Thursday, March 7
Jill Lepore, “The Mansion of Happiness: A History of Life and Death”
Whitley Auditorium, 4:15 p.m.
Lepore is the David Woods Kemper Professor of American History at Harvard and also a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The American Scholar and many scholarly journals. Lepore examines how recent debates about life and death before the cradle to beyond the grave have influenced the course of U.S. politics. Investigating the surprising origins of the stuff of everyday life – from board games to breast pumps – Lepore argues that the era of discovery, Darwin and the Space Age turns ideas about life on earth topsy-turvy.