On Ancestry with Maya Jasanoff

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We are talking about Ancestry today. Our guest is Maya Jasanoff who is the Coolidge Professor of History at Harvard University’s History Department.

Maya’s teaching and research extend from the history of the British Empire to global history. She is the author of three prize-winning books. The Dawn Watch examines the dynamics of modern globalization through the life and times of the novelist Joseph Conrad. Her other books are Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World and her first book,  Edge of Empire explores British expansion in India and Egypt through the lives of art collectors. She is currently working on a book about the human preoccupation with ancestry.

In addition to classes on imperial history, she teaches a multidisciplinary Gen Ed course on the topic of "Ancestry: Where Do We Come From and Why Do We Care?". In 2015 Jasanoff was named a Harvard College Professor for excellence in undergraduate teaching. From 2019 to 2022, she is a part-time Visiting Professor at Ahmedabad University in India, where she has been helping launch new curricula in the liberal arts.

Jasanoff has been a Guggenheim Fellow (2013), a fellow at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, a Kluge Chair at the Library of Congress, and a member of the Institute for Advanced Study. She has participated in several BBC documentaries, and her essays and reviews regularly appear in publications including The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, The New Yorker and The New York Times.

We will be talking about:

• The history of ancestry
• Caste systems in India
• Herder and the Idea of a Nation
• Immigrant nations
• Bards as knowledge keepers
• Race as a factor for resource allocation
• Affirmative Action university admission
• Generational privilege and dispossession
• Transatlantic slave trade

Let’s go back to our roots!

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