Interests

Maya Jasanoff’s teaching and research focus on the history of modern Britain and the British Empire, particularly in the 18th and 19th centuries. She is currently completing the first global history of the loyalists who fled the United States after the American Revolution, and resettled in Canada, the Caribbean, Britain, Sierra Leone, and beyond. Her first book, Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750-1850, explores British expansion in India and Egypt through the lives of art collectors. It was awarded the 2005 Duff Cooper Prize and was a book of the year selection in The Economist, The Observer, The Sunday Times, and The Independent. Jasanoff currently holds a Charles A. Ryskamp Fellowship from the American Council for Learned Societies, and spent 2006-7 as a fellow at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. Her essays and reviews have appeared in publications including The New York Times Magazine, The London Review of Books, and The New York Review of Books.

Selected Publications

• "The Other Side of Revolution: Loyalists in the British Empire" in The William & Mary Quarterly 65:2 (2008)
• "Border Crossing: My Imperial Routes" in History Workshop Journal 64:1 (2007)
• "Cosmopolitan: A Tale of Identity from Ottoman Alexandria" in Common Knowledge 11:3 (2005)
• Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750-1850 Knopf/Fourth Estate (2005)
• "Collectors of Empire: Objects, Conquests and Imperial Self-Fashioning" in Past & Present 184 (2004)

 

 

Contact Info

Center for European Studies

Room 206

27 Kirkland Street

Cambridge, MA 02138

mjasanof@fas.harvard.edu

617.495.4303

Office Hours:

Course(s):

"Loyal to a Fault"

Edge of Empire

London Review of Books