Rate My Professor Jill Lepore

Lepore’s scholarship explores absences and asymmetries in the historical record, with particular emphasis on the histories and technologies of evidence. She teaches classes in evidence, historical methods, the humanities, the history of technology, and American political history. Her many books include The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (1998), winner of the Bancroft Prize, Ralph Waldo Emerson Award, and Berkshire Prize; New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan (2005), winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Award for the best nonfiction book on race and a Pulitzer Prize finalist; Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin (2013), winner of the Mark Lynton History Prize, National Book Award finalist, and Time magazine’s Best Nonfiction Book of the Year; The Secret History of Wonder Woman (2014), national bestseller and winner of the 2015 American History Book Prize; These Truths: A History of the United States (2018), an international bestseller named one of Time magazine’s top ten nonfiction books of the decade; IF THEN: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future (2020), longlisted for the National Book Award; The Deadline (2023), winner of the PEN prize for the Art of the Essay; and We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution (2025), a New York Times bestseller. Among her honors are election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society; the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought (2021); PEN Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay; honorary degrees from Yale, NYU, and Tufts; and research support from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, and others. She is a past president of the Society of American Historians and former commissioner of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery.