News & Views
History Dept Teaching Awards 2022-23
Please join us in congratulating this year's award recipients!OMNIA: Writer Clint Smith In Conversation with Penn Historian Mia Bay
At the annual Stephen A. Levin Family Dean’s Forum, Smith spoke about his poetry, his work as an educator, his opinions on how the past should and can shape the future, and more.Students interview President Liz Magill, fellow History Major
Elizabeth Meisenzahl and Hannah Kerekes sat down with President Magill in December 2022 to learn more about her own experience in the major.Congratulations! SAS distinguished teaching award recipients Prof. Sarah Gronningsater and KC O'Hara
Please join us in congratulating our wonderful colleagues in History for receiving 2023 awards for distinguished teaching in the School of Arts and Sciences.Penn Today: Sophia Z. Lee named Dean of the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School
Lee is currently a professor of law with a secondary appointment in history, and has been a member of the Penn Carey Law faculty since 2009.Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet (Op-Ed): Why were young women poisoned in Iran?
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has condemned the suspicious poisonings of students in over 50 girls’ schools, and the state has now arrested around 100 suspects. But how could such attacks have occurred in the first place, leaving Iranian schoolgirls extremely vulnerable?Julu Nwaezeapu, The Daily Pennsylvanian: Why universities need African histories
The study of African history is fundamental to a complete liberal arts education.Omnia: Sophia Rosenfeld and Peter Struck discuss 2,800 years of ideas through history
The Penn Arts & Sciences professors discuss editing their new book series, ‘A Cultural History of Ideas.’ By Katelyn SilvaJared Farmer, Smithsonian: The Science Behind the Oldest Trees on Earth
How experts have determined that bristlecone pines, sequoias and baobabs have stood for thousands of yearsKimberly St. Julian-Varnon, Opinion: Russian hypocrisy and the death of a Zambian student in Ukraine
Lemekhani Nyirenda’s life and death expose the fallacy of Russian anti-imperialist rhetoric on Africa.
Welcome to the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania. Over thirty historians in the standing faculty with a broad range of research specialties advance our understanding of the past.
In an age of wrenching social change and momentous global challenges, history gives us fresh perspectives, important distinctions, and a sense of how we got here. This year, join Penn historians for lively discussions of the past that seek to better orient us in the present. Because as events unfold, that’s History Speaking, too.
The Penn & Slavery Project teaches us that no colony, state, or well-funded university was buffered from slavery’s reach. Penn’s story is a national story, and one of great importance to our ongoing efforts to come to terms with our nations’s history of slavery.
Featured Students
Bianca Serbin
My name is Bianca, and I’m a senior pursuing the general history major and minoring in French. From a young age, I was certain I wanted to study history. I was influenced by my father, who is a historian and who always encouraged me to value stories about the past.
Carson Eckhard
Carson didn’t come to Penn set on being a History Major. Yet her freshman year she enrolled in “The American South” and there wrote a paper about Southern U.S. universities and slavery.
Archana Upadhyay
I’m a senior from Chicago majoring in World History. I transferred to Penn as a sophomore from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.
John Mullan
John is a double-major in History and Arabic and Islamic Studies.
