News & Views
M. Elizabeth Magill nominated to become President of the University of Pennsylvania.
Magill, who currently serves as Executive Vice President and Provost of the University of Virginia, will assume the Penn Presidency on July 1, 2022. She succeeds Dr. Amy Gutmann who announced last year that she would conclude her tenure as Penn’s President.Jared Farmer (History) - Jane E. Dmochowski (Earth and Environmental Science) and Irina Marinov (Earth and Environmental Science), talk about the challenges to understanding the Earth’s 4.6 billion year history, and more
Jared Farmer (History) - Jane E. Dmochowski (Earth and Environmental Science) and Irina Marinov (Earth and Environmental Science), talk about the challenges to understanding the Earth’s 4.6 billion year history, and how our actions in the present impact a future we can only imagine.Arielle X. Alterwaite - Biddy Mason in Images: A Monumental Life in Monumental Forms
LAST YEAR, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art asked five artists to reconceptualize local history through public monuments scattered across the city.Sophia Rosenfeld (Upenn-History), Heather Williams (Upenn-Africana Studies), and David Young Kim (Upenn-Art History), three historians weigh in on how we can understand our past and the Future of History.
Parents, teachers, and school boards arguing over how classrooms talk about race. Monuments coming down. Passionate defenses of our history as a noble past clashing with views that see that same history as the roots of today’s injustice.Benjamin Nathans - Opinion: Putin is banning the group that memorializes Stalin’s crimes. That’s bad for Russia.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is on the verge of liquidating his country’s most important civic organization.Sarah Xia Yu - Past plagues, current pandemics, and public hygiene messaging
History Ph.D. candidate Sarah Xia Yu discusses her research on public hygiene in China and what the past might tell us about how governments could better communicate public health messages.Past confronts present at 'History Speaking' lecture series. Penn Historians will present a series of lively discussions of historical issues that seek to better orient attendees in the current moment.
From the warming planet to the increasingly polarized electorate to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S.Benjamin Nathans - "To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement." A podcast from the Center for Russia, East Europe, and Central Asia (CREECA) - University of Wisconsin-Madison
Rather than treat Soviet dissidents as avatars of Western liberalism, or take their appeals to rights and legal norms as natural, Prof.Cheikh Babou interviewed on New Books in African Studies
Cheikh Babou was recently interviewed for the New Books In African Studies podcast about his recent publication The Muridiyya on the Move: Islam, Migration, and Place Making (Ohio University Press, 2021).
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
“The Origins and Futures of the Modern Research University”
Emily Levine, Stanford University
In accordance with University guidelines, this event will be virtual only
Virtual: …
Mae M. Ngai, Columbia University The Chinese Question. The Gold Rushes and Global Politics
Mae M. Ngai, Columbia University
UPDATE | This program will be presented virtually. Please register for the Zoom link.
REGISTRATION HERE
Drawing on ten years of research…
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
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.
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.
![A Research Guide to Materials on the History of Russian Jewry (19th and Early 20th Centuries) in Selected Archives of the Former Soviet Union [in Russian]](/sites/default/files/styles/book_carousel/public/2019-10/Nathans%20Book.jpg?itok=8czCfvmw)