Jill Lepore | The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State | 2026 Tanner Lectures on Human Values

Name: Jill Lepore | The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State | 2026 Tanner Lectures on Human Values
Start: 2026-02-04T16:30:00-05:00
Location: SSS 114 (1 Prospect Street)

Schedule

Wed, 04 Feb, 2026 at 04:30 pm

UTC-05:00

Location

SSS 114 (1 Prospect Street) | New Haven, CT

Join Harvard historian and The New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore for the 2026 Tanner Lectures on Human Values: The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State.
Full details: https://events.yale.edu/event/jill-lepore-the-rise-and-fall-of-the-artificial-state
📍 SSS 114 (1 Prospect Street)
✅ Free and open to all
ABOUT THE LECTURES:
Jill Lepore’s 2026 Tanner Lectures on Human Values are an inquiry into what humans mean and intend—to think what we are doing—in abandoning constitutional democracy and the liberal nation-state for rule by automation and government by machine. Much in history is headlong but few grand transformations have been more precipitate or more heedless than the rise of what Lepore calls the Artificial State. Yet little seems more inevitable than its eventual fall. These two lectures, richly illustrated with visual material, chronicle the rise of the Artificial State, attempt to reckon with what it has cost the natural world, and anticipate its fall.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. She is also a staff writer at The New Yorker. A prize-winning professor, she teaches classes in evidence, historical methods, humanistic inquiry, and American history. Much of her scholarship explores absences and asymmetries in the historical record, with a particular emphasis on the history and technology of evidence. As a wide-ranging and prolific essayist, and winner of the PEN prize for the Art of the Essay, Lepore writes about American history, law, literature, and politics. She is the author of many award-winning books, including the international bestseller, These Truths: A History of the United States (2018) and The Deadline, a collection of essays (2023). Her latest book is We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution (September 2025).