Warren Breckman Named Sheldon and Lucy Hackney Professor of History

Warren Breckman has been named Sheldon and Lucy Hackney Professor of History. Breckman is a leading intellectual and cultural historian of modern Europe. He is the author of three books, Karl Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory: Dethroning the Self, European Romanticism: A Brief History with Documents, and Adventures of the Symbolic: Postmarxism and Radical Democracy. He was the executive co-editor of the Journal of the History of Ideas from 2006-2016 and a founding editor of Zeitschrift für Ideengeschichte.

Breckman has been a fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung and a member of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, and has served as visiting scholar at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris and the American Academy in Berlin. He has also received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, and the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada. At Penn, Dr. Breckman has served as Faculty Director of the Penn Graduate Humanities Forum, Topic Director of the Penn Humanities Forum, and as a member of the University Graduate Council.

The Sheldon and Lucy Hackney Professorship in History was created in 1993 by the University’s Board of Trustees in honor of Dr. Sheldon Hackney, then the outgoing president of Penn, and his wife, Lucy, for their many years of devoted service to the University. The late Dr. Hackney served as University president from 1981 to 1993 and went on to become Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities from 1993 to 1997 before returning to Penn’s history faculty until his 2010 retirement.