Pitt Family Foundation Speaker Series Welcomes Award-winning Historian Jill Lepore
Lepore will continue the speaker series on November 17.
Award-winning historian and writer for The New Yorker Jill Lepore will be the Pitt Family Foundation Speaker Series' next guest speaker on Wednesday, November 17, 2021.
In a conversation with former Tucson mayor and current University of Arizona Law Professor of Practice Jonathan Rothschild, Lepore will offer an account of the origins and rise of our divided nation and a reckoning with the beauty and tragedy of American History.
The Pitt Family Foundation Speaker Series is part of the Participatory Democracy Initiative at the University of Arizona. The Participatory Democracy Initiative is an interdisciplinary and community-engaged program of the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law, the School of Government & Public Policy, and the School of Journalism.
When: November 17, 2021, 5:30-6:45 p.m. (MST)
Where: Pitt Family Foundation Speaker Series will be delivered live via Zoom.
Who may attend: This event is free and open to the public. Registration is required.
About Jill Lepore
Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History and Affiliate Professor of Law at Harvard University. She is also a staff writer at The New Yorker, and host of the podcast, The Last Archive. She's written many books, including These Truths: A History of the United States (2018), an international bestseller named one of Time magazine's top ten non-fiction books of the decade. A textbook edition will be published in August 2022. Her 2020 New Yorker pieces contemplated the pandemic year, including essays on loneliness, race riot commissions, policing, the census, the decline of democracy, living indoors, the literature of plagues, and burnout. Her long-term research project is a history of attempts to amend the U.S. Constitution, beginning by building an online archive of the text of thousands of proposed amendments, from 1787 to 2020. In 2021, BBC Radio 4 broadcast her series, Elon Musk: The Evening Rocket, untangling the strange, sci-fi roots of extreme capitalism. Lepore received a B.A. in English from Tufts University in 1987, an M.A. in American Culture from the University of Michigan in 1990, and a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University in 1995. She joined the Harvard History Department in 2003 and was Chair of the History and Literature Program in 2005-10, 2012, and 2014. In 2012, she was named Harvard College Professor, in recognition of distinction in undergraduate teaching.
Lepore is the recipient of many honors, awards, and honorary degrees. In 2021, she was named the winner of the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award; the National Magazine Award; and, twice, the Pulitzer Prize; and winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Award, for the best non-fiction book on race. She has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and to the American Philosophical Society.