Peter Conn retired from the University of Pennsylvania as Vartan Gregorian Professor of English and Professor of Education and was a member of the graduate groups in the history of art and American civilization. His publications include The Divided Mind: Ideology and Imagination in America, 1898-1917, Literature in America, Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography (a "New York Times Notable Book"), and The American 1930s: A Literary History.

Conn wrote and presented a video course and book on "American Best Sellers" for the Teaching Company. He has given talks at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Whitney Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and other institutions, on a number of American artists, including Edward Hopper, William Christenberry, Thomas Wilmer Dewing, Maxfield Parrish, Charles Sheeler, Winslow Homer, Wharton Esherick, and The Eight.

A John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellow, Conn has also received several awards for distinguished teaching. He has served as literary consultant on numerous television projects, including the Emmy-winning series, "The American Short Story," adaptations of novels by James Baldwin and Saul Bellow, and a video biography of John Dos Passos.

Since 1993, Conn has served as visiting professor at the University of Nanjing in the People's Republic of China. In 2011 and again in 2013, sponsored by the Ford Foundation, Conn lectured in West China on topics in American studies.

"With a diverse and fine selection of Thomas Sully's portraits, Peter Conn introduces us to a variety of socially and politically engaged men and women who contributed to the growth of important Philadelphia institutions dedicated to education, science, business, and the arts during the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century."--Carol Soltis, Project Associate Curator, Philadelphia Museum of Art

"Peter Conn has compiled what amounts to a splendid group portrait of early-to-mid nineteenth century Philadelphia by a single talented artist, Thomas Sully. Engagingly, this assembly of notables also reads as a tour of the great institutions, buildings, and milestones in the city celebrated in Sully's day as "the Athens of America.""--Kathleen A. Foster The Robert L. McNeil, Jr., Senior Curator of American Art, and Director, Center for American Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art

"Peter Conn has written an engaging and accessible exploration of Thomas Sully--the leading mid-19th-century portrait painter who should be better known today--situating him in his fertile Philadelphia environment. Underlining the importance of place for Sully's portrait practice, Conn surveys his layered relationship with the city's culture and society."--Sylvia Yount, Lawrence A. Fleischman Curator in Charge of the American Wing, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

"I have never read a book quite like it. It discusses two dozen portraits--and their subjects--by Thomas Sully, the prolific portrait artist of nineteenth-century Philadelphia. As we read Conn's biographies of Sully's sitters, we realize that he is slyly giving us the history of the city itself, its institutions and ideas, as told through the makers of those institutions, and their critics."