The Phi Beta Kappa Society Visiting Scholar Program presents:

Ancestry: Where do we come from and why do we care?, a talk by Dr. Maya Jasanoff.

Reception to follow. 

Jasanoff is the X.D. and Nancy Yang Professor and Coolidge Professor of History at Harvard University. 

Professor Jasanoff is a historian of British imperial and global history. Her books Edge of Empire (2005), Liberty’s Exiles (2011), and The Dawn Watch (2017) have won numerous 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. She is currently writing a history of the human preoccupation with ancestry and genealogy, the topic of a popular undergraduate course she teaches in Harvard’s General Education curriculum. She is also completing a short book on the craft of historical narrative, looking at ways to bring out the “story” in history. Professor Jasanoff writes widely about history, literature, and world affairs for publications including The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. In 2021 she was chair of judges for the Booker Prize.