Jill Lepore, Harvard University professor and staff writer for The New Yorker, will give a public lecture at Elon March 7.
Lepore will speak on “The Mansion of Happiness: A History of Life and Death” at 4:15 p.m. in Whitley Auditorium.
As a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar, Lepore will attend several classes and meet with professors during her two-day stay at Elon March 7 and 8.
Lepore’s visit is sponsored by the Phi Beta Kappa Society and the Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholars Program, which selects top scholars in the liberal arts and sciences to travel to universities and colleges where Phi Beta Kappa Chapters are located. Visiting scholars spend two days on each campus and give one major address open to the entire academic community. Since 1956, the Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholars Program has been offering undergraduates the opportunity to spend time with some of America’s most distinguished scholars and enriching the intellectual life on campuses across the country.
In her lecture, Lepore will examine how recent debates about life and death before the cradle to beyond the grave have influenced the course of U.S. politics. Investigating the surprising origins of the stuff of everyday life – from board games to breast pumps – Lepore argues that the era of discovery, Darwin and the Space Age turns ideas about life on earth topsy-turvy. The lecture is free and open to the public.
Lepore is a David Woods Kemper Professor of American History at Harvard and also a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The American Scholar and many scholarly journals. She has written about issues such as gun control, military spending and religion in public life. She received the Bancroft Prize in American History for her first book, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity. Her book, New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Lepore co-wrote with Jane Kamensky a novel, Blindspot, and probed the uses and misuse of history in politics with The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle over American History. Her latest work, The Mansion of Happiness: A History of Life and Death and The Story of America: Essays on Origins were published in 2012. Her next book, a landmark biography of Benjamin Franklin’s sister Jane Franklin Mecom, is expected to be released in September.