.

Marshall, who is a lso a Thouron Scholar , will pursue a master’s degree in film programming and curating at the University of London, Birbek. She says she also hopes to continue screenwriting.

With parents who immigrated from Jamaica and didn’t go to college, Marshall, who is from Miami Gardens, Florida, says it was a big deal when she applied for the Thouron Award. She says being a first-generation student comes with a great deal of self-imposed pressure and she felt a sense of, “What did my parents come to this country for if I wasn’t going to go to college and be successful?”

Expressing his pride, her father, Leroy Marshall says, “she has strength and perseverance and here she is.” Seeing her matriculate, he says, “is remarkable.”

“UPenn was the last letter she got in that mail, and everybody was just screaming; we were jumping, and we were shouting. It was great,” recalls her mother, Claudett Marshall. She says at the time she wondered, “Can Crystal manage by herself? How is it going to work?”

Marshall has been working in the Penn First Plus office since the fall of her second year and says she didn’t realize the expansiveness of the first-generation and limited-income (FGLI) identity until working there. “FGLI is something that’s an applicable term even outside of the college setting because it is a big reality for people entering tight-knit industries like entertainment in particular,” she says, noting the industry is also competitive and full of people whose parents worked in entertainment.

First-generation advocacy and research

Jason Chu says a lot of people in his hometown of Sachse, Texas, never left the state, that there was the precedent of going to the local community college and getting a job in the Dallas area. But Chu says going to accounting competitions in high school and seeing students from other schools made him realize he should start looking outwards.

“When I was a sophomore, a senior at my school had gotten into Penn, and he was the first person who had gotten into an Ivy in a while, so that was kind of a mind-blowing moment,” says Chu, a Wharton School student with concentrations in finance and accounting. He searched for top business schools and says he also realized that Penn had a strong FGLI community with a lot of resources.

Chu, who is headed into investment banking in San Francisco after graduation, became a mentee in Penn First Plus’s Pre-First Year Program, Wharton’s Successful Transition & Empowerment Program , and the PEER Mentoring Program , helping Asian and Pacific-Islander students adjust to life at Penn. He went on to join the Wharton Undergraduate Society of Accounting, Wharton Asia Exchange, and Phi Chi Theta, a business fraternity.

Chu says he is passionate about sharing the first-generation experience and says peers may not understand his experience of working a job every semester—and sometimes multiple jobs—to pay rent and expenses.

Having been on the receiving end of help for a while, he says that once he could give back he sought out first-generation spaces. He became involved with Seven|Eight , a Penn community for first-generation Asian American and Pacific Islander students, and 1vyG, the country’s largest summit for FGLI students. Penn hosted the conference last year.

Chu’s honors thesis focuses on how first-generation students fare in the workplace after graduating. “First-generation students are a very understudied area in academia,” Chu says. “A lot of the research is centered around how these students do transitioning into college and how they do getting a job, but there’s kind of a drop-off in understanding how they do long-term, which was my goal.”

He says of his own experience, “I think being a first-generation student at Penn specifically, at an elite institution, is coming to realize the privilege that a person holds. I think coming to Penn I realized how much more power I have relative to the people I grew up with, and I’m trying to understand the best way to harness that toward helping the same people.”

His father, Minh Chu, says he always encouraged his children to at least get a four-year degree, that it will help them down the line and make looking for a job easier. He and Jason’s mother, Jade Tiuong, immigrated from Vietnam. They told Jason they would try to support him the best they could and are “very, very, very happy that four years passed and he’s about to graduate. He has grown so much, and I’m very proud,” Minh Chu says.

Class of 2025 relishes time together at Hey Day

Arts, Humanities, & Social Sciences

Picturing artistic pursuits

Hundreds of undergraduates take classes in the fine arts each semester, among them painting and drawing, ceramics and sculpture, printmaking and animation, photography and videography. The courses, through the School of Arts & Sciences and the Stuart Weitzman School of Design, give students the opportunity to immerse themselves in an art form in a collaborative way.

Penn celebrates operation and benefits of largest solar power project in Pennsylvania

Solar production has begun at the Great Cove I and II facilities in central Pennsylvania, the equivalent of powering 70% of the electricity demand from Penn’s academic campus and health system in the Philadelphia area.

Education, Business, & Law

Investing in future teachers and educational leaders

The Empowerment Through Education Scholarship Program at Penn’s Graduate School of Education is helping to prepare and retain teachers and educational leaders.

‘The Illuminated Body’ fuses color, light, and sound

A new Arthur Ross Gallery exhibition of work by artist Barbara Earl Thomas features cut-paper portraits reminiscent of stained glass and an immersive installation constructed with intricately cut material lit from behind.

Vanderbilt wins top awards at 2024 ARL Film Festival 

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May 16, 2024, 10:23 AM

Quantum Potential, Slave Societies Digital Archive recognized    

Vanderbilt University and the Jean and Alexander Heard Libraries won three awards at the ninth annual Association of Research Libraries Film Festival on May 8 at the Harvard Film Archive in Cambridge, Massachusetts.   

The “ARLies” recognize excellence in multimedia projects that highlight library collections and their impact. This year’s festival featured 34 submissions from major research libraries across North America.   

Vanderbilt’s entry, “ AI Unearths Untold Stories: Slave Societies Digital Archive ,” picked up the awards for Best Collections-Focused Film, Best Production and Best in Show. The project, part of the university’s Quantum Potential video series, highlights the innovative work of Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of History Jane Landers and Daniel Genkins , digital library architect and curator of the Slave Societies Digital Archive . Landers, Genkins and their collaborators are using artificial intelligence and computer science techniques to scan through thousands of historical documents to assemble the world’s largest colection of records documenting the history of Africans and their descendants across the Atlantic World. The archive is housed at the Heard Libraries.   

“Vanderbilt University’s winning film showcases both a groundbreaking project and the pivotal role of research libraries in preserving our shared cultural history,” ARL Executive Director Andrew K. Pace said. “I congratulate Vanderbilt on these awards, which underscore the vital importance of digital preservation in academic research.”       

Jad Abumrad , Distinguished Research Professor of Cinema and Media Arts and Communication of Science and Technology, created Quantum Potential in collaboration with Vanderbilt Communications and Marketing , and he hosts the series.    

“When I first learned of the Slave Societies Digital Archive and Jane’s work, I was floored,” Abumrad said. “Her team is quite literally re-writing history—or writing it for the first time, because so many of the names on the worm-eaten records she’s recovered exist nowhere else in the historical record. It’s an extraordinary act of un-erasing.”   

“For more than 20 years, my teams have been racing against time to save the endangered history of Africans and their descendants across the Atlantic World,” said Landers, director of the SSDA. “Thanks to Jon and the Heard Libraries, these records are now preserved and accessible to the world, and thanks to Jad and his Quantum Potential project, more people will know about our work. ”   

The 2024 awards, Vanderbilt’s first-ever ARLies, mark a milestone achievement for the Heard Libraries, said University Librarian Jon Shaw .   

“This honor highlights Vanderbilt’s commitment to significant historical research and digital preservation and emphasizes the libraries’ dedication to leveraging advanced technologies and fostering radical collaboration to enhance discovery,” Shaw said. “We are immensely proud of this achievement as well as the deep partnerships among our librarians, curators, students and faculty.”  

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Durkin on multi-institutional team leveraging virtual reality to teach quantum computing

Daring to Grow: The stories that shaped Vanderbilt in 2023

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National Humanities Center selects two A&S professors as 2024-25 Fellows

National Humanities Center

By | Kate Blackwood , A&S Communications

Two faculty members in the College of Arts and Sciences have been named as National Humanities Center (NHC) Fellows for the 2024-25 year. Kim Haines-Eitzen , the Paul and Berthe Hendrix Memorial Professor of Near Eastern studies, and Mostafa Minawi , associate professor of history and director of Critical Ottoman and Post-Ottoman Studies, will pursue research projects in residence at the NHC in Durham, North Carolina.

“NHC fellowships are highly selective. It is a real honor to have two scholars from Cornell Arts and Sciences recognized with fellowships in the same year,” said Deborah Starr , professor of Near Eastern studies and chair of the department. “Near Eastern Studies is particularly excited to see the research of our department and graduate field faculty supported by this prestigious fellowship.”

Minawi and Haines-Eitzen are among 31 Fellows appointed for the 2024-25 academic year, chosen from among nearly 500 applications.

As an NHC fellow, Haines-Eitzen will develop her book project “Crossing the River of Fire: Apocalypse, Transformation, and the Elements in Late Antiquity." With a possible alternative title, “A Field Guide to the Apocalypse,” the book extends her interest in environmental and sensory history, tracing themes of kinesis, convergence, and transformation in the writings of late antiquity.

“From creation to the apocalypse, early Christians assembled a set of texts that traversed between the natural elements–earth, air, water, fire–and the imagination, merged the sensational with the contemplative, crossed the sublime with the violent,” Haines-Eitzen wrote in a summary of the project. “The transformational potency of flowing waters and blazing fires, living stones and dissonant earthquakes, howling winds and thundering voices offered Christian writers evocative and compelling images to breach new identities formed in the meshwork of Jewish, Zoroastian, Greek and Roman cultures and worldviews.”

“Having the opportunity to spend a full academic year at the National Humanities Center provides uninterrupted time for research and writing in a way that is increasingly difficult to find,” Haines-Eitzen said. “It allows me to deeply immerse myself in the project.”

During the residency, Minawi will work on a book tentatively titled “Ottoman-Ethiopian Relations and the Geopolitics of Imperialism in the Red Sea Basin and the Horn of Africa at the End of the 19th Century.” The research relies on a set of recently released Ottoman archival documents on Ottoman involvement in the Horn of Africa at the turn of the 20th century.

The short-lived province of Abyssinia was established in 1517, when the Ottomans occupied the African Red Sea coast, including the important cities of Massawa (Eritrea), Suakin (Sudan), and Zeila (Somalia). Following the 1884-85 Berlin Conference, the Ottomans, along with a number of European empires, were back in the Horn of Africa to compete over territories in the Red Sea Basin and northern coast of Somalia. Minawi’s book, under contract with Stanford University Press, is the first to investigate this Ottoman-Ethiopian-European competition for Northeast Africa between 1885 and WWI.

“Thinking, discussing ideas and writing is a true privilege that we rarely get to enjoy anymore,” Minawi said. “After the year we have had, I am looking forward to returning to the life of the mind. The Center will provide the space to concentrate on writing my third book and to engage with faculty in the Research Triangle and other fellows.”

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2024 Presidential Arts and Humanities Fellows selected to advance research, creative projects

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. — A signature Indiana University program that amplifies and accelerates the work of outstanding arts and humanities faculty recently selected its latest cohort. The Presidential Arts and Humanities Fellowship is an annual program that supports the work of IU faculty who are improving society and revitalizing communities through their research and creative activity, and poised to become national and international leaders in their fields.

Supported by the IU Office of the President and IU Research, and administered by the university’s assistant vice president for research, the fellowship awards $50,000 of flexible funding to each recipient to support a variety of needs as they pursue innovative research and creative projects. President Pamela Whitten started the program in 2022.

Along with funding, recipients gain access to professional development programming and advanced training in the areas of grant writing, scholarly communication with the public, media training and digital scholarship, among other specialized trainings.

The goal of the IU Presidential Arts and Humanities Fellowship program is to amplify and promote the rich and diverse opportunities within the arts and humanities at Indiana University and to ensure the recipients have continued success as they make impactful changes in their fields and in local, national and international communities.

“Congratulations to the 2024 Presidential Arts and Humanities Fellows,” Whitten said. “The recipients of this fellowship exemplify the standard that is set by our faculty at Indiana University, which has long been a leader in the arts and humanities. This fellowship represents the university’s steadfast commitment to supporting the pursuit of transformative research and creativity across our campuses, which helps us better understand the world and revitalizes communities.”

The 2024 IU Presidential Arts and Humanities Fellows are:

Allison Baker

Allison Baker is an associate professor of fine arts in the Herron School of Art and Design on IIU’s Indianapolis campus. She will construct a body of work and monumental public sculptures that memorialize the complexities of late-stage capitalism, illuminating the aspirations and struggles of the American working class and working poor.

Baker seeks to build monuments that challenge dominant narratives, humanize the ripple effects of poverty and create work that the American working class and working poor can see as a reflection of their own experiences in galleries and museums, which are spaces where they are seldom represented.

Emily Beckman

Emily Beckman is an associate professor and director of the Medical Humanities and Health Studies Program in the School of Liberal Arts on the Indianapolis campus. Beckman is co-founder of Build Community Give Care, a nonprofit organization that provides compassionate end-of-life care in Africa.

She will use the funding to support research addressing the need for palliative care education in Uganda. Outcomes will include a better understanding of the pathways available for palliative care education and access in Uganda, solutions for better retention in these educational programs and the development of medical humanities curricula at IU.

Catherine Bowman

Catherine Bowman , professor of English in the College of Arts and Sciences at IU Bloomington, is an award-winning poet, author of several collections of poetry and the editor of “Word of Mouth: Poems Featured on NPR’s ‘All Things Considered.’”

Bowman will use the fellowship funding for travel and archival research to make significant progress on her sixth poetry collection, tentatively titled “Volver, Volver: An Underworld Intergenre Pilgrimage.” The collection will imagine and recount various underworld encounters with several generations of women.

Andrew Goldman

Andrew Goldman is an assistant professor of music in music theory at the Jacobs School of Music and assistant professor of cognitive science in the College of Arts and Sciences. He directs the IU Music and Mind Lab , an interdisciplinary research group that investigates music perception and cognition and the role of music in the human condition.

Goldman will use the fellowship funding to explore the critical challenges and contributions of incorporating cognitive science into music studies. He will research how music cognition researchers’ historical and cultural situations have influenced their scientific work and the nature of their findings.

Raiford Guins

Raiford Guins is a professor and the director of Cinema and Media Studies at The Media School in Bloomington. He is also an adjunct professor of informatics. He plans to use the funds to support research travel that will aid in the development of his book, tentatively titled “Museum Games.”

The book will explore the emerging area of games and gaming culture in museums, libraries and archives worldwide. For example, the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York, recently completed a $70 million expansion, while The Nintendo Museum plans its long-anticipated opening in Kyoto, Japan, in 2024. Guins will detail the relatively new phenomenon of gaming museums and preservation from an academic perspective.

Lisa Lenoir

Lisa Lenoir is an assistant professor who teaches courses in The Media School’s new Fashion Media Program in Bloomington. Her research examines contemporary cultural phenomena in media discourses in journalism studies, activism and identity, and consumer culture.

Lenoir will use the funds to research the life and work of Chicago Defender journalist Mattie Smith Colin, a fashion and food editor who covered the return of Emmett Till’s body from Mississippi to Chicago in 1955. Lenoir will collect oral histories from people who knew Colin and review archival materials, compiling her findings into a digital bibliography.

Anja Matwijkiw

Anja Matwijkiw is a professor of philosophy in the College of Arts and Sciences at IU Northwest and affiliated faculty in the Institute for European Studies at IU Bloomington. She will use the funds to explore stakeholder philosophy and international law as it pertains to the United Nations rule of law.

Linda Pisano

Linda Pisano is chair and professor in the Department of Theatre, Drama and Contemporary Dance in the College of Arts and Sciences at IU Bloomington. Her fellowship is sponsored by the Big Ten Academic Alliance and the Vice Provost for Faculty and Academic Affairs.

Pisano will use the fellowship funding to research methods and mechanisms in cultivating new audiences, patrons and donors of the arts and humanities on university campuses during increasingly difficult times. Her research will include investigating interest in community outreach, education, socio-political advocacy and identity, among other areas. Pisano hopes to ensure that universities are communicating the value of arts and humanities as fundamental to their institutional identity and the public spaces they occupy.

Spencer Steenblik

Spencer Steenblik is an assistant professor of comprehensive design at the Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design in Bloomington. He will use the funds to develop several projects, including producing and testing an innovative structural joint and pursuing a patent. The main goals are to develop full-scale experimental structures and installations that test new materials, technologies and design approaches and to highlight the need for more opportunities for young practitioners to engage in similar types of hands-on innovation.

The previous cohort of fellows made advancements across a multitude of disciplines with the funding and resources provided by the IU Presidential Arts and Humanities Fellowship, including composing a chamber music and AI opera that will premiere next year and erecting a floating monument that spotlights underrepresented communities in Chicago.

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