The prize citation for Dr. Kamensky’s Barry Prize reads:
As an academic historian and as president of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, Jane Kamensky
has helped the American people to know themselves more fully by understanding the history of
their founding and early development. Through kaleidoscopic lenses including art, finance, race,
language, sexuality, and households great and small, she has helped our Nation embrace a
story that is coherent and humane, while also honest in its faithfulness to complex realities. The
Academy honors Dr. Kamensky’s distinguished contribution to humanity’s understanding of the
many dimensions of the early American experiment.
Jane Kamensky is president and CEO of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, and Jonathan Trumbull Professor of American History Emerita at Harvard University. At the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, she served as the Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation Director of the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America. In addition to serving as a commissioner for the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, she has held roles in the Association of American Historians, the Council of the American Antiquarian Society, the Society of Historians of the Early American Republic, and the Society of American Historians. Her book A Revolution in Color: The World of John Singleton Copley (W.W. Norton & Company, 2016), received awards from the New York Historical Society, the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, and the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.
November 2026
The prize citation for Dr. Kamensky’s Barry Prize reads:
As an academic historian and as president of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, Jane Kamensky
has helped the American people to know themselves more fully by understanding the history of
their founding and early development. Through kaleidoscopic lenses including art, finance, race,
language, sexuality, and households great and small, she has helped our Nation embrace a
story that is coherent and humane, while also honest in its faithfulness to complex realities. The
Academy honors Dr. Kamensky’s distinguished contribution to humanity’s understanding of the
many dimensions of the early American experiment.
Jane Kamensky is president and CEO of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, and Jonathan Trumbull Professor of American History Emerita at Harvard University. At the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, she served as the Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation Director of the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America. In addition to serving as a commissioner for the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, she has held roles in the Association of American Historians, the Council of the American Antiquarian Society, the Society of Historians of the Early American Republic, and the Society of American Historians. Her book A Revolution in Color: The World of John Singleton Copley (W.W. Norton & Company, 2016), received awards from the New York Historical Society, the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, and the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.
November 2026