JILL LEPORE is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her scholarship focuses on language, cruelty, race, and the writing of history. Her books include The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle over American History (Princeton, 2010), a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice; New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan (Knopf, 2005), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (Knopf, 1998), winner of the Bancroft Prize; and Blindspot (Spiegel and Grau, 2008), a novel written jointly with Jane Kamensky, also a Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. Her research has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Pew Foundation, the Gilder Lehrman Institute, the Charles Warren Center, and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. She is currently writing a biography of Benjamin Franklin’s youngest sister; a series of essays about how historians write; and a study of Charles Dickens’s American legacy. Her next book, The Mansion of Happiness: A History of Life and Death, will be published in May of 2012.
A co-founder of the magazine Common-place, Lepore’s essays and reviews have also appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the Times Literary Supplement, American Scholar, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, The Daily Beast, the Journal of American History and American Quarterly. She has served as a consultant for the National Park Service and currently serves on the boards of the National Portrait Gallery, the Society of American Historians and the National Council for History Education. In 2011-12 she will be a Visiting Scholar of the Phi Beta Kappa Society.