News & Views
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
Penn Today: Redlining and rentals
The Atlantic: What the Civil Rights Act Really Meant by Prof. William Sturkey
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
Sovereign Fictions: Poetics and Politics in the Age of Russian Realism
Ilya Kliger (Russian and Slavic Studies, NYU)
East European History and Culture Workshop
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
John Mullan, class of '20
John double-majored 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.
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.