Lecturer
2016—Jill Lepore
David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History, Harvard University
In the first of two illustrated lectures about the relationship between evidence and privacy, Lepore will trace the decline of a medieval, religious conception of mystery, as something God knows and man cannot; the rise of a secular and state-based notion of secrecy, as something the government knows, and the people don’t; and the emergence of an obsession with privacy as essential to the integrity of the self. She will demonstrate the workings of this epistemological transformation through a historical analysis of episodes in American politics, law, and literature, with an eye to urgent contemporary questions about evidence and surveillance.