NEWS RELEASE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
For more information, contact:
Victor Bailey
Director
Hall Center for the Humanities
(785) 864-7822
vbailey@ku.edu
Popular American Historian Jill Lepore to Speak on the History of Privacy
LAWRENCE—Jill Lepore, author of the National Book Award longlisted Book of Ages:
The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin (2013), will speak at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday,
October 22, in the Woodruff Auditorium in the Kansas Union. Her lecture,
"Unseen—The History of Privacy," is an installment of the Hall Center for the
Humanities' 2013-2014 Humanities Lecture Series. This lecture is supported by the
Sosland Foundation of Kansas City. The event is free and open to the public.
The Hall Center will also host a more informal public question-and-answer session
the following morning. "A Conversation with Jill Lepore" will take place at 10 a.m. on
October 23 in the Hall Center Conference Hall. This event is also free and open to the
public.
In this lecture, Lepore traces the history of invisible people, including H.G. Wells'
invisible man, considering the strange relationship between the unseen and
unknown. In an illustrated lecture that ranges from the mysteries of the medieval
church to the privacy settings on Facebook, Lepore argues that what was once
mysterious became secret and, finally, private.
Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History and chair
of the History and Literature Program at Harvard University. Her research interests
include the history of war and violence, as well as the history of language and
literacy. She is the author of 8 books, including The Story of America: Essays on
Origins (2012), a collection of wide-ranging essays framed by the idea of the United
States as itself a set of stories, and New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery and Conspiracy
in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan (2006), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History.
She has been a contributor to The New Yorker since 2005 and a staff writer since
2008. Her essays and reviews have also appeared in the New York Times, the Times
Literary Supplement, American Scholar, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington
Post, The Daily Beast, Smithsonian Magazine, the Journal of American
History, American Quarterly, and Common-place, a magazine she co-founded.
Lepore currently serves on the boards of the National Portrait Gallery and the
Society of American Historians.
Founded in 1947, the Humanities Lecture Series is the oldest continuing series at KU.
More than 150 eminent scholars from around the world have participated in the
program, including author Salman Rushdie, poet Gwendolyn Brooks and
evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. Recent speakers have included Stephen
Greenblatt, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and Mary Oliver. Shortly after the program’s
inception, a lecture by one outstanding KU faculty member was added to the
schedule. For information on the series, visit the Hall Center website.
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