News & Views
Penn Today: Patterns of Soviet Jewish emigration in the post-Stalin era with Sasha Zborovsky, History PhD Candidate
For four decades, more than one million Jews left the USSR despite the Soviet Union’s complex bureaucracy and opposition to emigration. Doctoral candidate Sasha Zborovsky explores the intricate dynamics.Penn Today: Teaching and learning abroad in Vietnam
In a Q&A, Fred Dickinson of the Department of History discusses his semester as a Fulbright U.S. Scholar in Vietnam and building out Southeast Asian studies at Penn.Curation, Narration, Erasure: Power and Possibility at the U.S. Supreme Court
Professor Karen Tani was invited to write the foreword to this year’s Harvard Law Review special issue on the Supreme Court.Dr. Hardeep Dhillon wins Western Historical Association's Vicki Ruiz Award
Professor Dhillon's article "The Making of Modern US Citizenship and Alienage: The History of Asian Immigration, Racial Capital, and US Law" is published in Law and History Review.The DP: Activist, Penn professor Mary Frances Berry reflects on 1964 civil rights movement at lecture
History and Africana Studies professor Mary Frances Berry led a discussion on the significance of the 1964 civil rights movement at the Annenberg Public Policy Center on Oct. 10.OMNIA: Children of Freedom
Historian Sarah Gronningsater’s new book, about efforts toward slavery’s abolition and equal rights in New York from the Revolution through Reconstruction, shows how Black people found ways to advocate for their freedom—and helped mold a new nation.British Academy Book Prize 2024 shortlist announced
The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals after 1492 by Marcy Norton (Harvard University Press)Carceral Recycling: Zero Waste and Imperial Extraction in Nazi Germany
New publication in The American Historical Review by Dr. Anne BergThe Daily Pennsylvanian: Penn History Department launches political history concentration for undergraduate majors
By Chloe Norman Full text and images at The Daily PennsylvanianNew Publications by Department of History Faculty
New Publications by Department of History Faculty The Rising Generation: Gradu
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 Stalin Cult and Soviet Lyric Poetry of the 1930s
Anatoly Pinsky (Visiting Researcher, Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki; Visiting Scholar, Kennan Institute)
East European History and Culture Workshop
The Inquisition’s Inquisitor: Henry Charles Lea of Philadelphia
Richard L. Kagan
Book Talk
Join in celebrating…
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, 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.
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.
