Jane Kamensky, a native of New York City, earned her B.A. and Ph.D. from Yale University. Since 1993, she has been a member of the History faculty of Brandeis University, where she teaches courses on early American history and culture, and on the writing of history. She has won two university-wide awards for excellence in teaching.

Before The Exchange Artist, she published Governing the Tongue: The Politics of Speech in Early New England (Oxford University Press, 1997); and The Colonial Mosaic: American Women, 1600-1760 (Oxford University Press, 1995); as well as numerous chapters and articles. In 2000, in an effort to make cutting-edge scholarship in early American history accessible to a wider public, Kamensky co-founded Common-place, an award-winning online journal.

Her current writing projects include the novel Blindspot, jointly written with Jill Lepore (due out from Spiegel & Grau in December 2008); and a biography of the painter Gilbert Stuart (1755-1828), the American-born, British-trained portraitist whose likenesses of George Washington defined the American experiment for viewers around the world. To better understand Stuart’s world, she is spending this year in London, studying at the Courtauld Institute of Art under the auspices of an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation “New Directions” Grant. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her husband of twenty-one years, and their two sons, aged seven and nine.