Jill Lepore

Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History in Harvard University’s History Department and Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. She is also a staff writer at The New Yorker, contributing since 2005 on topics including American history, law, literature, and politics. Lepore received a B.A. in English from Tufts University in 1987, an M.A. in American Culture from the University of Michigan in 1990, and a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University in 1995. She joined the Harvard History Department in 2003 and served as Chair of the History and Literature Program from 2005 to 2010, in 2012, and in 2014. In 2012, she was named Harvard College Professor in recognition of distinction in undergraduate teaching. In 2024, she joined the faculty of Harvard Law School. She is the founder and director of Amend, an NEH-funded public archive of proposed amendments to the U.S. Constitution.

Lepore’s scholarship explores absences and asymmetries in the historical record, with particular emphasis on the histories and technologies of evidence. She teaches classes in evidence, historical methods, the humanities, the history of technology, and American political history. Her many books include The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (1998), winner of the Bancroft Prize, Ralph Waldo Emerson Award, and Berkshire Prize; New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan (2005), winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Award for the best nonfiction book on race and a Pulitzer Prize finalist; Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin (2013), winner of the Mark Lynton History Prize, National Book Award finalist, and Time magazine’s Best Nonfiction Book of the Year; The Secret History of Wonder Woman (2014), national bestseller and winner of the 2015 American History Book Prize; These Truths: A History of the United States (2018), an international bestseller named one of Time magazine’s top ten nonfiction books of the decade; IF THEN: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future (2020), longlisted for the National Book Award; The Deadline (2023), winner of the PEN prize for the Art of the Essay; and We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution (2025), a New York Times bestseller. Among her honors are election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society; the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought (2021); PEN Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay; honorary degrees from Yale, NYU, and Tufts; and research support from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, and others. She is a past president of the Society of American Historians and former commissioner of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery.

Professional Email: jlepore@fas.harvard.edu