News & Views
Penn Today: Dr. Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, Sarah Eskandari (PhD candidate), and Dr. Fatemah Shams on Women. Life. Freedom.
Prof. Domenic Vitiello wins Kenneth Jackson Award from Urban History Association for Best Book in N. American History
Penn Today: Professor Brent Cebul's new book ‘Illusions of Progress’
New York Times: Bianca Serbin, honors History major, featured
Penn Today: Senior Sophie Mwaisela travels to Geneva for History Honors Thesis research
Penn Today: Who, What, Why: Rich Lizardo on poverty in early modern Spain
Penn Today: Reinventing customary law in medieval France
Penn Today: Mary Frances Berry and Kermit Roosevelt on Juneteenth’s history
Penn Today: Kimberly St. Julian Varnon on the short-lived insurrection in Russia
Research at Penn: How the Muridiyya Made a Home in Harlem
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.
Upcoming Events
Legal History Workshop
Aziza Ahmed (Boston University), "We Are Not Immune”: How Feminists Transformed the Law and Science of AIDS
The workshops will continue to be hybrid. Zoom links and classroom location will be available in the calendar invites. Papers will be circulated for each individual workshop closer to the date. Lunch will be…
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
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.
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.
John Mullan
John is a double-major in History and Arabic and Islamic Studies.
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.