As history professor Kathleen Brown steps into her new role as chair of the Faculty Senate, she described it as an opportunity to revitalize shared governance at Penn in an interview with The Daily Pennsylvanian.

Brown, who teaches the history of gender and race in early America, will serve as chair for the 2025-26 academic year. She characterized her role as an opportunity to “reinvigorate the democratic process” at Penn, an institution she said is “coming out of terrible crisis” and faces a “very tense political moment.”

Brown — who is approaching 30 years at Penn — sees herself as “a historian who is endlessly curious about how history allows us to believe that what we are told is natural in the world.” That curiosity, she said, has driven both personal discovery and professional growth.

“We’re in a moment where so much is being upended,” Brown said. “We’ve seen the suspension of due process and questions about how much of a touchstone the Constitution is for what’s legal and what’s not.”

Brown’s vision for the Faculty Senate involves helping her peers understand “what’s at stake for all the other faculty members on this campus, because we are a very diverse group in terms of our vulnerabilities, our strengths and supports, [and] our privileges.” 

“When the process isn’t transparent and people don’t feel like they can engage it fruitfully, then they go away,” she added.

Brown also highlighted the need for new ways of thinking at a moment of “crisis” on Penn’s campus, pointing to the loss of funding for “salaries, research projects, [and] important work” across the University.

“There’s serious jeopardy all over the University, and people are … not being over dramatic and hyperbolic,” she added.

Penn is currently the subject of multiple federal investigations, including a probe into the University’s foreign donation disclosures, allegations of price-fixing, and a set of demands issued by the Department of Education after finding that Penn violated Title IX by allowing transgender athletes to compete in women’s intercollegiate athletics.

The University is also facing continued pressures from 1968 Wharton graduate and President Donald Trump, who has implemented restrictions on institutional students, cut federal research funding, and worked to dismantle diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives across college campuses.

“I’m sorry that I’ve lived long enough to see what’s happening at the moment in higher education,” Brown said. “But I sort of feel well prepared by my life experience and my teaching experience and my administrative experience to step up into a leadership role.”

Before assuming her position as chair-elect in 2024 Brown visited the University’s archives to research the history of the Faculty Senate.

“What I learned was that it actually has a really vigorous and interesting history of deep engagement and deep influence on campus,” Brown said, specifically referencing the numerous elections that occurred “in order to bring about the constituencies of the tri-chairs” and the members of the Senate Executive Committee. 

While acknowledging that the historical function of the Faculty Senate “doesn’t mean that’s necessarily the right mode for shared governance right now,” Brown emphasized that “knowing the path you’ve been on to get where you are is illuminating.”

Brown told the DP that she admires former Faculty Senate Chair and University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School professor Eric Feldman’s “hard work” during his “very turbulent year” as chair. However, she also expressed her desire to bring a new vision to the role — including ways to “learn more about what shared governance can mean and what it should look like” within the Faculty Senate.

“I’m interested personally in learning more about how shared governance works in other places, more about the history of how it has worked here, how it came about here, and how it worked here — and just thinking about … how to hang on to it in a way that’s going to serve all interests on campus,” Brown added.

In her letter of introduction — published May 27 — Brown outlined her plan for investigating the Faculty Senate’s shared governance, including “discussing how best to democratize all processes and procedures for selection to SEC, Faculty Senate committees, and the tri-chairs.”

“It will mean reviewing exactly how we communicate with constituencies and how they communicate with us,” Brown wrote in the letter. “This might also mean considering whether we should have elections for SEC and the tri-chairs as was past practice at Penn. Even if we reject the option of elections, a thorough review of our democratic practice will serve to make us stronger by making us more intentional in our practices and commitment to our governance structure.”

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Brown’s academic journey began during her undergraduate studies at Wesleyan University before she received a master’s degree and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin. 

While a graduate student at Wisconsin, Brown also served as a teaching assistant. Before coming to Penn in 1995 as a visiting professor, Brown taught at a high school in Virginia.

Brown’s interest in the “work [that] goes into making things look natural” has informed almost everything she has written, including her most recent book, “Undoing Slavery: Abolitionist Body Politics and the Argument over Humanity.”

This also led to the formation of the Penn & Slavery Project, a student-driven archival endeavor that researches the University’s historical ties to slavery and the slave trade. Brown has guided the project since its creation in 2017.

She called the project “the biggest highlight of [her] time at Penn,” noting its role in “transform[ing] the career paths” of many original members. From augmented reality tours of the legacy of Penn’s slavery to in-depth examinations of the University’s financial records, the project — whose website is currently undergoing updates, according to Brown — has continued to grow each year.

“People are kind of amazed by it, especially when they realize undergraduates did the research and undergraduates really imagined and designed the whole thing,” Brown told the DP of the project in 2024. 

From 2017 to 2020, Brown served as the director of Penn’s Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies program — a tenure she described as “an energetic effort to get professors of practice affiliated and to renew the enthusiasm” of the program.

“A lot of that got taken apart very quickly in the spring of 2020, so it was very disappointing … in that it felt very transient at that moment,” Brown said. “But some of it has persisted thanks to the effort of subsequent directors.”

Brown has similarly guided the Marks Family Center for Excellence in Writing as faculty director through a period of transition. She noted the program’s “changing landscape,” including a piloting process for new courses.

“There’s no question that it’s entering the second chapter of its existence,” Brown said in reference to a DP survey that found growing criticisms of Penn’s Critical Writing Seminar. 

Brown also serves as the interim director of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, a program she classified as “unique nationally and internationally” because of its focus on the “work” and “discipline” for Ph.D. students.

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Brown’s first formal introduction to the University community came as she delivered her address on overturning “old wisdom” at Penn’s 269th Commencement ceremony last month.

In her speech, Brown encouraged students to “listen carefully” to others while thwarting the urge to accept “what is said uncritically.”

“Combining intellectual curiosity with humility is tricky,” Brown told the crowd of graduates, family members, and faculty at Franklin Field. “When we ask questions, we are acknowledging that we don’t know everything without listening to others.”

Despite the “terrifying” rush she felt standing before the Commencement podium, Brown recalled feeling as if she had “overcome” the “public speaking phobia” of her childhood. 

“We were given pretty strict instructions that it be three minutes, and we were very heartily encouraged to make a reference to Benjamin Franklin,” she said.

Thankfully for Brown, the speech was not the first time she has been tasked with embodying Penn’s founder. Brown, along with fellow history professor Emma Hart, has made a hobby of dressing up as Franklin on Locust Walk to distribute “subversive Benjamin Franklin quotes.”

“I don’t really have heroes from history, because I think that whole impulse to turn people into heroes is really a very bad one,” Brown said. “I actually have some problems with Benjamin Franklin as an enslaver [and] as a really pretty terrible misogynist. But I decided that at this moment — if the University had decided to double down on Benjamin Franklin — then I would make Benjamin Franklin work for me.”

Brown chose to include Franklin’s advice that “half of the truth is often a great lie,” nodding again to how historical conventions play a role in “people’s personal journeys with choos[ing] an ethical path going forward.”

“Use your curiosity and your critical thinking skills you hold here at Penn to question what you are told and to wonder whether there is more to know,” she said during the speech.

Brown also described feeling compelled to use her three minutes to “say something heartfelt” — a decision that led her to pages of Mary Oliver’s poetry.

“I turned to Oliver because … a lot of her poetry has to do with trying to unravel the mysteries of existence just by sitting quietly at the edge of a field,” Brown said. 

Brown contemplated her “own improbable journey to this immense podium” while speaking to the Class of 2025. 

“I’m about to turn 65 and I feel like I’m in a world where, for good reasons and for ill, I see a lot of upending going on,” Brown told the DP. “That’s kind of a painful process for people as they get older — if they want to feel justified and they want to feel like they’ve given it their best shot and something good has come out of it.”

“But actually, every educator I know worth their salt is really trying to train people to be able to think better and smarter,” she said.