Interests

Maya Jasanoff’s teaching and research focus on the history of modern Britain and the British Empire, particularly in the 18th and 19th centuries. Her first book, Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750-1850, investigates British expansion in India and Egypt through the lives of art collectors. It was awarded the 2005 Duff Cooper Prize and was a book of the year selection in numerous British publications including The EconomistThe Observer, and The Sunday Times. She has recently completed a new book, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World(forthcoming February 2011), which provides the first global history of the loyalists who fled the United States after the American Revolution, and resettled in Canada, the Caribbean, Britain, Sierra Leone, and beyond. Her current research explores the worlds of Joseph Conrad. Jasanoff has been an ACLS Charles A. Ryskamp Fellow, a Cullman Center Fellow at the New York Public Library, and a Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress. Her essays and reviews have appeared in the London Review of BooksThe New York Review of Books, and The New York Times Magazine.