PHILADELPHIA – Steven Hahn of the University of Pennsylvania has been elected to the 20-member Pulitzer Prize Board.  Hahn is the Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of History at Penn.

Hahn won the Pulitzer Prize for history in 2004 for A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration. The book also received the Bancroft Prize for Best Book in American History and the Merle Curti Prize in Social History given by the Organization of American Historians.

Hahn has written extensively about the American South, African-American history and the international history of slavery, emancipation and race. His other books include The Roots of Southern Populism (1983), The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation (1985) and, most recently, The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom (2009). He is also co-editor of Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation (2009). He is writing a book for the Penguin/Viking History of the United States series entitled, A Nation Without Borders: The United States and Its World, 1830-1900, as well as a textbook for Bedford-St. Martin’s Press, Colonies, Nations, Empires: A History of the United States and the People Who Made It.

 Hahn’s articles have appeared in the American Historical Review, Past and Present, the Journal of Southern History and the Journal of American History, as well as in The New Republic, Dissent, Le Monde Diplomatique and the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Hahn is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including ones from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. He is an elected member of the Society of American Historians.    He has been an expert witness on behalf of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and for the past three decades he has been actively involved in promoting the teaching of history in the public schools in cooperation with the American Council of Learned Societies, the California History Project and the Gilder Lehrman Foundation.

The Pulitzer Prizes, administered by Columbia University, were established by Joseph Pulitzer, a Hungarian-American journalist and newspaper publisher, who bequeathed money to Columbia when he died in 1911.