Maya Jasanoff

Maya Jasanoff’s teaching and research focus on the history of the British Empire.  She is currently completing a book on the life and times of Joseph Conrad, which examines the dynamics of modern globalization through a cultural lens.  Jasanoff's first book, Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750-1850, investigates British expansion in India and Egypt through the lives of art collectors, was awarded the 2005 Duff Cooper Prize and was a book of the year selection in numerous publications including The Economist, The Observer, and The Sunday Times. Her 2011 book Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World provides the first global history of the loyalists who fled the United States after the American Revolution, and resettled in Canada, the Caribbean, Britain, Sierra Leone, and beyond. Liberty's Exiles won numerous distinctions including the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award for Non-Fiction, the George Washington Book Prize, and a Recognition of Excellence from the Cundill Prize in History; it was also shortlisted for the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize.

Jasanoff has been an ACLS Charles A. Ryskamp Fellow, a Cullman Center Fellow at the New York Public Library, and a Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress. Her essays and reviews regularly appear in publications including The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, and The New York Times.