Humanities and Languages

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. 

Professor Jasanoff is currently engaged in researching two books:

• How to Tell a History (under contract with Princeton University Press)
  
  This book explores the craft of historical writing in English from the 1800s to the present. It considers how certain methods of telling stories have become marked as either “academic” or “popular,” and explores the differences between scholarly methods of telling stories and those used by fiction writers. It argues that academics might profitably draw on the methods of postcolonial and postmodern authors in considering how to write histories for the 21st century. 

• Ancestors: Where do we come from and why do we care? (under contract with Penguin Press and HarperCollins)
  
  This book offers a sweeping consideration of the role that ancestry has played in informing individual and social identity, from the origins of Homo sapiens to the DNA ancestry tests of today. Drawing on biology, anthropology, sociology, and history, it argues that ancestry itself has an ancestry—that each method of describing where people come from relies on earlier conceptions—and that exploring this history can foster a better-informed, more precise discussion of the role that personal/social origins ought to play in different contexts today. 

Books:

• The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World. New York: Penguin Press, 2017. London: William Collins, 2017. New Delhi: HarperCollins India, 2017. https://www.harpercollins.co.uk/9780007553723/the-dawn-watch/
• Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011. London: HarperPress, 2011. https://www.harpercollins.co.uk/9780007180103/libertys-exiles/
• Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750-1850. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005. London: Fourth Estate, 2005. https://www.harpercollins.co.uk/9780007180110/edge-of-empire-conquest-and-collecting-in-the-east-17501850/

Selected recent essays and journalism:

• Review of William Dalrymple, The Anarchy (The Guardian, September 2019): https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/sep/11/anarchy-relentless-rise-east-india-company-william-darymple-review
• “Rudyard Kipling, American Imperialist” (The New Republic, August 2019):  https://newrepublic.com/article/154615/rudyard-kipling-american-years-imperialism-book-review
• “Lost Calcutta” (The New York Review of Books, May 2019): https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/05/23/lost-calcutta/
• “When Empires End: The Last Days of British India” (Foreign Affairs, January/February 2019): https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/review-essay/2018-12-11/when-empires-end
• “Out of India: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and the Art of Ambivalence” (The New Yorker, January 2019): https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/01/07/ruth-prawer-jhabvala-and-the-art-of-ambivalence
• “How Joseph Conrad Foresaw the Dark Heart of Brexit Britain” (The Guardian, October 2017): https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/oct/28/how-joseph-conrad-foresaw-the-dark-heart-of-brexit-britain

As a Visiting Professor at the University, Professor Jasanoff will offer lectures in imperial and global history, and engage faculty and students in different ways of writing about the past, such as biography and narrative non-fiction, through seminar-style courses.