Steven Laurence Kaplan (born January 23, 1943) is professor emeritus and former Goldwin Smith Professor of European History in the Department of History at Cornell University, a lecturer at the Sciences Po Paris and at the prestigious École normale supérieure (ENS).
He graduated summa cum laude in History from Princeton University in 1963.
Kaplan was the founder (1995) 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 (1986), the European University Institute in Florence, Tuscany, Italy (1987), the École Nationale des Chartes (2001, 2002), Sciences Po Paris (2002, 2010, 2013), the École Normale Supérieure, Lyon (2002), the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (1995), the University of Lille (2000) and the Maison européenne des sciences humaines et sociales de Lille (2009), and on numerous occasions at the École Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Sixième Section, re-organized as the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris in 1981.