Penn’s History Department is adding a new political history concentration, giving students the opportunity to explore the evolution of political institutions and state powers on a national and global scale. 

The concentration officially opened to all undergraduate history majors on Aug. 19. According to the department website, the program will push students to “think deeply about how time, place, geography, and context shape differences and similarities in the development and permanence of political regimes and cultures.”

Students who choose the concentration will take six courses — consisting of three core courses with the political history attribute, two “major–related” elective courses, and one seminar.  The political history concentration marks the department's ninth concentration, in addition to a general curriculum option. These offerings are divided into regional areas, such as American or European history, and thematic areas, such as diplomatic or economic history. 

Associate Director of the History Department Yvonne Fabella said the new concentration's introduction is a response to history majors' heightened interest in courses centered around political history, as well as a "dramatic increase" in the number of students pursuing a minor in legal studies and history over the last five years. 

Fabella said that while the history department has offered politics–oriented courses to students in the past, such courses did not effectively “provide a path through the major that was organized around the topic of politics."

“As an advisor, I would see students who are majoring in other subjects, like political science and PPE in particular, or maybe international relations, taking history courses in order to pursue those topics,” she said. “What we realized after talking with some of those students was that they didn’t understand that you could study politics while majoring in history … so, in a way, the creation of this concentration is just providing a structure for content that’s always been here.”

In addition to dissecting the comparative history of national politics, students will be encouraged to consider political history in a global context. During the fall 2024 semester, the department will offer a range of classes that explicitly examine international political institutions, including HIST 1550 East Asian Diplomacy, HIST 3350 Religion and Colonial Rule in Africa, and HIST 3920 European Diplomatic History 1789–1914. 

College senior Alana Yang, who is among the first cohort of students to declare the concentration, said that she was drawn to the program’s emphasis on studying political history’s chronological development beyond national borders. 

“Something that has always been important to me as a history major is understanding context,” Yang said. “My political courses have taught me that all of these global issues happening around the world didn’t happen in a vacuum … so one thing that the history major and political history concentration has taught me in general, is just to look at context more carefully than the actual situation itself.”

The concentration’s conceptualization was spearheaded by assistant History professor Sarah Gronningsater and History professor Brent Cebul. In response to many of their own students’ demonstrated interest in political history, they worked together to develop a concentration that bridged the gap between the two disciplines. 

When structuring the concentration’s curriculum, Cebul and Gronningsater said that they hoped to highlight classes that emphasize constitutional and legal changes across history. Both invited their colleagues to nominate courses that focus on questions of citizenship, subjectivity, and their interactions with formal political institutions and movements.  

Beyond its fusion of politics and history, the concentration will include courses that overlap with other majors in the College. Gronningsater wrote in a statement to the DP that the department welcomes these interdisciplinary connections. 

“In fact, one of the reasons we created the concentration is because we had non–History majors — those in Political Science, PPE, the Legal Studies and History minor, and others — who expressed the desire for more political history," she wrote. "While of course political history concentrators will take our classes, we very much welcome students from across the College of Arts and Sciences and all Penn undergrad schools into the classes that we have designated 'political history.'"

Although the concentration aims to provide a comprehensive examination of past political regimes, Cebul wrote to the DP that he believes the concentration can also offer students insight into the dynamics underlying today’s political landscape.

“Thinking historically also enables us to think with all sorts of cultures and peoples on their own terms,” Cebul wrote. “And that in and of itself alerts us to all sorts of other possibilities, habits of mind, and ways of organizing human societies — which has the power to help us understand our own minds and societies that much better.”