Rate My Professor Jared Farmer

Jared Farmer is the Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History and Chair of the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania, positions he has held since 2021 and 2025, respectively. He joined Penn in 2020 as Professor of History, having previously served as Professor (2017–2019), Associate Professor (2012–2017), and Assistant Professor (2007–2012) in the Department of History at Stony Brook University, and as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Southern California (2005–2007). Farmer earned his Ph.D. in history from Stanford University in 2005, M.A. in history from the University of Montana in 1999, and B.A. in history with honors from Utah State University in 1996. Affiliated with Penn's History and Sociology of Science Graduate Group, Religious Studies Graduate Group, and the Initiative in the History of the Built Environment at the Weitzman School of Design, he also chaired the History Graduate Group at Penn from 2020 to 2023.

An environmental historian, Farmer studies the histories of built and unbuilt environments from the hyperlocal to the planetary, with temporal expertise in the long nineteenth century and regional expertise in the North American West. His major publications include On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape (Harvard University Press, 2008), which received the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians; Trees in Paradise: A California History (W.W. Norton, 2013), winner of the Ray Allen Billington Prize from the Organization of American Historians and other honors; Elderflora: A Modern History of Ancient Trees (Basic Books, 2022), awarded the Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History from the American Philosophical Society; and the forthcoming The Sound of Mormonism: A Media History of Latter-day Saints (Utah State University Press, 2025). Farmer has garnered numerous awards and fellowships, including the Hiett Prize in the Humanities (2014), Andrew Carnegie Fellowship (2017), Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin (2018), and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, American Council of Learned Societies, National Humanities Center, and Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. He has led the digital history project Petrodelphia, resulting in the 2025 public website America’s First Petrochemical Corridor, and pursues ongoing works such as Aerial Views, Proxy for the Dead, Point Breeze, and The Everlasting Stone Age. His scholarship has earned nine book awards and profiles in the Chronicle of Higher Education and Pennsylvania Gazette, contributing significantly to environmental humanities, landscape studies, and public history.