Steven Hahn was born on July 18th, 1951 in New York City. He was educated at the University of Rochester (BA) and at Yale University (MA, PhD) and is currently the Roy F. and Jeanette P. Nichols Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. A specialist on the history of the South, on the social and political history of the nineteenth century United States, and on the comparative history of slavery and emancipation, Hahn is the author of The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850-1890 (Oxford University Press, 1983), and the co-editor of The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation: Essays in the Social History of Rural America (UNC Press, 1985), and Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, Land and Labor in 1865 (forthcoming from Cambridge University Press). His scholarly articles have appeared in the American Historical Review, Past and Present and the Journal of Southern History.

Hahn has bee on the faculties of the University of Delaware, the University of California at San Diego, and Northwestern University before joining the History Department at Penn. He has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. He has won two Distinguished Teaching Awards (at UC San Diego) and has been recognized for teaching excellence (with selection to the Faculty Honor Roll at Northwestern). He is an elected Fellow of the Society of American Historians. And his scholarly work has been honored with numerous prizes: among them, The Allan Nevins Prize of the Society of American Historians; the Frederick Jackson Turner Award of the Organization of American Historians, the E. Harold Hugo Memorial Book Prize; and the ABC Clio America: History and Life Award of the Organization of American Historians. Hahn has also been actively involved with projects that promote the teaching of history in the public schools and that make humanities education available to diverse members of the community.

--photo credit: Caitlin Kelley