As you will see in the pages that come, we have had a fruitful year with Penn’s Mellon Foundation-sponsored Humanities, Urbanism and Design (aka H+U+D) initiative. The planned activities are “up and humming.” But what this report cannot fully communicate are the intangible results of the effort. Words can barely convey how this opportunity is widening our horizons, especially in nurturing new intellectual partnerships and scholarly exchanges that simply would not have occurred without it. We know that H+U+D will continue to yield exciting results — classes and research — in the years to come.

Let us share some observations. When the H+U+D Colloquium, the bi-weekly gathering of faculty and post-doctoral fellows from the School of Arts and Sciences and the School of Design began last year, meeting in a lovely seminar room in the Jaffe History of Art Building, we watched the inaugural members, who did not know each other very well, dutifully enter the room, politely exchange greetings, look somewhat skeptically at a large tray of sandwiches, and listen politely to our first day’s presentation. On that first afternoon, we did a lot of the talking.

Now fast forward a year. Here is what we see: Our colleagues eagerly run into the room, quickly help themselves to lunch and then begin to talk–catching up with each other about a class they are teaching or something they have read that they know others will want to hear about, sharing a new bit of research, and talking about current and future collaborations. In fact, we can’t get a word in edgewise! All sorts of productive arrangements are occurring. Through the colloquium, two “city seminars” emerged whose instructors had never worked together before. One course traveled to Paris and the other to Rio. Two other faculty members have put together a conference that they told us never would have happened save for their introduction through H+U+D.

This is only a small taste of the H+U+ D initiative “magic.” As you read the annual report, remember that underlining each entry is a story of new relationships and enormous instructional and research breakthroughs benefitting the whole Penn community.

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