Jill Lepore

Jill Lepore (born 1966) is a professor of American history at Harvard University and chair of Harvard's History and Literature Program. She is a contributing writer at The New Yorker, and her essays and reviews have also appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The American Scholar, and in scholarly journals including the Journal of American History, The American Historical Review, and American Quarterly.

Lepore's book New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan (Knopf, 2005) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History.

Biography

Youth and education

Lepore was born and grew up outside of Worcester, Massachusetts. Although she had no early desire to become a historian, she claims to have wanted to be a writer from the age of six. Lepore entered college with an ROTC scholarship, starting as a math major. Eventually she left ROTC and changed her major to English.^[1]

Lepore earned her B.A. in English at Tufts University in 1987, an M.A. in history at University of Michigan in 1990, and a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University in 1995, where she specialized in the history of early America.^[2]

Career

Lepore taught at the University of California-San Diego and at Boston University before starting at Harvard. In addition to her books of history, in 2008 Lepore published a historical novel, Blindspot, written with co-author Jane Kamensky, a history professor at Brandeis University. Previously, Lepore and Kamensky had co-founded an online history journal called "Common-place".^[1]

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Works

Books

The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity, 1998
Encounters in the New World: A History in Documents, 1999
A is for American: Letters and Other Characters in the Newly United States, 2002
New York Burning: Liberty and Slavery in an Eighteenth-Century City, 2005
Blindspot: A Novel, with Jane Kamensky, 2008
The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle over American History, Princeton University Press, 2010
The Mansion of Happiness: A History of Life and Death, 2012
The Story of America: Essays on Origins, 2012

Uncollected articles and essays

"Historians Who Love Too Much: Reflections on Microhistory and Biography, Journal of American History, 88 (June 2001): 129-44.
"Just the Facts, Ma'am", The New Yorker, 24 March 2008.

This section requires expansion. (October 2012)

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Awards and honors

1999, winner of the Bancroft Prize in history, for The Name of War (1998). It also won the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, the Berkshire Prize, and was a finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Award.^[2]
2006, winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award (nonfiction), for New York Burning (2005)
2006, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History, for New York Burning (2005)
2012, Sarah Josepha Hale Award Hale Award Winners Webpage