News & Views
Dr. Hardeep Dhillon wins Western Historical Association's Vicki Ruiz Award
The DP: Activist, Penn professor Mary Frances Berry reflects on 1964 civil rights movement at lecture
OMNIA: Children of Freedom
British Academy Book Prize 2024 shortlist announced
Carceral Recycling: Zero Waste and Imperial Extraction in Nazi Germany
The Daily Pennsylvanian: Penn History Department launches political history concentration for undergraduate majors
New Publications by Department of History Faculty
New York Times Book Review: Sometimes Protest Movements Are a Slow, Slow Burn
Dr. Kathleen Brown wins SHEAR Mary Kelly Prize
Omnia: Telling the story of a Hispanic war hero
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 Paradox of Hunger Strikes
Nayan Shah, Professor of American Studies & Ethnicity and History, University of Southern California
Co-sponsored event
The Paradox of Hunger Strikes
Nayan Shah
Professor of American Studies & Ethnicity and History, University of Southern California
Wednesday,…
The Other Reconstruction: The Enslavers State After Emancipation
Gautham Rao, American University
Legal History Workshop
Professor Gautham Rao, from American University, will present his paper, “White Power: Policing American Slavery (manuscript under contract), introduction and chapter 5, “The Other Reconstruction: The Enslavers State…
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.
John Mullan, class of '20
John double-majored in History and Arabic and Islamic Studies.
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.
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.