Title

Harry S. Truman Professor of American Civilization

History
Women's and Gender Studies

Expertise

North America before ca. 1830, cultural history, the writing of history.

Profile

JANE KAMENSKY earned her B.A. and Ph.D. in History from Yale University, and has taught at Brandeis since 1993. She offers courses in colonial American history, women's and family history, and the writing of history that have been recognized with a university-wide award for excellence in teaching. Her major publications include THE EXCHANGE ARTIST: A Tale of High-Flying Speculation and America's First Banking Collapse (Viking, 2008), a Finalist for the 2009 George Washington Book Prize; GOVERNING THE TONGUE: The Politics of Speech in Early New England (Oxford University Press, 1997), and THE COLONIAL MOSAIC: American Women, 1600-1760 (Oxford University Press, 1995). In 2008, Spiegel & Grau/ Random House published her first novel, BLINDSPOT, jointly written with Jill Lepore. She is co-editor of the forthcoming OXFORD HANDBOOK OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION, and is now researching a book about American artists in London in the late eighteenth century. .

Her scholarship has been supported by grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Pew Charitable Trusts, and the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Studies.

Before graduate school, Professor Kamensky worked on Wall Street and in university philanthropy. Her continuing activities outside the academy include participation in a variety of teacher-scholar partnerships with local secondary-school teachers, service as a consultant and on-camera expert for documentaries shown on PBS and The History Channel, and appearances on National Public Radio and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. In 2000, she co-founded Common-place (www.common-place.org), an award-winning online journal that she co-edited from 2000 to 2004.