Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and chair of Harvard's History and Literature Program. She is a contributing writer at The New Yorker, and her essays and reviews have also appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The American Scholar, and in scholarly journals including the Journal of American History, the American Historical Review, and American Quarterly.
Lepore's book New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan (Knopf, 2005) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History.
Lepore earned a B.A. in English at Tufts University in 1987, an M.A. in history at University of Michigan in 1990, and a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University in 1995, where she specialized in the history of early America.
Before Harvard, Lepore taught at the University of California-San Diego and at Boston University.
In addition to her several books of history, in 2008 Lepore published a novel. She wrote it with Jane Kamensky, a professor at Brandeis University. Blindspot: a Novel (2008), features a rogue Scottish artist who has arrived in late 18th-century Boston as the American Revolution is on the verge of erupting. Another character is his young apprentice, an artistically talented girl who disguises herself as a boy to gain social freedoms.
1999, winner of the Bancroft Prize in history, for The Name of War (1998). It also won the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award, the Berkshire Prize, and was a finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Award.
2006, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History, for New York Burning (2005)