113, School of Arts and Sciences
Central Campus
Meeting ID: 960 7781 2146
Passcode: 398900
Maya Jasanoff is a Visiting Professor in the Humanities and Languages division of the School of Arts and Sciences. Educated at Harvard (BA), the University of Cambridge (MPhil) and Yale (PhD), she is now the Coolidge Professor of History at Harvard University. Her award-winning works explore different aspects of imperialism and globalisation. An acclaimed “method historian” who believes in following in the footsteps of the characters she writes about, Professor Jasanoff sailed across the Indian Ocean on a container ship and travelled on a barge down the Congo River for her much talked-about book The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World, which won the prestigious Cundill History Prize in 2018. Her first book Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750-1850 (2005) won the Duff Cooper Prize. Her second book, Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (2011), won the National Book Critics Circle Award and George Washington Book Prize.
Professor Jasanoff’s research has been recognized with numerous awards and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Kluge Chair at the Library of Congress, a Charles A. Ryskamp fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, and a fellowship at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. In 2015 she was named a Harvard College Professor for excellence in teaching. In 2017 she won the Windham-Campbell Prize for achievement in non-fiction literature.
Tansen Sen specialises in Asian history and religions and has special scholarly interests in India-China interactions, Indian Ocean connections, and Buddhism. He is the author of Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade: The Realignment of Sino-Indian Relations, 600-1400 (2003; 2016) and India, China, and the World: A Connected History (2017). He has co-authored (with Victor H. Mair) Traditional China in Asian and World History (2012) and edited Buddhism Across Asia: Networks of Material, Cultural and Intellectual Exchange (2014). He is currently working on a book about Zheng He’s maritime expeditions in the early fifteenth century and co-editing (with Engseng Ho) the Cambridge History of the Indian Ocean, volume 1.
He has done extensive research in India, China, Japan, and Singapore with grants from the American Institute of Indian Studies, the Japan Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (Singapore). He was the founding head of the Nalanda-Sriwijaya Center in Singapore and served on the Governing Board of the Nalanda University.
