Forms & Info

SELECT TITLES THAT OUR FACULTY RECOMMEND TO ALL STUDENTS

Oscar Aguirre-Mandujano

• Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms (1980 [original in Italian, 1979])
• Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility (1983)
• Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (1984)
• Greg Dening's Mr Bligh’s Bad Language: Passion, Power and Theater on H.M. Armed Vessel Bounty (1992)
• Luise White, Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa (2000)

Mia Bay

• Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (1977)
• Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (1990)
• James Goodman, Stories of Scottsboro (1994)
• Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995)
• Stephanie E. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (2008)

Cheikh Babou

• Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of this Earth (1963 [original in French, 1961])
• Cheikh Anta Diop, The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality (1974 [original in French, 1960])
• Edward Said, Orientalism (1978)
• Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (1983)
• Talal Asad, The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam (1986)

Anne Berg

• Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (1997)
• damali ayo, How to Rent a Negro (2005)
• Eyal Weizman, Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability (2017)
• Victoria Osterweil, In Defense of Looting (2019)
• Bathsheba Demuth, Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait (2019)

Lee Cassanelli

• Philip D. Curtin, The African Slave Trade: A Census (1969)
• Eric Hobsbawm and Terrence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (1983)
• Louise White, The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi (1990)
• Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (1996)
• Fred Cooper, Africa since 1940: The Past of the Present (rev. ed., 2019)

Brent Cebul

• Daniel T. Rodgers, The Work Ethic in Industrial America, 1850–1920 (1978)
• Arnold Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–1960 (1983)
• Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (1990)
• William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (1992)
• John Soluri, Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental Change in Honduras (2005)

Roger Chartier

• Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (1957)
• Carl Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (1981)
• Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow / Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (1988)
• Paul Ricœur, Memory, History, Forgetting (2004 [original in French, 2000])

Hardeep Dhillon

• Yasmin Khan, The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan (2008)
• Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (2014)
• Sunil Amrith, Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants (2015)
• Katrina Jagodinsky, Legal Codes and Talking Trees: Indigenous Women’s Sovereignty in the Sonoran and Puget Sound Borderlands, 1854–1946 (2016)
• Tiya Miles, The Things She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake (2021)

Jared Farmer

• Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (2014 [original in German, 2009])
• Olga Tokarczuk, The Books of Jacob (2022 [original in Polish, 2014])
• Thomas Laqueur, The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (2015)
• Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals (2019)
• Dipesh Chakrabarty, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (2021)

Ann Farnsworth-Alvear

• Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, The Answer/La Respuesta (1994 [original in Spanish, 1690])
• Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century (1992 [original in French, 1967])
• Gareth Stedman Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History: 1832–1982 (1983)
• Alessandro Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History (1991)

Antonio Feros

• Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (1975)
• Roger Chartier, On the Edge of the Cliff: History, Language and Practices (1997 [original in French, 1991])
• Eric Hobsbawm, Interesting Times: A Twentieth-century Life (2002)
• Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2006)
• Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (2008)

Marc Flandreau

• Julius Caesar, Commentarii de Bello Gallico (ca. 58–49 BCE)
• Emile Guillaumin, La vie d’un simple (1904)
• Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon (1940 [original in German, 1940])

Emma Hart

• Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (1944)
• E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963)
• Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995)
• Karl Schlögel, In Space We Read Time: On the History of Civilization and Geopolitics (2016 [original in German, 2003])
• William H. Sewell Jr., Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (2005)

Peter Holquist

• Daniel Field, Rebels in the Name of the Tsar (1976)
• Laura Engelstein, "Combined Underdevelopment: Discipline and Law in Imperial and Soviet Russia," AHR (1993)
• Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as Civilization (1995)
• David Stevenson, Cataclysm: The First World War as Political Tragedy (2004)

Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet

• Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)
• John Hersey, Hiroshima (1946)
• Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)
• Laurel Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812 (1990)
• Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (2000, original in French)

Walter McDougall

• David Hackett Fischer, Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought (1970)
• William H. McNeill and J.R. McNeill, The Human Web: A Bird’s-Eye View of World History (2003)

Ann Moyer

• Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style. (rev. ed., 1988)
• Brian Stock, Listening for the Text: On the Uses of the Past (1990)
• Anthony Grafton, Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship In an Age of Science, 1450–1800 (1991)
• Andrew Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance (2010)

Benjamin Nathans

• David Hackett Fischer, Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought (1970)
• Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession (1988)
• Joan Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (1988)
• Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989)

Kathy Peiss

• W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (1935)
• Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812 (1990)
• George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (1994)
• Frederick Logevall, Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam (2012)
• Sarah Haley, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (2016)

Eve Troutt Powell

• Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West (1970)
• Janet Abu-Lughod, Cairo: 1001 Years of the City Victorious (1971)
• Edward Said, Orientalism (1978)
• Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983)
• Henry Louis Gates, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (1988)

Sophia Rosenfeld

• E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963)
• Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1985 [original in French, 1975])
• Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (1986)
• Joan Scott, "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis," AHR (1986)

William Sturkey

• Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986)
• John Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (1994)
• Tera Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors after the Civil War (1997)
• Thomas G. Andrews, Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War (2008)
• Fredrik Logevall, Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam (2012)

Karen Tani

• Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (2004)
• Susan M. Schweik, The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public (2009)
• Lauren Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (2009)
• Barbara Welke, Law and the Borders of Belonging in the Long Nineteenth Century United States (2010)

Arthur Waldron

• Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring (1878)
• W.H. Walsh, An Introduction to Philosophy of History (1951)
• Karl W. Deutsch, Nationalism and Social Communication: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Nationality (1953)
• Leszek Kołakowski, Main Currents of Marxism: Its Origins, Growth, and Dissolution (1978 [original in Polish, 1976])
• Donald Kagan, The Peloponnesian War (1969–87)

Beth Wenger

• Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (1983)
• Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession (1988)
• Linda Gordon, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction (1999)
• Jan Tomasz Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (2001)
• Robert A. Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880–1950 (rev. ed., 2002 [1985])

Seçil Yılmaz

• Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality (1978 [original in French, 1976])
• Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (1993)
• Arif Dirlik, The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism (1997)
• Harry D. Harootunian, History's Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice, and the Question of Everyday Life (2000)
• Afsaneh Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches and Men Without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity (2005)

SELECT TITLES THAT INFLUENCED OUR FACULTY IN THEIR FORMATIVE YEARS

Oscar Aguirre-Mandujano

• Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (2002 [original in German, 1930])
• José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (1985 [original in Spanish, 1930])
• Norbert Elias, The Court Society (1983 [original in German, 1969])
• Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred (1977 [original in French, 1972])
• Paul Ricœur, Time and Narrative (1990 [original in French, 1983–85])

Mia Bay

• William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (1936)
• Willie Lee Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment (1964)
• Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (1977)
• Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (1977)
• Robert Coles, The Call of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination (1990)

Cheikh Babou

• Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion (1920, original in German)
• Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (1971 [original in Italian, 1947])
• Aimé Césaire, Discours sur le colonianisme (1955)
• Djibril Tamnsir Niane, Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali (1994 [original in French, 1960])
• Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)

Anne Berg

• Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1963 [original in French, 1961])
• Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1977 [original in French, 1975])
• Eric Wolf, Europe and the People without History (1982)
• Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (1998)
• Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (2000)

Lee Cassanelli

• Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft (1953 [original in French, 1949])
• Ousmane Sembene, God’s Bits of Woods (1962 [original in French, 1960])
• William McNeill, The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (rev. ed., 1991 [1963])
• Basil Davidson, The African Genius (1969)
• Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972)

Brent Cebul

• St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Jr., Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (1945)
• Don DeLillo, White Noise (1985)
• Tom Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (1996)
• Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (2005)
• Suzanne Mettler, The Submerged State: How Invisible Government Policies Undermine American Democracy (2011)

Roger Chartier

• Marc Bloch, The Royal Touch: Sacred Monarchy and Scrofula in France and England (1973 [original in French, 1924])
• Lucien Febvre, The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais (1982 [original in French, 1942])
• Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1972 [original in French, 1949])
• Erwin Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (1951)
• Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process (1969 [original in German, 1939])

Hardeep Dhillon

• Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals (1980)
• Nayan Shah, Stranger Intimacy: Contesting, Race, Sexuality, and the Law in the North American West (2011)
• Daina Ramey Berry, The Price of Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation (2017)
• Lisa Ko, The Leavers (2017)
• Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals (2019)

Jared Farmer

• J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians (1980)
• Patricia Nelson Limerick, Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (1987)
• Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead (1992)
• William Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature (1995)
• William deBuys, Salt Dreams: Land and Water in Low-Down California (1999)

Ann Farnsworth-Alvear

• Richard Price, ed., Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas (1979)
• Luisa Passerini, Fascism in Popular Memory: The Cultural Experience of the Turin Working Class (1987)
• Alberto Flores Galindo, Buscando un Inca: identidad y utopía en los Andes (1987)
• Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power (1991)
• Maria Odila Leite da Silva Dias, Power and Everyday Life: The Lives of Working Women in Nineteenth-century Brazil (1985)

Antonio Feros

• Leon Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution (1930)
• Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (1957)
• A.D. Lublinskaya, French Absolutism: the Crucial Phase, 1620–1629 (1965)
• J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (1975)
• Umberto Eco, How to Write a Thesis (2015 [original in Italian, 1977])

Emma Hart

• Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks (1901)
• Joseph Conrad, Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard (1904)
• Gary Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution (1979)
• Detlev Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition, and Racism in Everyday Life (1989)
• Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation (1992)

Peter Holquist

• Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)
• Greg Dening, Mr Bligh’s Bad Language: Passion, Power and Theater on H.M. Armed Vessel Bounty (1992)
• Lucien Febvre, The Great Fear of 1789: Rural Panic in Revolutionary France (1932)
• David Sabean, Power in the Blood: Popular Culture and Village Discourse in Early Modern Germany (1984)
• Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution (1984)

Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet

• Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment (1866)
• Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha (1922)
• Sadeq Hedayat, The Blind Owl (1936)
• Albert Camus, La Chute (1956)
• Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)

Walter McDougall

• Patrick O’Brien, Aubrey–Maturin series (1969–2004)
• George MacDonald Fraser, Flashman series (1969–2005)

Ann Moyer

• Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1953 [original in German, 1946])
• Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)
• Peter Robert Lamont Brown, The World of Late Antiquity, AD 150–750 (1971)
• Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes In the Art of the Renaissance (1972)
• Paul Ricœur, Time and Narrative, (1990 [original in French, 1983–85])

Benjamin Nathans

• Lucien Febvre, The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais (1982 [original in French, 1942])
• Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1953 [original in German, 1946])
• Petr Geyl, Napoleon, For and Against (1964 [original in Dutch, 1946])
• Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)
• Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (1980 [original in Italian, 1976])

Kathy Peiss

• Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (1900)
• E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963)
• Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (1973)
• Linda Gordon, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: Birth Control in America (1975)
• Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (1977)

Eve Troutt Powell

• Naguib Mahfouz, Palace Walk (1990 [original in Arabic, 1956])
• Tayeb Saleh, Season of Migration to the North (1969 [original in Arabic, 1966])
• A.S. Byatt, Possession (1990)
• Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (1977)

Sophia Rosenfeld

• Carl Schorske, Fin de Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (1979)
• Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (1984)
• Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (1984)
• Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (1992)
• Ian Hacking, Historical Ontology (2002)

William Sturkey

• James Baldwin, Just Above My Head (1979)
• Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried (1990)
• John M. Barry, Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed America (1997)
• Edward P. Jones, The Known World (2003)
• Patti Smith, Just Kids (2010)
 
Karen Tani

• William Novak, The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-century America (1996)
• Michael Katz, The Price of Citizenship: Redefining the American Welfare State (2002)
• John Fabian Witt, The Accidental Republic: Crippled Workingmen, Destitute Widows, and the Remaking of American Law (2004)
• Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-century America (2009)

Arthur Waldron

• Confucius, The Great Learning (ca. 500 BCE)
• Fukuzawa Yukichi, The Autobiography of Fukuzawa Yukichi (1966 [original in Japanese, 1899])
• Halidé Edib, The Memoirs of Halidé Edib (1916)
• Nirad Chaudhuri, The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (1951)
• Giuseppe Tomas de Lampedusa, Il Gattopardo (1958)

Beth Wenger

• J.D. Salinger, Catcher in the Rye (1945)
• Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)
• Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (1987)
• Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812 (1990)
• Michael G. Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (1991)

Seçil Yılmaz

• Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1953)
• Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)
• Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1875–1914 (1987)
• John Berger, Ways of Seeing (1972)
• Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1970 [original in Spanish, 1967])

Penn Libraries include some of the oldest academic libraries in the country and their collections are valuable to history students. For European history, the library system possesses most of the important serial publications of documents issued in England, France, Spain, Italy, and Germany. For U.S. history, extensive collections of federal, state, and municipal documents are available. For Asian history, the library contains one of the most complete collections of South Asian materials in the country as well as extensive holdings in Chinese and Japanese.

The university also has many manuscript and rare book collections. For example, the Henry C. Lea Library, part of the university's Special Collections, collects primary materials for the study of the late medieval and early modern period. The Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books & Manuscripts holds in total over 250,000 printed books, over 10,000 linear feet of manuscript collections, and over 1,500 codex manuscripts. The Library at the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies holds approximately 200,000 volumes, including dozens of incunabula and thousands of rare books, mainly in Hebrew, English, German, French, Yiddish, Arabic, Latin, and Ladino. The Penn Museum Archives documents the university's many archaeological expeditions and also the history of the practices of archaeology, with extensive photogrpaphic and film holdings. The University Archives & Records Center documents the history of UPenn.

Beyond the university, Greater Philadelphia an unparalleled constellation of historical museums, libraries, and archives:

The Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries is a portal for searching various archives in the Delaware River Valley.

The Free Library of Philadelphia holds government documents, as does NARA at Philadelphia.

The Historical Society of Pennsylvania has extensive manuscript collections from the colonial and national periods, including transcripts of documentary material from English sources.

The Library Company of Philadelphia houses a large collection of American and European books, pamphlets, periodicals, and manuscripts, with particular strengths in the eighteenth century and nineteenth centuries.

The American Philosophical Society has an important collection of manuscripts and pamphlets.

The Academy of Natural Sciences has a large archival collection, mainly composed of the papers of its members.

The Science History Institute collects archival material related to the chemical and molecular sciences.

The Historical Medical Library at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia is one of the world's premier research collections in its field.

The Presbyterian Historical Society in Philadelphia serves as both the national archives and historical research center of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).

The Hagley Museum & Library in Wilmington, Delaware, is a preeminent institution for business history.

The resources for historical study at Penn extend far beyond the boundaries of the Department of History. Historians of note can be found in most of the other eleven schools on campus, including:

• Annenberg School for Communication
• Graduate School of Education
• Penn Carey Law School
• Penn Nursing
• Weitzman School of Design
• Wharton School

The Department is closely affiliated with the McNeil Center for Early American Studies (part of the School of Arts & Sciences), the leading institute of its kind, located a short walk from College Hall. During the academic year, the McNeil Center offers Friday seminars.

Graduate students are likewise invited to join seminars and colloquia organized by other centers, forums, and institutes, including:

• Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy
• Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies
• Penn Economic History Forum
• Wolf Humanities Center
• Workshop in the History of Material Texts

Scholars with strong historical interests can be found in other SAS departments and programs, including:

• Department of Africana Studies
• Department of Anthropology
• Department of East Asian Languages & Civilizations
• Department of Classical Studies
• Department of Economics
• Department of English
• Department of Francophone, Italian, and Germanic Studies
• Department of the History of Art
• Department of History & Sociology of Science
• Department of Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations
• Department of Political Science
• Department of Russian and East European Studies
• Department of Sociology
• Department of South Asia Studies
• Price Lab for the Digital Humanities
• Program in Latin American & Latinx Studies
• Program in Global Medieval & Renaissance Studies
• Program in Environmental Humanities
• Program in International Relations
• Program in Urban Studies
• Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies

Many faculty members from other departments take an active part in the History Graduate Program and regularly serve on student advisory committees. Moreover, the Penn Department of History maintains close cooperative ties with history faculty at nearby universities and colleges.

GENERAL

Path@Penn (registration and records, including transcripts)
https://path.at.upenn.edu/

PennPortal (assorted useful links)
https://portal.apps.upenn.edu/penn_portal/portal.php

Graduate policies and procedures
https://catalog.upenn.edu/graduate/policies-procedures/

PhD Regulations
https://catalog.upenn.edu/pennbook/academic-rules-phd/

Arts & Sciences, Grad Division (GSAS) Policies
https://www.sas.upenn.edu/graduate-division/current-students/policies

Graduate Student Center
https://gsc.upenn.edu/

Penn Career Services
https://careerservices.upenn.edu/channels/phds-postdocs/

AHA resources
https://www.historians.org/jobs-and-professional-development/professional-life/resources-for-graduate-students


HOUSING AND TRANSPORT

Off-Campus Services
https://www.business-services.upenn.edu/services/off-campus-services

Commuter Services
https://www.business-services.upenn.edu/services/commuter-services

Penn Transit Services
https://cms.business-services.upenn.edu/transportation/


MEDICAL/HEALTH

Wellness
https://wellness.upenn.edu/

Insurance info
https://wellness.upenn.edu/about-penn-student-insurance-plan-psip

Aetna PSIP
https://www.aetnastudenthealth.com/en/school/724535/index.html

Insurance grants
https://gsc.upenn.edu/resources/graduate-funding-and-finances/insurance-grants

Penn Dental
https://mypenndentist.org/about-us/insurance-plans/

Weingarten Center (disability services)
https://weingartencenter.universitylife.upenn.edu/

Penn Recreation
https://recreation.upenn.edu/


TECHNOLOGY

Tech Center (general tech support, electronics recycling, etc.)
https://techcenter.upenn.edu/support/home

Information Systems and Computing page for students
https://www.isc.upenn.edu/resources/students

Arts & Sciences student support (including Google@SAS, History Lab, etc.)
https://computing.sas.upenn.edu/students


EVENTS

History
https://www.history.upenn.edu/events

VPUL
https://ulife.vpul.upenn.edu/calendar/

GAPSA
https://www.gapsa.upenn.edu/events-calendar/

SASgov
https://www.sasgov.sas.upenn.edu/event

GSC
https://gsc.upenn.edu/events

 

Many of our Ph.D. students secure a sixth year of internal funding through fellowship competitions at Penn, including:

• SAS Dissertation Completion Fellowship
• McNeil Center for Early American Studies Hamer Dissertation Fellowship
• Penn Urban Studies Dissertation Completion Fellowship
• Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy Graduate Fellowship
• Price Lab for Digital Humanities Mid-Doctoral Fellowship
• Communication Within the Curriculum Critical Speaking Fellowship
• Penn Program on Gender, Sexuality, and Gender Studies Graduate Fellowship
• Provost's Graduate Academic Engagement Fellowship at the Netter Center

Our doctoral students likewise have an excellent track record of winning external fellowships for dissertation writing, as well as external and internal awards for dissertation research.

People affiliated with the Department have access (through PennKey) to a document listing various fellowships, grants, and awards available to Ph.D. students in history.

For general databases on fellowships, not exclusive to historians, see:

SPIN Database
https://research.upenn.edu/funding/spin/

Illinois Database of Grants and Fellowships for Graduate Students
https://apps.grad.illinois.edu/fellowship-finder/

The majority of our Ph.D. students have, in the long run, secured tenure-track positions at research universities and liberal arts colleges throughout the United States and the world. Here is a partial list of institutions that have hired Penn graduates as full-time assistant professors since 2005:

• American University in Cairo
• Amherst College
• Arizona State University
• Australian National University
• Berry College
• Bilkent University (Turkey)
• Bowdoin College
• Brandeis University
• Brooklyn College
• Brooklyn Law School
• Bucknell University
• California State University, Los Angeles
• City College of New York
• Columbia University
• Cornell University (2)
• DeSales University
• Drew University
• Durham University (UK)
• Emory University
• European University of St. Petersburg
• Fordham University
• Haverford College
• John Jay College
• Kaidong University (Korea)
• Kenyon College
• Loyola University of Chicago
• Marymount University
• Michigan State University
• Muhlenberg University
• Northwestern University
• Ohio State University
• Princeton University (2)
• Purdue University (2)
• Queens College (CUNY)
• Rhodes College
• Stanford University
• Stetson University
• Suffolk University
• Syracuse University
• Texas A&M University
• Touro College
• University of California, Berkeley
• University of Cambridge
• University of Denver
• University of Groningen (Netherlands)
• University of Hartford
• University of Iowa
• University of Jena (Germany)
• University of Kansas
• University of Michigan
• University of Nevada, Las Vegas
• University of New Hampshire
• University of Richmond
• University of Southern California
• University of South Florida
• University of Tennessee, Chattanooga
• University of Victoria (Canada)
• University of Wisconsin, Madison
• University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
• Valparaiso University
• Waseda University (Japan)
• Wesleyan University
• Williams College
• Wilkes University

In recent years, an increasing number of our graduates have found history-related employment outside the traditional tenure-track job market. We are proud to have Penn doctorates in staff, teaching, research, or leadership positions at institutions such as:

• Academia Sinica
• American Philosophical Society
• Berggruen Institute
• Cambridge University
• Collegium Institute
• Council on International Educational Exchange
• Duke University
• Gallagher & Associates
• Germantown Friends School
• Harvard University Press
• Indiana University
• Jovoto
• McLarty Associates
• Morgan State University
• New York University
• Paper Street Omnia Media
• Plivka Art Center
• UNC Chapel Hill
• University of Pennsylvania
• University of Virginia
• U.S. Department of Commerce
• War Childhood Museum
• Yale University

For general information and historical data on careers in the historical profession, see the American Historical Association.