Maya Jasanoff's teaching and research encompass the history of the British Empire and global history. She is the author of three acclaimed books: The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World (2017), which won the Cundill Prize in History; Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (2011), narrating the global history of loyalists post-American Revolution and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award; and her debut, Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750-1850 (2005), which received the Duff Cooper Prize.
A Guggenheim Fellow (2013) and Kluge Chair at the Library of Congress, Jasanoff has participated in BBC documentaries. Her essays appear in The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, and The New York Times. In 2017, she was awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction literature and chaired the judges for the 2021 Booker Prize.
Known for uncovering the narrative in history, Jasanoff teaches courses on imperial history, a General Education course titled "Ancestry: Where Do We Come From and Why Do We Care?" and a seminar on writing historical narratives. Named a Harvard College Professor in 2015, she served as a part-time Visiting Professor at Ahmedabad University (2019-2022), where she helped develop new liberal arts curricula. Jasanoff is currently working on a book about humanity's fascination with ancestry.