"The Past as Proof"
Speaker: Jill Lepore, David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History, Department of History, Harvard University; Affiliated Faculty, Harvard Law School; Harvard College Professor.
Co-sponsored by the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
Contact: Shana Rabinowich
shana_rabinowich@hks.harvard.edu
Chair: Sheila Jasanoff, Faculty Associate. Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies, Harvard Kennedy School.
Lunch is provided if you RSVP via our online form by Thursday of the week before the event.
Abstract:
In the last decades of the twentieth century, literary scholars, intellectual historians, and historians of the law and of science became fascinated by epistemological questions about the means by which ideas about evidence police the boundaries between disciplines. This fascination produced invaluable interdisciplinary work on subjects like the history of truth and the rise of empiricism and of objectivity. For all the fascination with questions of evidence, though, very few scholars have investigated the nitty-gritty, stigmata-to-DNA history of the means by which, at different points in time, and across realms of knowledge, some things count as proof, and others don’t. This talk traces a key transformation in the history of evidence—the turn from “facts” to “data”—through a very nitty-gritty examination of a murder in Vermont in 1919.
Biography:
Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University. She is also a staff writer at The New Yorker. In 2012, she was named Harvard College Professor, in recognition of distinction in undergraduate teaching. Much of Lepore's research, teaching, and writing explores absences and asymmetries of evidence in the historical record. Her books include The Name of War (1998), winner of the Bancroft Prize; New York Burning (2005), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and Book of Ages (2013), Time magazine's Best Nonfiction Book of the Year, winner of the Mark Lynton History Prize and a finalist for the 2013 National Book Award for Nonfiction; and The Secret History of Wonder Woman (2014), a New York Times bestseller. Her next book, Joe Gould's Teeth, will be published in 2016.
