Jane Kamensky is President of Monticello/ The Thomas Jefferson Foundation. A leading historian of early America and the United States, she earned her BA (1985) and PhD (1993) in history from Yale University. For thirty years, she worked as a history professor and higher education leader, most recently as Jonathan Trumbull Professor of American History at Harvard University and Pforzheimer Foundation Director of the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at Harvard Radcliffe Institute. Kamensky is the author or editor of numerous books, including A Revolution in Color: The World of John Singleton Copley (2016), which won four major prizes and was a finalist for several others; and the authoritative Oxford Handbook of the American Revolution, co-edited with the late Edward G. Gray. Her next book, Candida Royalle and the Sexual Revolution, will be published by W.W. Norton in March 2024. A former Commissioner of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Kamensky serves as a Trustee of the Museum of the American Revolution, and as one of the principal investigators on the NEH/ Department of Education-funded initiative, Educating for American Democracy, among many other public history roles. Jane will be in conversation with Jennifer Portman and Katherine Mooney as part of the tribute to the late historian Ed Gray at this year’s Word of South.
Jane Kamensky
