Jane Kamensky was professor of historical past at Harvard College and the Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Basis Director of the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the Historical past of Ladies in America on the Radcliffe Institute for Superior Research. She is a historian of the Atlantic world and america with explicit pursuits within the histories of household, tradition, and on a regular basis life.
Born in Manhattan, Kamensky acquired her BA (1985) and PhD (1993) in Historical past from Yale College. Earlier than coming to Harvard, she taught for twenty years at Brandeis College, the place she received two awards for excellence in instructing, and chaired the Division of Historical past. She has additionally served as Mary Ann Lippitt Professor of Historical past at Brown College.
Her most up-to-date ebook, A Revolution in Colour: The World of John Singleton Copley (2016), received the New-York Historic Society’s Barbara and David Zalaznick Ebook Prize in American Historical past, the James Bradford Biography Prize of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, and the Annibel Jenkins Biography Prize of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Research, and was a finalist for PEN’s Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography, the Marfield Prize for Arts Writing, and the George Washington Ebook Prize. Kamensky’s earlier books embrace The Trade Artist: A Story of Excessive-Flying Hypothesis and America’s First Banking Collapse (2008), additionally a finalist for the George Washington Ebook Prize; Governing the Tongue: The Politics of Speech in Early New England (1997); and the novel Blindspot (2008), collectively written with Jill Lepore. With Edward G. Grey, she edited the Oxford Handbook of the American Revolution (2012). Her subsequent ebook, Candida Royalle and the Sexual Revolution: A Historical past from Beneath, will likely be printed by W. W. Norton.
Kamensky’s analysis has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Basis, the Nationwide Endowment for the Humanities, the Radcliffe Institute for Superior Research, the Charles Warren Heart at Harvard, and the Paul Mellon Centre for Research in British Artwork. A co-founder, with Jill Lepore, of the web journal Frequent-place, she has served on the editorial boards of the American Historic Assessment, the Journal of American Historical past, and the Journal of the Early Republic, and as a Commissioner of the Smithsonian’s Nationwide Portrait Gallery. She has been elected to the Council of the American Antiquarian Society, the Govt Board of the Group of American Historians, the Advisory Board of the Society of Historians of the Early American Republic, and the Govt Board of the Society of American Historians. In 2017, she was honored as a “Literary Gentle” by the Boston Public Library.
