Maya Jasanoff

Maya Jasanoff is a professor of imperial and global history at Harvard. Her books Edge of Empire (2005), Liberty’s Exiles (2011), and The Dawn Watch (2017) have won accolades including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Cundill Prize in History, the George Washington Book Prize, and the Windham-Campbell Prize for Non-Fiction. She writes widely about history, literature, and world affairs for publications including The New Yorker and The New York Times.

At Bogliasco, Maya will work toward completing Ancestors, a book about the human preoccupation with lineage from the earliest records of ancestor veneration to the DNA tests of today. Combining wide-ranging historical synthesis with an exploration of Jasanoff’s own Indian and Jewish genealogies, Ancestors investigates the many ways in which lineage has been used to assign and deny people power, status, and rights.