May 2012

Maya Jasanoff

Resident in A Room for London from 28 - 31 May 2012.

"When Joseph Conrad joined the British merchant marine in the 1870s, Europeans had charted the coastlines that had eluded them just a century or two before. Nobody any longer rendered California as an island, or left off the western half of Australia."

Photograph: Lawrence Wright

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Maya Jasanoff was educated at Harvard, Cambridge, and Yale, and is currently a professor of history at Harvard University. Her first book, Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750–1850, was awarded the 2005 Duff Cooper Prize and was a book of the year selection in numerous publications including The Economist, The Guardian, and The Sunday Times (London). She has recently been a fellow of the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, and the American Council of Learned Societies and has contributed essays to the London Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, and The New York Review of Books.

Maya Jasanoff's recent book Liberty's Exiles was winner of the General Nonfiction category at the National Book Critics Circle Award 2011 and was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize.

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