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Sharmila Sen

Editorial Director and Director of Special Initiatives

Photo of Sharmila Sen, Editorial Director and Director of Special Initiatives

“As the Editorial Director of Harvard University Press, I strategize and oversee our overall book acquisitions program. I welcome books that make lasting contributions to several fields in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences.

My own recent signings include books on a diverse range of topics—wealth and animal behavior, how the British slave trade shaped modern medicine and health care, the sexiness of consent, political correctness as an accusation, the misunderstood effects of family structure on life outcomes for Black youth, a synthetic biologist’s surprising account of our beloved eukaryote Saccharomyces cerevisiae, a political theorist’s timely reassessment of the notorious psychobiography of Woodrow Wilson, how New York publishers accidentally invented world literature, the untold story behind the greatest literary biography of the twentieth century (Ellmann’s James Joyce), and a curated collection of queer poems by one of America’s leading poetry critics.

Lila Abu-Lughod, Manan Ahmed Asif, Mary Beard, Hans Belting, Alexander Bevilacqua, Daphne Brooks, Fred Donner, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Ram Guha, Sari Nusseibeh, Robert Orsi, Richard Ovenden, Snigdha Poonam, Ingrid Rowland, Priya Satia, Aldo Schiavone, Nick Sousanis, Maria Tatar, Helen Vendler, and Donna Zuckerberg are some of the authors I have published at Harvard University Press.

My acquisitions also include the award-winning digital Loeb Classical Library (now available with enhanced navigation), the critically-acclaimed bilingual series Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library and Murty Classical Library of India, as well as intellectual comic books that challenge the primacy of words over images.”

Contact: • @_sen_sharmila

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