Lecturer
2016—Jill Lepore
David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History, Harvard University
In the second of two illustrated lectures about the relationship between evidence and privacy, Lepore will trace the rise and fall of the fact, as a known and established act, and its replacement with data, a collection of bits of information. Building on her first lecture, about the abandonment of the idea of mystery in favor of the idea of privacy, 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 truth.