JANE KAMENSKY is the Harry S. Truman Professor of American Civilization and Chair of the Department of History at Brandeis University, where she has taught since 1993. She is the author, most recently, of The Exchange Artist: A Tale of High-Flying Speculation and America’s First Banking Collapse(Viking, 2008), a finalist for the 2009 George Washington Book Prize. Her other major publications include Governing the Tongue: The Politics of Speech in Early New England (Oxford University Press, 1997); and The Colonial Mosaic: American Women, 1600-1760 (Oxford University Press, 1995). She is co-editor, with Edward Gray, of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of the American Revolution.

Kamensky earned her B.A. and Ph.D. in history from Yale University. Her scholarship has been supported by grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. A member of the editorial boards of the Journal of American History, the Journal of the Early Republic, and the Massachusetts Historical Review, Kamensky co-founded Common-place, an award-winning online journal that she and Jill Lepore created and co-edited from 2000 to 2004.

In 2007-08, she studied at the Courtauld Institute of Art of the University of London, under the auspices of the Mellon Foundation, as part of her work on a book about American artists in London in the late eighteenth century. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her husband of twenty years, and their two sons.