Author Jill Lepore, a staff writer for The New Yorker and the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University, will present a lecture titled “The Secret History of Wonder Woman” on Thursday, Sept. 24, at 4:10 p.m., in the Kennedy Auditorium, Taylor Science Center. Lepore’s lecture is a Humanities Project sponsored by the Johnson Family Fund, the Dean of Faculty, the Days-Massolo Center and the Kirkland Endowment. The lecture is free and open to the public.
Lepore has been contributing to The New Yorker since 2005. Her essays and reviews have also appeared in The New York Times, the Times Literary Supplement, the Journal of American History, the Yale Law Journal, American Scholar, and the American Quarterly. Much of Lepore’s research, teaching and writing explores absences and asymmetries of evidence in the historical record. Her current work concerns the histories and technologies of evidence and of privacy. Lepore’s most recent book The Secret History of Wonder Woman, a New York Times bestseller and winner of the 2015 American History Book Prize, deals with the history of the struggle for women’s rights.
Lepore received a bachelor’s degree in English from Tufts University in 1987, a master’s degree in American culture from the University of Michigan in 1990, and a Ph.D. in American studies from Yale University in 1995. She joined the Harvard History Department in 2003 and served several terms as chair of the History and Literature program. In 2014, Lepore was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and to the American Philosophical Society. Her research has been funded by the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Pew Foundation, the Gilder Lehrman Institute, the Charles Warren Center and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation.
Lepore is currently the president of the Society of American Historians and an emeritus commissioner of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery.
