Welcome! Bienvenue! Swagatam! Willkommenl! INTERNATIONAL CLASSROOM hosted its annual International Student Reception on October 20, 2000. International students, scholars, and professionals were invited to a unique welcome in the Museum’s Chinese Rotunda. The event was cosponsored by 43 colleges and universities, and guests came from 87 countries, ranging from Armenia to Zimbabwe. Guests of honor were the Consul of Italy, The Honorable Lorenzo Mott, and Ida Chen, the first Asian American judge of the Court of Common Pleas of Philadelphia County.
“It was something special to get to meet so many people from so many countries and especially our own countrymen and women at such a far-off place,” said a St. Joseph’s University student from India. International Classroom’s acclaimed program of presentations and workshops continues to grow by recuiting new international speakers and networking with Foreign Student Advisors.
The Museum is also welcoming back a number of its artifacts that have been viewed by more than 645,000 people in the traveling exhibit SEARCHING FOR ANCIENT EGYPT: Art, Architecture and Artifacts from the University of Pennsylvania Museum. Over the last three years the exhibition went to Dallas, Denver, Seattle, Omaha, Birmingham, and Honolulu (where it broke all previous attendance records at the Academy of the Arts). Curated by Dr. David Silverman and jointly organized by UPM and the Dallas Museum of Art, Searching for Ancient Egypt featured a diverse selection of ancient Egyptian artifacts.
Twenty-two of the objects being returned to the Museum galleries this fall are long-time visitor favorites, including a tall slender bronze cat and a gilded funerary mask. Five large pieces going into the galleries have never before been on display at UPM; these include a statue of the lion goddess Sekmet and a massive sarcophagus lid. In future months, 26 additional pieces from the traveling exhibit, also new to the Museum galleries, will be added.
A newly endowed chair has been created by the UPM in Penn’s School of Arts and Sciences. DR. DAVID SILVERMAN, chairman of the department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and Curator in Charge of the Museum’s Egyptian Section, is the new Eckley Brinton Coxe, Jr. Professor and Curator of Egyptology. Silverman joined Penn’s faculty in 1976, having received his Ph.D. in Near Eastern languages and civilizations from the University of Chicago in 1975. He has received many awards and distinctions including grants from the National Foundation for the Humanities, Penn Research Foundation grants, and the Athenaeum Society of Philadelphia Literary Award. He has completed extensive fieldwork in Egypt.
The chair was created in honor of Eckley Brinton Coxed, Jr. (1872-1916), who personally financed six Museum expeditions to Nubia and Egypt from which came many of the artifacts now on display in the Egyptian galleries.