November 26, 2018

To Members of the Connecticut College Community,

I am pleased to announce that Jill Lepore will come to Connecticut College on April 25 to deliver the fourth annual President’s Distinguished Lecture. Lepore is an award-winning writer and scholar, who holds the David Woods Kemper ’41 chair in American history at Harvard University.

A staff writer for The New Yorker since 2005, Lepore represents a rare breed in the academy–a renowned scholar whose essays and books on American history, politics, law, and literature also hold broad appeal for the general public. In addition to her New Yorker essays, her articles and interviews have appeared in The New York Times, Foreign Affairs, The Journal of American History, The Yale Law Journal, The Chronicle of Higher Education, National Public Radio, The Colbert Report, Smithsonian magazine, and more.

Lepore earned a bachelor of arts in English from Tufts University, and went on to complete a master’s in American Culture at the University of Michigan, and then a Ph.D. in American Studies at Yale University, with a specialization in early American history. She is the author or editor of 11 scholarly books and one novel. Among her most widely admired work, “The Secret History of Wonder Woman,” published by Knopf in 2014, won the 2015 American History Book Prize from the New York Historical Society. “The Name of War,” from 1998, won the Bancroft Prize, the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award from the Phi Beta Kappa Society, and the annual Book Prize from the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians. She was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize in History and the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2006 and 2013.

For the President’s Distinguished Lecture, she will be discussing her most recent project, “These Truths: A History of the United States,” an epic study that examines the history of the American experiment–and the jagged course of democracy in the U.S.–from its infancy to our present contentious moment.

Her visit on Thursday, April 25, will begin with a reception at 5:30 p.m. in Evans Hall, followed by the lecture and a book signing. Please mark your calendars. I look forward to seeing you there.

Yours,
 
Katherine Bergeron
President