JILL LEPORE is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University. She is also a staff writer at The New Yorker.
The daughter of public school teachers, Lepore always wanted to be a writer, but spent years working odd jobs: newspaper girl, chambermaid, prep cook, secretary, public opinion survey caller, and shoe store clerk. She went to Tufts University on an ROTC scholarship as a math major but ended up graduating with a BA in English in 1987. After an MA in American culture from the University of Michigan, she finished a PhD in American Studies at Yale University in 1995.
She began teaching at Harvard in 2003 and started writing for The New Yorker in 2005. Her books and essays have been widely translated, including in German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Latvian, Swedish, French, Chinese, and Japanese. In 2012, she was named Harvard College Professor, in recognition of distinction in undergraduate teaching; she also teaches at Harvard Law School. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, she is also past president of the Society of American Historians.
Much of Lepore’s scholarship explores absences and asymmetries of evidence in the historical record. She likes to think about how people know what they know. Her earlier work includes a political history trilogy: The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (1998), winner of the Bancroft Prize; New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan (2005), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin (2013), a finalist for the 2013 National Book Award for Nonfiction. Her 2014 book, The Secret History of Wonder Woman, was a national bestseller and winner of the American History Book Prize.
She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband and three sons.