Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History and chair of the History and Literature Program. She received her Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale in 1995, an M.A. in American Culture from the University of Michigan in 1990 and a B.A. in English from Tufts University in 1987. She is an elected member of the Society of American Historians and a Distinguished Lecturer of the Organization of American Historians. A co-founder of the magazine, Common-place, Lepore has also served as a consultant for the National Parks Service and for a number of historic sites and public television programs. In 2006, she received the Kidger Award for service to the historical profession. Her research has focused on language, cruelty, race, and the writing of history. She is currently working on a biography of Benjamin Franklin and his sister, Jane Mecom. She is also a staff writer at The New Yorker.

Selected Publications

• Contributions to The New Yorker
• Blindspot (a novel written jointly with Jane Kamensky) (2008)
• Websterisms:  A Collection of Words and Definitions Set Forth by the Founding Father of American English, compiled by Arthur Schulman with an introduction by Jill Lepore (2008).
• New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan Pulitzer Prize Finalist; Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Award for Non-fiction (2005)
• “Writing for History,” in Why We Write, edited by James Downs (2005).
• “Reckoning,” Common-place, January 2003.
• A is for American: Letters and Other Characters in the Newly United States (2002)
• “Plagiarize This,” Common-place, April 2002.
• “Wigwam Words,” The American Scholar 70 (Winter 2001):  97-108.
• “Historians Who Love Too Much:  Reflections on Microhistory and Biography,” Journal of American History 88 (June 2001):  129-144.
• Encounters in the New World: A History in Documents (1999)
• The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity Winner of the Bancroft Prize, the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award, the Berkshire Prize, and a finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Award(1998)
• “Dead Men Tell No Tales: John Sassamon and the Fatal Consequences of Literacy,” American Quarterly 46 (December 1994): 479-512.

Contact Info

Robinson Hall

Room 209 & Barker Center 126

35 Quincy Street

Cambridge, MA 02138

jlepore@fas.harvard.edu

617.496.5083 & 5.3564 at Barker Ctr.

Office Hours: Thursday 11:00-1:00

Course(s): 97, 84b

Brief bibliographies for some New Yorker articles