Faculty of Arts and SciencesUniversity of PennsylvaniaDECEMBER 1980

RENEWING SCHOLARSHIPAND BUILDING TIES

In the past year, 175 men and women from 65

colleges and universities in the Delaware Valley havebeen coming to Pennsylvania to engage in thework ofscholars. Each of them is attending oneof the sixseminar series that comprise the Lilly-PennsylvaniaProgram.The program grew outof the mutual interests of the

University and the Lilly Endowment, Inc. The

University wanted to further its role as a regionalresource. And the Lilly Endowmentwas interested in

supporting programs to help faculty members stayintellectually vital at a time when faculties aregettingsmaller, and fewer people are moving to new

positions and campuses.Pennsylvania, along with Indiana University, Stan-

ford, Yale, Chicago and Duke, was asked for ideas to

bring regional faculty in a number of disciplinestogether fora two-yearcollaborative program. The

Facultyof Arts and Sciences responded with a

proposal for a series of seminar programs appealingto differentdisciplines and using different formats.

They are Cognitive Sciences; Literature and theVisual Arts; Mathematical Modeling; Medieval Stud-ies; and Technology, Medicine, Science and Society.

Explaining theconcept behind the program, PeterConn, its Director, said, "We don't turn to the LillyFellowsas teachers, though they areand so arewe,but as scholars."

All of the Lilly-Pennsylvania programs include a

presentation by an outstanding authorityon the topicand foster discussion among the participants-whether the program is taking place over a longweekend or every other week fora semester. The

dialogue among colleagues has been encouraged not

only during formal sessions but also through suchinformal opportunitiesas dinner. These informalmomentshave been a key to the successof the LillyProgram. In addition, Penn's research facilities, suchas the library, laboratories and computers, have beenmade available to the Lilly Fellows. Thomas Waldman,Associate Director, is in charge of all thearrange-ments.Cover Photo

TheArmada portrait of Elizabethby George GowermarkstheEnglish victory over theSpanish fleet in 1588. Thebreadth of her royal authority is indicatedthroughhersizeandstature, theregalcrown, andthe globe; thedestruction of theArmada is described in theimages inthebackground. Like a Shakespearean drama it bringstogether all the important elements necessary to tell the

story in onepainting without regard for unity of time,

place, or action, thus illustrating a keypointmade byProfessorRoland M. Frye in his lecture described on

page 3.

Overseeing the program are thedozen members ofthe Lilly-Pennsylvania Advisory Committee. Thesemen and women include the organizers of theseminars, the University's Provost, and a number ofdeans and faculty members from some of the schoolsthat are participating in the program.The Lilly Fellows are chosen from those who apply

according to how well their interests fit together withthe focus of the seminar. Many of the Fellows comefrom small colleges where they may be the onlyperson in their field. A great many of these peoplehave heavy teaching loads with little time forresearch.

In the past faculty members in smaller, more

physically isolated schoolswere continually rejuven-ated as people moved to these institutions and

exposed each otherto new ideas in their fields.However, there is considerably less coming and goingon today'scampus. And fewerfunds are available forconferencesand scholarly meetings."The Lilly program really is putting local people,

especially from small schools, in contact with aninternational scholarly community," said Edward M.Peters, Henry C. Lea Associate Professorof Medieval

History, who planned the Medieval Studies program.Another important benefit is that people in the area

are getting to know each other. There are no regionalassociations for scholars of these interdisciplinarytopics. Thus the Lilly-Pennsylvania Program has beeninstrumental in bringing together these groups withsimilar interests.

"The people know each other. They'regettingtogether. They're notsimply coming into a room,

listening to a paper, sitting next to people they neversaw before, and then leaving," asserted PeterConn."The Medievalists, forexample, are spending a whole

year together."The Pennsylvania faculty in the program have a

chance to meet people and hear outstandingspeakers, too. They also have an opportunity to testtheir ideason a newgroup of colleagues. And, as inthecase of the program in Technology, Medicine,Science, and Society, it has led to newways of

approaching their field."It makes people in the vicinity realize that Penn is

not inaccessible, that it is here, that they can get to it,that the people here are worth talking to," concludedProfessor Peters.

The Lilly-Pennsylvania Program is offering semin-ars in the following areas:Cognitive Sciences deals with artificial intelligence,

language acquisition, and natural language process-ing. Lilly Fellows can join two regular Universitycourses: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence taughtby Professor Aravind Joshi and a seminar in Natural

Language Processing taught by Professors Joshi andBonnie Webber, both in the Department of Computerand Information Science. During the summer of 1980,Lila Gleitman, William T. Carter Professor of Educa-tion and Professor of Psychology, offered a one-weekseminar in The Development of Spoken and WrittenLanguage in the Child. In 1981, Professors TimothyFinin, Joshi, and Webber of the Department ofComputer and Information Science will offer atwo-week program on recent developments in theconstruction of "intelligent" computer systems.

Literature and the Visual Arts consists of threethree-day seminars, each on a different topic. TheAmerican Landscape was the subject of a programdeveloped by Professor Hennig Cohen of the EnglishDepartment in the fail of 1979. Professor Roland M.Frye organized a three-day colloquium on the EnglishRenaissance in May 1980 (see the illustrations onpage 4). Mark Miller, assistant professor of English,has planned a third workshop for April 9-11, 1981 onFilm and Literature, which will include DianeJohnson, novelist and author of the screenplay forStanley Kubrick's The Shining.Mathematical Modeling includes two seminar

series, one centered around modeling problems in thebiological sciences and the other in the socialsciences. Both were developed by George Karreman,Professor of Physiology. For more information, seepage 7.Medieval Studies, which is described in greater

detail on page 6, was organized by Edward M. Peters,Henry C. Lea Associate Professor of Medieval History,around the themes of Town and Country (1979-80)and Literacy and Society (1980-81).Technology, Medicine, Science and Society, a

two-week seminar taught by Professors Mark Adams,Thomas Hughes, and Rosemary Stevens of theDepartment of History and Sociology of Science,linked the history of medicine, technology, andscience through themes that cross the disciplines. Formore information see page 4.

PERSPECTIVES FROM ART AND DRAMA

At the three-day seminar on Literature and theVisual Arts in the English Renaissance, Roland M.

Frye, Felix E. Schelling Professor of EnglishLiterature, gave a lecture to the Lilly Fellowsentitled, "Ways of Seeing, or Epistemology in theArts: Unities and Disunities in ShakespeareanDrama and Elizabethan Painting." A month later onJune 5, he presented the same lecture in London tothe Royal Society at its first joint meeting with theAmerican Philosophical Society, one of the rareoccasions in this century when a scholar of thehumanities has been invited to speak to the RoyalSociety. The following are a few brief excerpts fromthat illustrated lecture."The way someone sees things," or "her point of

view," or "his perspective"-these are all standardforms of speech, so necessary in the language that wewould be hard pressed to communicate without them."Seeing" has by metonymy come to denote far morethan physical eyesight; it suggests virtually all of ourperceptions as well as the ways in which weunderstand and organize those perceptions ....We are left with the conclusion that the ways in

which Shakespeare "saw things," his "point of view,"his "perspective" was essentially the same, instructural terms, as that of the painters of late TudorEngland. Both the dramatist and the Elizabethanpainters (not one of whom was his artistic equal)operated with a flamboyant disregard for the visualand literary unities of time, place, and action whichdeveloped out of the Italian Renaissance. Instead,they chose the other ancient unities of persons and ofnarrative themes, diachronic rather than synchronic,representing many places in one picture, andproviding multiple rather than single perspectives.Both carry us "here and there, jumping o'er times,Turning th' accomplishment of many years Into anhourglass." This aesthetic was provincially Englishand archaically Tudor even when Shakespeare beganto implement it in his plays-it may indeed have beenthe principal thing about his art which was of his ownage. But he turned it, as Ben Jonson well knew, intocreations which are "not of an age, but for all time." Inthe select company of the most creative minds of ourculture, Shakespeare was also distinguished bybeing, in some ways at least, a great artisticconservative. (See photographs on next page)

The set design of InigoJones for staging works by BenJonson draws a sharp contrast with the paintings of theElizabethans andtheplays of Shakespeare. Here Jones'ssketches of St. George's portico for Jonson's Prince

Henry's Barriers and the Roman atrium for Albion'sTriumph demonstrate the new vision promoted by theStuart dynasty. "AsBenJonson's devotion to classicaldrama impelled him to insist upon the unities of time,

place, action, so In/go Jones's studyof continental art

compelledhim to insist upon a unified total perspectivefor his scene paintings," explained Professor Frye.

In the Unionpanel, the artist surrounds a portrait ofsoldier anddiplomat SirHenry Union with images fromthe important moments in his life-his birth, education,travels, anddeath. "Like a Shakespeare play, the Union

panel turns theaccomplishment of many years into an

hourglassby leaping o'er times and places," saidProfessor Frye.

CONVERGENT THEMES IN TECHNOLOGY,MEDICINE ANDSCIENCE

The seminarevaluationsare glowing. The threeseminar leaders have that pleased look which comesfrom doing successfully what they thought might be

impossible. And thefield of the History and Sociologyof Science may never be the same."The opportunity to offera Lilly seminarchallenged

us to combine ourthinking about the history ofscience, technology, and medicine as a unity, whichas faras we know no other history of science

department in the country has done," explainedRosemary Stevens, chairman of thedepartment and a

specialist in the history of medicine and health policy.To date the three subjects have grown up as very

separate disciplines, each having their own societyand journals. At most universities they are located indifferentschools. History of medicine, for example,may be part of the medical school; the history of

technology may be included as part of theengineer-ing school. And only the history of science would bein a setting similar to FAS."We've had this institutional opportunity, butwe're

so busy organizing seminars and teaching courses,that there wasn't really any occasion to sitdown and

really start knocking our heads together, forcing us toread stuff in the other people's fields," explained MarkAdams, an historian of science.With the Lilly Program as their challenge, Profes-

sors Adams, Stevens, and Thomas Hughes, whose

field is the history of technology, met together, withmore than a little skepticism, to discuss how theymight organize a seminar. If they really wanted tointegrate the fields, they would have to teach theseminar together, they reasoned, and would need toinclude material from each area in each session,rather than simply assigning one-third of the sessionsto each scholar. They decided to begin theirpreparation by giving each other the most interestingand thoughtful 10 or 15 readings in each field .... Andthey continued to be skeptical."Going into that meeting, it still had to be proved to

me that this sort of thing was possible, but when itturned out that we really had a lot more commonground than we thought we had, then it got veryexciting!" said Professor Adams.The exchange became even more productive when

the two-week seminar program began in May."We then had the opportunity of exploring ideas

with a phenomenal group of people," explainedRosemary Stevens. "They were self-confident andexperienced and had very good senses of humor.There was a great deal of willingness to criticize andthe maturity of experience to be able to criticize in avery constructive way... And they didn't let us getaway with anything. Not much anyway."The 25 faculty enrolled in the seminar came from

Villanova, Glassboro, Temple, Cedar Crest, MedicalCollege of Pennsylvania and other colleges, and theirfields ranged from nursing to English, from history tobiology.

Several themes which cut across the three fields oftechnology, medicine and science provided the focusfor each session's discussion. For example, each ofthe three fields is strongly rooted in the institutionsand systems of the times, such as professionalorganizations, factories, hospitals, research laborato-ries, government agencies, and universities. Thisprovided the focus for a seminar entitled Institutionsand Systems.

In another session, on National and RegionalStyles, the seminar leaders and fellows discussedhow technology, medicine, and science are definedby geography: while people view these fields astransnational, they actually develop in ways that areindigenous to their nation and region. Another theme,Inertia, dealt with the fact that science, technology,and medicine are not always in the vanguard, butoften resist change due to pressures from suchgroups as government agencies, large corporations,and sometimes the professionals themselves.

The discussions were lively. The attendance wasvirtually 100 percent. And as many of the participantssaw it, it was an unqualified success.

"All in all, it was one of the most congenial andeffective groups of which I have ever been a part,"said one participant. "Drs. Hughes, Stevens andAdams had the rare qualities of being good leaders aswell as being 'good listeners' and chaired the seminarmeetings with genuine respect for both subject andaudience. The depth of the subject knowledge whichthey brought to the seminar was excelled only by theirdynamic ability to communicate that knowledge toand to stimulate the group."

"The thematic approach and the selection ofarticles was effective. They somehow prevented theone-upmanship common among academics, andcreated an atmosphere that was, at once, pleasantand intense," commented another."They reinforced my conviction that knowledge is

not easily divisible and in the process helped mereplace cobwebs with firmer structures," said stillanother.The program had an impact both at the schools of

the Lilly Fellows and at Pennsylvania. A number of theparticipants used the course to help them preparecourses in history of science, technology, or medicinefor their own students and drew on the seminarleaders for such practical information as courseoutlines and bibliographies.Mark Adams is drawing on the Lilly experience in

teaching an introductory course for graduate stu-dents that touches on all three fields. While he hadtaught the course the year before, he felt that therewas simply not enough medicine and technology in it.This year's course, which is required of all graduatestudents, has incorporated several of the Lilly themesin addition to the perspective and enthusiasm thatProfessor Adams developed during the summer.Rosemary Stevens sees the possibility of other

forms of integration in the future. "It certainlyexpanded my horizons in terms of looking atconjunctions. There are interesting possibilities ofdoing a similar seminar perhaps with a clinicaldepartment."Thomas Hughes, on leave this semester, took his

Lilly lessons to the fall meeting of the Society for theHistory of Technology. He devoted part of hispresidential address to a discussion of the convergentthemes among the history of science, medicine, andtechnology.

MONASTERIES, MANUSCRIPTS AND OTHERTHINGS MEDIEVAL

Just how many opportunities does a Medievalist getto converse over dinner about harlots in the

Gilgamesh epic?It can be lonely as the only medieval scholar at a

ruralcampus like Lebanon Valley College orsometimeseven in the French department at a largeurban university like Temple. For its 25 fellows, the

Lilly program has certainlyoffered a chance for both

easy discussions on things Medieval and more

scholarly considerations of topics like Ruined Cities,the Medieval Imagination and Libri Feodorum, OrWhoMade a System of Feudal Relations?The Medieval Studies program, now in its second

year, was designed as interdisciplinary seminars forDelaware Valley Medievalists in fields ranging from

theology to art history, from English to anthropology.Edward M. Peters, Henry C. Lea Associate Professorof Medieval History, planned the first year's sixseminars around thetheme of Town and Country inthe Middle Ages and the second group, scheduled forthe current academic year, on Literacy and Society.

Penn's unique strength in medieval archaeologywasa keyfactor in the choice of Town and Country.University Museum Director Martin Biddle opened the

program last year with a presentation on an

archaeological approach to Anglo-Saxon medievaltownsand fascinated participants by showing howmuch historical information can be reconstructedfrom the materials uncovered in excavations. Other

highlights of the program included Berkeley ArtHistorian Walter Horn's presentation on the St. Gall

Monastery plan,a large drawing on the back of a

poem and the earliest plan ever discovered foraMedieval monastery. This lecture coincided with the

appearance of Horn's book on the subject.In the following weeks, presentations included

Columbia's John H. Mundy, who spokeon OrderandSocial Class in Toulouse and the Toulousain, andElizabeth A. R. Brown's work on Royal Authority inTown and Country in the Late Middle Ages. Diane

Hughes explained in a papertitled Ruined Cities inthe Medieval Imagination how people in the Middle

Ages thought of places like the Roman Forum as

ghostlyand uninhabitable.In thefinal sessions Edward Peters presented a

paper sketching out urban and rural religion in whichhe was able to tie together many of thethemes thathad emerged throughout theyear. He compared, for

example, the greatopen spaces of city churcheswhere the preacher's voice could be heard by all withthe small pilgrimage-oriented churches in rural areas.He explained the differences among clergy and their

training and asserted that the most advanced ideas

This cutawayperspective of the principal claustralstructures and the monks' cloister is just one of themanybeautiful illustrations which appear in The Plan of St. Gall,a book written by Ernest Born and Walter Horn. Horndiscussedtheplan at a session of the Lilly seminars onTown and Country in the Middle Ages.

came from the Franciscans and Dominicans whowere only to be found in towns of over 3,000 people,while rural residents looked to more isolated villagecures. Another theme was the church's images of the

city: did the church view the city as a bastion of sin tobe saved, or was the city the source of new ideas in

religion?The Lilly Fellows were encouraged to present their

own papers, and during the last few sessions theyspoke on topics ranging from Patterns of TownGovernment in Early 12th Century Leon-Castile to

Hermitages in medieval Italy. The format also calledfor discussion in Saturday. The Saturday sessions

began as rather polite question and answer periodsand became considerably more lively as the weekswent on.

"It took several weekends for the group to gel, to

really become friendly, and for the people from other

colleges to know that this was for them. It wasn't forPenn. It wasn't forthe guest speakers. It was forthem," explained Professor Peters.

This year's seminars were launched with that

understandingand proceeded very quickly to dinner

conversations ranging from papal documents to

techniques for presenting The Canterbury Talesto

undergraduates.Professor Peters chose Literacy and Society for the

second year becauseas he put it, it was getting to be a

hot topic in the field."Because of the anthropologists' work, medieval

historians and literary people are beginning to applyanthropological approaches to their own texts,"Professor Peters explained. "Suddenly we find thatthe old distinctions between literate clergy andilliterate laity simply don't mean anything anymore."To begin the year, Brian Stock was invited from

Toronto to deliver a paper identifying some of theissues in literacy. Donald Bullough of the Universityof St. Andrews in Scotland presented his work onWomen and Literacy in which he demonstrated thatboth religious and lay women were often literate inthe Middle Ages and may well have prepared some ofthe manuscripts that were attributed to men.The next weekend included Edward B. Irving, Jr. of

Penn's English department who spoke on Literacy inAnglo-Saxon England and Margaret Aston, whodiscussed Devotional Literacy in the Fourteenth toFifteenth Centuries. In the four sessions that willfollow, eight speakers will discuss topics ranging fromAttitudes Toward Literacy, Learning, and Letters inMedieval Literature to Political Images in Works ofArt: On the Iconography of the German Monarchs.

Probably the most universal reaction of theparticipants is that they have had a chance to cometogether to talk and learn from each other. Some arenow getting together informally outside the seminarto discuss mutual interests. Others have returned toresearch after many years away from it.

"This program is one that does something that thisuniversity has professed itself to be trying to do for a

long time," said Professor Peters. "It really does makePenn a regional center."

RECENT DEVELOPMENTS INMATHEMATICAL MODELING EXPLORED

Francis E. Johnston uses mathematical equationsto study why children grow differently. AbrahamNoordergraaf creates mathematical models to studythe heart. And Lawrence A. Klein won a Nobel Prizefor developing complex models of the economy.

"Because mathematics is an interdisciplinary fieldwhich can be applied to many scientific activities, it

plays an increasingly important role in solving realworld problems as they occur in a number of areas,"

explains George Karreman, the person who organ-ized the Lilly-Pennsylvania seminars in mathematical

modeling. He points out that many fields, such asbiology, engineering, economics, history and medi-cine, require the solution of complex systemproblems containing a hierarchy of several interact-

ing subsystems. "With recent advances in mathemat-ics several phenomena which could not be describedadequately by calculus can now be treatedmathematically."

Dr. Karreman, a professor of physiology and amathematical biologist, developed the mathematicalmodeling seminars in response to a suggestion forsuch a program by Lilly-Pennsylvania Advisorycommittee members from other colleges and univer-sities. There are four seminar series: in the fall therewere programs in the social sciences and in thebiological sciences; this spring there will be programsin the biological sciences and science and engineer-ing. The programs have drawn together engineersand physicists, chemists and mathematicians, histori-ans and operations research specialists and aredesigned to give participants an overview of recentdevelopments in mathematical modeling.

Take, for example, Francis Johnston's work withchild growth and development. This anthropologistexplained to Lilly Fellows how he has used models toidentify a population for study and to describechildhood and adolescent growth, focusing onfactors such as nutrition and environment whichaffect that growth.A fairly simple model was used to identify

malnourished children from a Mexican community,who were then compared with normal children toidentify the factors that are connected to malnutrition.The model permitted Johnston to compare each

child's growth rates against a norm. In this way hewas able to spot malnourished children since theirgrowth rates were consistently falling behind thenorm. Without the mathematical model it would havebeen almost impossible to tell whether poor growthwas caused by such factors as a period of illness orother problems that were not related to the process ofgrowth itself.

Dr. Edward B. Irving, Jr. (left,), Professor of English atPennsylvania, discusses his Lilly seminar lecture on Liter-acy in Anglo-Saxon England with Dr. Tom Waldman (cen-ter), Associate Director of the Lilly Program at Pennsyl-vania, and Dr. Edward M. Peters (right), Henry C. LeaAssociate Professor of Medieval Studies, who plannedthe Lilly seminars in Medieval Studies.

Professor Johnston has also created afar morecomplex model to describe childhood and adolescentgrowth and developed an equation, long sought forby students of growth, to predict size at agiven age.Johnston has used the data from this model to

comparethe growth of children from variousbackgrounds, such as United States residents,Guatemala natives and Guatemalan residents ofEuropean or Noth American ancestry, to see whetherenvironmental factors were more important thangenetic factors in determining growth. It wasconcluded that adolescent growth follows geneticswhile childhood growth is influenced by environmen-tal factors.Johnston is just oneof theseminar leaders in the

mathematical modeling programs. Others haveincluded Dr. Lawrence Klein, Benjamin FranklinProfessor of Economics, who explainedto the LillyFellows how econometric models are used to analyzesuch contemporary problems of theeconomyasenergy pricing, food supply and stagflation, and Dr.Abraham Noordergraaf, a biophysicist working in theBioengineering program in the School of Engineeringand Applied Science, whodescribed theoretical andexperimental work being undertaken on the cardio-vascular system.As noted by Professor Noordergraaf, investigators

attempting to assess the quality of the heartas apump formerly had to rely upon indirect evidence,such as arterial pressure pulse. Efforts to interpretthis pulse generated conflicting views and it wasn'tuntil a general mathematical theory of pulse wavepropagation in arteries was developed-in large partby Noordergraaf and his collaborators-that itbecame possible to define, in detail, the load faced bythe heart as it pumps.

Dr. Noordergraaf pointed outthat since thedevelopment of the theory, a wide variety ofmeasurement techniques have been developed. Someof these permit direct observation of the heart in vivo,and, in turn, they have been used to postulatean arrayof indices of "contractility" for the heart. Noorder-graaf hasdeveloped what is called the "pumpequation" which attempts to describe ventricularpumping; this equation, when fully developed, isexpected to provide the logical basis for thederivation of a measure of "contractility" to replacethe currently popularbut so far unsuccessful intuitiveprocedure.Ted Hershberg, Associate Professor in the School

of Public and Urban Policy, talked about multidiscipli-nary urban research which relies heavily on computer

technology. As he noted, "The construction of amassive machine-readable data base which candescribe population, history, transportation, infrastructures, vital statistics, institutions and serviceshas made it possible for scholars from the majorsocial science disciplines, including sociology, eco-nomics, geography, demography, city planning andhistory, to approach research on an integrated basis."

Citing work undertaken in the Philadelphia SocialHistory Project on urban-industrial development inPhiladelphia, Hershberg demonstrated howthis database could be used to explain the low socio-economic condition of black Americans. The expe-rience of black Philadelphians was compared to thatof earlier waves of white immigrants, the role of racialdiscrimination in the city's history was discussed, andthe importance of understanding the changing natureof Philadelphia's structure of opportunities wasestablished.Other topics presented this fall have focused on

scientific modeling, mathematical requirements forthe analysis of historical data, bifurcation andcatastrophe theory in science, population systemsdynamics, synergetics and cyclic behavior, andseminars leaders have included ProfessorJamesBennett (Peace Science), Zoltan Domotor (Philo-sophy), Kenneth Fegley (Systems Engineering),Christopher Hamlin (Anthropology), Stuart Kauffman(Biochemistry and Biophysics) as well as ProfessorsHershberg, Johnston, Karreman, Klein andNoordergraaf.

After each seminar, the participants have dinedtogether and this hasgiven them an opportunity tomeet and discuss applied mathematics with otherpeople in the field. As Professor Johnston put it, "Ithas allowed us to share some of the things we at Pennhave been doing with other people in the area, and it'sgood because we get feedback from them. I think Ilearned almost as much as they learned."

FAS Reports: 116 College HallEditors

Michele Steege, Linda KoonsDesign

David Tothero