Wolf Humanities Center

CORRECTED LINK: wolfhumanities.upenn.edu/events/lillo...

Penn Music's graduate students are delighted to welcome attendees to For(u)m: Re-forming Value, Re-valuing Form in Music Studies, featuring a keynote by Eric Drott (Butler School of Music, Univ of Texas at Austin) – Feb 13–14, Kislak Center.

Conference details & registration: tinyurl.com/mvatjj5

CORRECTED LINK: wolfhumanities.upenn.edu/events/lillo...

Join us for a presentation on the Truth about Sign Language Acquisition next Wednesday, February 11th. Please note this event will not be streamed.

Symposium cosponsored by Penn's Departments of Anthropology, English, History, History and Sociology of Science, Philosophy, Russian and East European Studies; Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy; Center for East Asian Studies; and Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies.

Dr. Althea Wasow, Assistant Professor in the Department of FIlm and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, will begin the day’s discussions with a keynote address on, “The Prison and Moving Images: The Aesthetics and Politics of Truth-Making.”

In conjunction with the Wolf Humanities Center’s 2025–2026 Forum on Truth, this interdisciplinary symposium engages experts in an exploration of truth(s) contested or revealed in crises across panels on (1) Institutions of Learning, (2) Land and its Technologies, and (3) Borders.

Join us for our upcoming symposium on Feb 27: Truth in Crisis.

What of Truth in Crisis? Crisis of truth, truth of crisis: how do we articulate, orient, and act on matters intricately interwoven with survival?

For more information: wolfhumanities.upenn.edu/events/truth...

Dr. Althea Wasow, Assistant Professor in the Department of FIlm and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, will begin the day’s discussions with a keynote address on “The Prison and Moving Images: The Aesthetics and Politics of Truth-Making.”

In conjunction with the Wolf Humanities Center’s 2025–2026 Forum on Truth, this interdisciplinary symposium engages experts in an exploration of truth(s) contested or revealed in crises across panels on (1) Institutions of Learning, (2) Land and its Technologies, and (3) Borders.

Image 1: Portrait of Austin Svedjan (credit Jason Varney).
Image 2: "The Author — A Modern Living Replica of the Ancient Greek Statue of 'Hermaphroditos.'" Photograph of Jennie June posed as the Borghese Hermaphrodite. 
Image 3-6: "The Author at Thirty-four." Photograph of Jennie June.

While trans access to healthcare has never seemed more pressing, Svedjan’s project traces the fraught historical relationship between transness and self-authorship to newly problematize accepted wisdoms about the incompatibility between medical and aesthetic “truth” as models for trans flourishing.

In their work, Svedjan leverages an archive of trans autobiographies prefaced by sexologists like Jennie June’s Autobiography of an Androgyne (1918) to intervene upon ongoing debates in trans studies pitting—not unlike “trutrans” discourse—“material” against “aesthetic” transition.

Svedjan examines how aesthetic concepts of the “truth” of trans life have been constructed through narrative techniques like autobiography in U.S. literature.

Using the colloquialism “TruTrans”—a term used online to juxtapose “true” trans people who medically transition against their “fake,” non-medical counterparts—as a conceptual springboard,

The project interrogates discourses surrounding the “truth” of medical gender transition as it is represented in the work of both twentieth-century sexology and contemporary trans studies.

For the Wolf Humanities Center’s Truth Seminar, Svedjan is working on a project titled, "TruTrans?: Trans Autobiography, Sexological Paratext, and Medical ‘Truth.’"

Their dissertation project tracks the emergence of the modern concept of “bad sex” through its historical interfacing with institutions of literary education across the long twentieth-century United States.

Svedjan's writing appears or is forthcoming in venues such as TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, Postmodern Culture, among others.

2025-26 Wolf Humanities Center Doctoral Fellow Austin Svedjan is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania.

The Ethical Pact combines literary analysis with narrative ethics to explore what it means for there to be an ethics of narrativizing Russian war, of what it means to tell “true” stories about war, even as notions of truth are radically altered by political, cultural, and ethical contexts.

This imperative motivates the final chapter of The Ethical Pact, which focuses on Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine and the relationship between present day Russophone writing cultures and Russian militarism.

Vladimir Putin’s reliance on false narratives and distortions of history to justify his illegal invasion of Ukraine since 2014 have necessitated both academic and artistic resistance to set the record straight.

Questions of how Russophone writers have conveyed the “truth” of wartime experiences strike with renewed resonance after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

His project investigates the importance of ethical relativity in war narratives, and how ethics, notions of guilt or innocence, responsibility or culpability, are discursive appendages that often obscure the more nuanced relationships between culture and state power during times of war.

For the Wolf Humanities Center’s Truth Seminar, Small is working on his book manuscript, The Ethical Pact in Russophone Wartime Writing.

Beyond his work on Russophone literature, Small also teaches and researches video games and their implication in historical and contemporary military-entertainment complexes. Small was also previously a lecturer of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale.

Small earned his PhD from Yale University in Slavic Languages and Literatures in 2024. His research investigates the relationships between narrative, art, and politics. He is affiliated with Penn’s Department of Russian and East European Studies.

*Fellow Spotlight*

2025-26 Wolf Humanities Center Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow Spencer Small is a scholar of Soviet and Post-Soviet literature, culture, and digital media.