Maya Jasanoff

Early life

Jasanoff grew up in Ithaca, New York and comes from a family of academics. Her parents, Sheila and Jay Jasanoff, are both Harvard professors, and her brother Alan is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She was educated at Harvard College before studying for a master's degree at Cambridge, where she worked with Christopher Bayly. She earned her Ph.D. at Yale with Linda Colley, completing the thesis "French and British imperial collecting in Egypt and India, 1780-1820" (Yale, 2002).

Career

Prior to joining the faculty at Harvard, Jasanoff taught at the University of Virginia.

Edge of Empire

Jasanoff published her first book, Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750-1850, with Alfred A. Knopf in 2005 and received mostly favorable reviews. In the London Review of Books, UCLA history and political science professor Anthony Pagden called the work a "brilliant contribution" to the historical investigation of the complexities of empire; in The Guardian, Richard Gott called it "a riveting and original book." However, in The American Historical Review, University of Pennsylvania English professor Suvir Kaul said Jasanoff's history of "objects and individuals, no matter how lovingly recollected, do not add up to an argument that historians should think of empire as instantiating 'the essential humanity of successful international relationships'," and underestimate the "concerns of those peoples who were at the receiving end of imperial power, whether that power was exerted by Europeans or by the native elites who functioned increasingly at their command." Similarly in The New York Times, Columbia University history professor Mark Mazower found "a high degree of wishful thinking" in Jasanoff's casting 18th- and early 19th-century empire as less asymmetrical domination and more "the kind of happy cross-cultural fusion that we dream about today".

Liberty's Exiles

Jasanoff published Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World in 2011, also with Alfred A. Knopf. The book describes the trajectories of the approximately 60,000 loyalists who fled the American Revolution to relocate in other parts of the British Empire; some 8,000 of those who elected to relocate were free black people, but 15,000 enslaved people of African descent were also forcibly moved when their owners chose to go. Liberty's Exiles was widely and favorably reviewed. In The New York Times, Thomas Bender called it a "richly informative account," "smart, deeply researched and elegantly written."

The Dawn Watch

Jasanoff's current research centers on the life and times of novelist Joseph Conrad; her forthcoming book on the topic is called The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World. In The Guardian, William Dalrymple named it to his list of best holiday reads of 2017. It appears November 7, 2017, from Penguin Press.

As part of the project, Jasanoff blogged a journey on a cargo ship sailing from China to Europe. She also published an essay in The New York Times describing the portion of her journey in the Democratic Republic of Congo; the piece drew criticism for, among other things, suggesting "most people in Congo were probably better off 100 years ago," at which point the country was under Belgian colonial rule. In The Washington Post, Karen Attiah found the opening paragraph "so cringe-worthy, I wasn't sure whether I was reading a parody." Responding in The New York Times, Boston University professor Timothy Longman said the essay "reeks of condescension" and "continues the widespread practice of ignoring the voices of Congolese intellectuals, many of whom write about their homeland with nuance."

Awards

In 2005, Jasanoff won the Duff Cooper Prize for Edge of Empire. She won both the 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award for Non-Fiction and 2012 George Washington Book Prize for Liberty's Exiles. She won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2013 and in 2017, she was awarded the Windham–Campbell Literature Prize, valued at $165,000.