Maya Jasanoff

Maya Jasanoff is the Coolidge Professor of History at Harvard University and the author of two award-winning works of nonfiction. The first, Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750-1850 (2005), investigates Britain’s expansion into Egypt and India through the lens of European art collectors. Her most recent book, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (2011), was praised by critic and historian Linda Colley as “vivid, superbly researched and highly intelligent.” It tells the previously untold story of the more than sixty thousand loyalists who fled the United States in the years following the American Revolution, settling in places as diverse as Jamaica, Nova Scotia, and Sierra Leone. Liberty’s Exiles won numerous distinctions, including the George Washington Book Prize and a National Book Critics Circle Award. Jasanoff has been an ACLS Charles A. Ryskamp Fellow, a Cullman Center Fellow at the New York Public Library, and a Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress. Her book reviews and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including The Guardian and The New York Review of Books. Her book The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World was published by Penguin Press in November 2017.