Thursday
26
March 2026
4:45 - 6:15 PM IST
Location
Room 004, School of Arts and Sciences
Central Campus
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The Roots of the Family Tree
Arts and Sciences Research Seminar Series
Maya Jasanoff
Coolidge Professor of History
Harvard University
Speaker
Today the family tree is a near-universal form of genealogical representation, but how did it develop in the first place? This talk traces the emergence of the family tree in western Europe and Asia, c. 500–1400 CE, and considers its implications for the allocation and inheritance of property and power.
Speaker
Maya Jasanoff
Maya Jasanoff is the Coolidge Professor of History at Harvard and a visiting professor at Ahmedabad University. She is the author of three books—Edge of Empire (2005), Liberty’s Exiles (2011), and The Dawn Watch (2017)—which have won accolades including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Cundill Prize in History, the George Washington Book Prize, and the Windham-Campbell Prize for Non-Fiction. Jasanoff is currently completing a wide-ranging history of the human preoccupation with ancestry. She writes widely about history, literature, and world affairs for publications including The New Yorker and The New York Times.
