Dr. Jane Kamensky

Dr. Jane Kamensky is President and CEO of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. A leading historian of early America and the United States, she worked for three decades as a professor and higher education leader, most recently as Jonathan Trumbull Professor of American History at Harvard University and Pforzheimer Foundation Director of the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at Harvard Radcliffe Institute. She brings to her work at Monticello a strong sense of civic purpose and a commitment to the ways that rigorous scholarship and compelling, honest storytelling help to build citizen capacity and revitalize the American experiment. 

Kamensky is the author or editor of numerous books spanning four centuries of American history, including A Revolution in Color: The World of John Singleton Copley (2016), which won four major prizes and was a finalist for several others. Her most recent book, Candida Royalle and the Sexual Revolution (2024), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation, among others. 

A former Commissioner of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery and past Trustee of the Museum of the American Revolution, Kamensky is as a member of the National Advisory Council of More Perfect and of the Executive Committee of the national history-civics initiative Educating for American Democracy, among many other public history roles. From 2018 through 2025, she served as a scholarly advisor and on-camera expert for the Florentine Films/ Ken Burns documentary, The American Revolution. 

Kamensky holds a BA and a PhD in American history from Yale University. She lives in Charlottesville with Dennis Scannell, her husband of 39 years. 

Email: jkamensky