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The College of Arts & Sciences
The Department of History is committed to pursuing excellence in historical scholarship and teaching across many different time periods and research interests. Its outstanding faculty specializes in a wide array of historical issues and themes that transcend particular regions and periods. Courses connect undergraduate and graduate students with the excitement of historic discovery and provide a rigorous training in researching and analyzing the human past.
Associate Professor
Director of Undergraduate Studies
American Studies Program, Asian American Studies Program, Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program, History
Are you interested in becoming a history major? You can apply online, after securing your own major advisor. For more information: history-major-application-information. Paper Applications are available at 120 Mary Ann Wood Drive.
Important notices:
Codes for pre-1800 and World Areas courses are currently available soon on the Course List ( https://courses.cornell.edu/courses/hist/), and in archival Catalogs.
World Areas are coded as HAN, HNA, HEU, HGS, HTR
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Announcing History’s 2nd Open House/Trivia Night at 120 Mary Ann Wood Drive
Date: Tuesday, April 21, 2026
Time: 4:30-6:00
Location: 120 Mary Ann Wood Drive, Room 125
Details: Join us for a night of fun trivia, a chance to hear history’s faculty talk about their course offerings, and to find out what CHS is. Handouts (including course flyers) will be available, faculty will be on hand to answer questions, this will be a great time to meet other majors and minors, snacks, and earn prizes for trivia questions. Highlights about our first trivia event: https://history.cornell.edu/news/history-department-hosts-lively-open-house-and-trivia-night.
*Please share the details about this event with friends who are interested in History!
An anniversary gala will mark the Cornell Black Alumni Association’s 50th anniversary April 24-26 in Washington, D.C. Hosted by alumni of Cornell University, the event honors leading alumni and launches a $1.5 million legacy fund.
Trump's threats against Iranian infrastructure could backfire legally and strategically, experts warn. Cornell University historian David Silbey says attacking bridges and power plants would harm civilians and undermine U.S. objectives.
Watch the LaFeber–Silbey Lecture video - link available in the full article.
Cornell University will host “Indigenous Voices in Abiayala/Latin America,” on April 9 at 4:45 p.m., exploring Indigenous media self-representation in Latin America – known as Abiayala in the Guna language. Held in the in the A.D. White House and organized by Polly Lauer, a Klarman Postdoctoral Fellow in Romance studies in Cornell’s College of Arts and Sciences, the panel will feature scholars discussing Mapuche and Maya K’ishe’ cultural production, Indigenous languages and broadcasters’ fight to sustain native-language media such as Guatemala’s oldest Maya radio station.
Cornell admits the Class of 2030 emphasizing real-world impact, enrolling 5,776 students from 102 countries.
At Cornell University, the diverse cohort reflects the land-grant mission and applied learning goals across multiple colleges.
Cornell University Humanities Scholars traveled to Washington, D.C. to advocate for increased National Endowment for the Humanities and National Archives funding, meeting with congressional offices to highlight the impact of humanities programs on education. Their two‑day trip underscored how federal support strengthens community partnerships, language programs, and public humanities initiatives benefiting campuses and local organizations nationwide.
HIST 4084 How to be Modern: Thinking with Max Weber (HST-AS, SSC-AS (HIST-HEU)
Wednesday: 2:00-4:30 plus Independent Research
Professor Nicholas Mulder
Max Weber (1864-1920) was the sharpest analyst of modernity: a condition marked by a global capitalist economic system, in which individuals are forced to specialize in a profession and calculate rationally without the comfort of religious belief but longing for objectivity in a world overtaken by relativism. But despite Weber’s influence he never produced a major programmatic book or school and left a fragmented body work across sociology, history, law, economics, religion, and philosophy. This reading- and discussion-intensive course examines Weber in the round, exploring both his empirical historical work and why any study of the modern human condition requires grappling with the issues that Weber identified: universalism and relativism, objectivity, rationality, specialization and vocation, transnational comparison, historical development, ideal-types, and motivation.
HIST 2154 Sex and Power in Jewish History (also JWST 2851, RELST 2154) (HST-AS) (HIST-HEU, HIST-HPE)
Monday and Wednesday: 2:30-4:15
Professor Olga Litvak
Jewish men and women in early modern Europe lived their lives within a gendered social order inherited from the Talmudic period. The relationship between sex and power remained fundamental to Jewish communal discipline until the eighteenth century. The explosion of vernacular publishing, increasing economic and geographic mobility and the coming of emancipation challenged existing gender norms and liberated Jewish desire - well, almost. As we will see, modernity has an ambiguous effect on Jewish sexual expression and Jewish sexual politics. It is not clear that the emancipation of Jewish men had the same emancipatory effect on Jewish women. Jewish patriarchy proved unexpectedly resilient. In this course, we will explore why - despite Judaism's reputation for liberal attitudes to sex - neither most Jewish men nor many Jewish women embraced the possibilities of personal liberation from a reproductive regime of rigid self-control and near compulsory heterosexual monogamy.