15 Questions with Jill Lepore
Jill Lepore may be known around Harvard as the head honcho of the Hist and Lit Department. But during her downtime she’s been cultivating another personality: a colorful, 18th-century Scottish painter named Stewart Jameson, protagonist in her debut novel, “Blindspot.” Lepore co-authored the book, which is a parody of, and homage to, 18th-century style, with Brandeis history professor Jane Kamensky. “Blindspot” tells the story of romance and intrigue in Revolutionary War-era Boston. FM sat down with the historian for a coffee chat about time travel and 18th-century debauchery.
1. Fifteen Minutes [FM]: How did you and Jane meet each other?
Jill Lepore [JL]: We met in graduate school, we were both at Yale in the early nineties and we both had dogs. We met each other, I think, at the dog park.
2. FM: You two decided to write the novel as a birthday present for a friend?
JL: He was actually our graduate student mentor at Yale, John Demos. When an academic retires, his graduate students usually hold a conference to celebrate his work. Jane and I decided that for our piece of the conference we were going to write character sketches that were a send-up of 18th-century genre fiction. It took us a week to write these character sketches, and it was fun. So we kept going, and before we knew it we’d batted back and forth 100 pages. ...
Read entire article at Harvard Crimson
1. Fifteen Minutes [FM]: How did you and Jane meet each other?
Jill Lepore [JL]: We met in graduate school, we were both at Yale in the early nineties and we both had dogs. We met each other, I think, at the dog park.
2. FM: You two decided to write the novel as a birthday present for a friend?
JL: He was actually our graduate student mentor at Yale, John Demos. When an academic retires, his graduate students usually hold a conference to celebrate his work. Jane and I decided that for our piece of the conference we were going to write character sketches that were a send-up of 18th-century genre fiction. It took us a week to write these character sketches, and it was fun. So we kept going, and before we knew it we’d batted back and forth 100 pages. ...