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 also a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her most recent book, New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan (2005), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History; winner of the New York City Book Prize and the Anisfield-Wolf Award; and an ALA Notable Book. She is also the author of A is for American: Letters and Other Characters in the Newly United States (2002); Encounters in the New World: A History in Documents (1999); and The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (1998), winner of the Bancroft Prize, the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award, and the Berkshire Prize. Her essay about Noah Webster appears as the introduction to Websterisms: A Collection of Words and Definitions Set Forth by the Founding Father of American English (2008). Her current book projects include a biography of Benjamin Franklin's sister, Jane Mecom, and an intellectual history of American ideas about life and death.

Lepore received a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University in 1995, an M.A. in American Culture from the University of Michigan in 1990, and a B.A. in English from Tufts University in 1987. Her research has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Pew Foundation, the Charles Warren Center for the Study of American History, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, the American Philosophical Society, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. With Jane Kamensky, she founded the on-line magazine, Common-place in 2000. In 2001 she was elected to the Society of American Historians. She is a Distinguished Lecturer of the Organization of American Historians.

She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband, three sons, and an extraordinarily large and formidable dog of entirely mysterious extraction.