Steven Kaplan (historian)


Steven Laurence Kaplan is a professor emeritus and former Goldwin Smith Professor of European History in the Department of History at Cornell University. His primary fields of expertise are French history, the history of markets, economic regulation, and political economy, and the history of food, specifically the history of bread, the grain trade and provisioning.

Biography

Steven Kaplan was educated through high school in New York City public schools. He graduated summa cum laude in History from Princeton University in 1963 and attended the Université de Poitiers in 1964 on a Fulbright scholarship. He received M.A., M.Phil. and Ph.D. degrees from Yale University.
Kaplan joined the Cornell University History Department as Assistant Professor of European History in 1970; he was promoted to Associate Professor in 1976 and Full Professor in 1980. In 1990, he was named Goldwin Smith Professor of European History, a post he held until he became emeritus professor in 2011. Kaplan was the founder and inaugural Director of the Program in French Studies at Cornell University. From 2003-2010, Kaplan spent one semester per academic year as professor of Early Modern French and European History at the Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin.
He has held numerous visiting professorships, including at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Quatrième Section, the Collège de France, the European University Institute, the Ecole Nationale des Chartes, the Institute d'Etudes Politiques, Paris, the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Lyon, the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, the Université de Lille and the Maison européenne des sciences humaines et sociales de Lille, and on numerous occasions at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Sixième Section, re-organized as the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in 1981.

Books