Sophia Rosenfeld (born 29 November 1966) [1] is an American historian. She specializes in European intellectual and cultural history with an emphasis on the Enlightenment, the trans-Atlantic Age of Revolutions, and the legacy of the eighteenth century for modern democracy. In 2017, she was named the Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. [2]
Rosenfeld received her B.A. from Princeton University, and Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1996. Before coming to the University of Pennsylvania Rosenfeld taught at the University of Virginia and Yale University. [3] In 2014–15, Rosenfeld was a Member at the Institute for Advanced Study, where she researched how the maximization of choice gradually developed across the Atlantic world into a proxy for freedom in human rights struggles and consumer culture. [4] She also served a three-year term from 2018 to 2021 as Vice President, in charge of the Research Division, of the American Historical Association. In 2022, she held the Kluge Chair in Countries and Cultures of the North at the Library of Congress, and she was also named by the French government Officier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques. [5]
Her book Democracy and Truth was praised in the New Yorker's "Briefly Noted" book reviews: “Rosenfeld’s conclusion is sobering: even if the relationship between democracy and truth has long been vexed, the crisis facing Western democracies today is distinctly new.” [6]
The Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, commonly called the Katz Center, is a postdoctoral research center devoted to the study of Jewish history and civilization.
Amy Gutmann is an American academic and diplomat who served as the United States Ambassador to Germany from 2022 to 2024. She was previously the president of the University of Pennsylvania from 2004 to 2022, the longest-serving president in the history of the University of Pennsylvania. She currently serves as the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Political Science, School of Arts and Sciences, and Professor of Communication, Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.
Caroline Walker Bynum, FBA is a Medieval scholar from the United States. She is a University Professor emerita at Columbia University and Professor emerita of Western Medieval History at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. She was the first woman to be appointed University Professor at Columbia. She is former Dean of Columbia's School of General Studies, served as president of the American Historical Association in 1996, and President of the Medieval Academy of America in 1997–1998.
Thomas J. Sugrue is an American historian of the 20th-century United States currently serving as a professor at New York University. From 1991 to 2015, he was the David Boies Professor of History and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and founding director of the Penn Social Science and Policy Forum. His areas of expertise include American urban history, American political history, housing and the history of race relations. He has published extensively on the history of liberalism and conservatism, on housing and real estate, on poverty and public policy, on civil rights, and on the history of affirmative action.
The University of Pennsylvania School of Arts and Sciences is the academic institution encompassing the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences at the University of Pennsylvania.
The Penn Quakers are the athletic teams of the University of Pennsylvania. The school sponsors 33 varsity sports. The school has won three NCAA national championships in men's fencing and one in women's fencing.
Nancy Joan Hirschmann is an American political scientist. She is the Geraldine R. Segal Professor in American Social Thought at the University of Pennsylvania where she specializes in the history of political thought, analytical philosophy, feminist theory, disability theory, and the intersection of political theory and public policy.
Renata Holod is an American art historian, architecture historian and archaeologist, specializing in the Islamic world. She is the College for Women Class of 1963 Term Professor Emerita in the Humanities in the History of Art Department, and current Curator of the Near East Section, Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Holod has taught at University of Penn since 1972, and was a visiting Clark Professor at Williams College in 2002. She has conducted and/or directed archaeological fieldwork in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Iran, Morocco, Turkey, Ukraine, and Tunisia.
John L. Jackson Jr. is an American anthropologist, filmmaker, author, and university administrator. He is currently the Provost and the Richard Perry University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania and was previously Dean of the School of Social Policy & Practice and Special Adviser to the Provost on Diversity at Penn. Jackson earned his BA from Howard University and his PhD in Anthropology from Columbia University. He served as a junior fellow at the Harvard University Society of Fellows before joining the Cultural Anthropology faculty at Duke University.
Claire Finkelstein is the Algernon Biddle Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and the Director of its Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law.
Mirjam Cvetič is a Slovenian-American theoretical physicist at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is Fay R. and Eugene L. Langberg Professor of Physics and of Mathematics. Cvetič has a background in basic theory, phenomenology and conducts research that bridges the gap between basic theory and experimental consequences on certain theories. Her research includes the applications of string theory, M-theory to black hole behavior, and particle phenomenology. Also, she has published highly cited works on supersymmetry, more than two hundred journal articles and is the editor of Physics Letter B.
Vijay Balasubramanian is a theoretical physicist and the Cathy and Marc Lasry Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania. He has conducted research in string theory, quantum field theory, and biophysics. He has also worked on problems in statistical inference and machine learning.
Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet is an American-Iranian historian. Currently, she serves as Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on boundary disputes, borderland histories, gender, and identity politics in the Middle East.
Jonathan Zimmerman is an American historian of education who is a professor of history of education at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education.
Nili Rachel Scharf Gold is an Israeli-American professor of modern Hebrew language and literature in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to the study of modern Hebrew literature, she draws in her research on approaches from psychoanalysis, urban history, diaspora and migration studies, and studies of collective and individual memory. She has published prize-winning books on the Israeli Hebrew poet, Yehuda Amichai, and on the cultural, social, and architectural aspects of the city of Haifa. She has promoted an awareness of modern Hebrew culture in the United States by sponsoring conferences about, and public readings and lectures by, a range of Israeli writers and filmmakers.
Steven Phillip Weitzman is an American scholar of Jewish studies and religious studies, with interests that include the origins and early history of Judaism and the history of the Bible's reception. He has served as the Ella Darivoff Director of the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania since 2014. He is also the Abraham M. Ellis Professor of Semitic Languages and Literatures in the department of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
Kimberly D. Bowes is an American archaeologist who is a professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She specializes in archeology, material culture and economics of the Roman and the later Roman world. She was the Director of the American Academy in Rome from 2014–2017. She is the author of three monographs.
Roxanne Leslie Euben is an American political scientist specializing in Islamic political thought. She is Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor in the Social Sciences, at the University of Pennsylvania.
The McNeil Center for Early American Studies (MCEAS) is an independent research institute based at the University of Pennsylvania. MCEAS was established in 1978 to support basic research on early American history and cultures. MCEAS defines “early America” chronologically as the era between 1492 and 1850 A.D. and has a particular commitment to the North American mid-Atlantic, but is known as a premier research institute for the study of early modern North America generally. The Center publishes a peer-reviewed journal, Early American Studies, and a monograph series of the same name, both with the University of Pennsylvania Press.
Beth Linker is a science historian. She is Samuel H. Preston Endowed Term Professor at the University of Pennsylvania.