Professor Jared Farmer, Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, will serve as Chair of the History Department from July 1, 2025 to June 30, 2028. Dr. Farmer studies the histories of built and unbuilt environments from the hyperlocal to the planetary. His temporal expertise is the long nineteenth century; his regional expertise is the North American West.
He has received fellowships and grants from institutions such as the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Humanities Center, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. In 2014, the Dallas Institute presented him the Hiett Prize in the Humanities; in 2017, the Carnegie Corporation of New York named him an Andrew Carnegie Fellow; and in 2018, the American Academy in Berlin awarded him a Berlin Prize. Farmer has been profiled in the Chronicle of Higher Education and the Pennsylvania Gazette.
Farmer’s book On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape (Harvard, 2008) won the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians. Trees in Paradise: A California History (Norton, 2013) won the Ray Allen Billington Prize from the Organization of American Historians. His latest book, Elderflora: A Modern History of Ancient Trees (Basic, 2022), won the Jacques Barzun Prize from the American Philosophical Society. In October 2023, he delivered the 28th annual Leonard J. Arrington Mormon History Lecture, which has been published in expanded form as The Sound of Mormonism: A Media History of Latter-day Saints (USU Press, 2025).
At Penn, Prof. Farmer is leading a collaborative digital history project, “Petrosylvania,” that in 2025 will result in a University-hosted website: “America’s First Petrochemical Corridor.” Farmer’s self-published digital projects—The Energies of Penn; Restoring Greatness to Utah; Mormons in the Media; and more—are available through his personal website.
Prof. Farmer is also affiliated with the History and Sociology of Science Graduate Group; the Religious Studies Graduate Group; and the Initiative in the History of the Built Environment at the Weitzman School of Design.