Sharmila Sen

“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: [email address] • @_sen_sharmila

Recent Books

The World of Sugar: How the Sweet Stuff Transformed Our Politics, Health, and Environment over 2,000 Years
Ulbe Bosma

Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound
Daphne A. Brooks

The Joy of Consent: A Philosophy of Good Sex
Manon Garcia

Who’s Black and Why? A Hidden Chapter from the Eighteenth-Century Invention of Race
Edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Andrew S. Curran

Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge
Richard Ovenden

Time’s Monster: How History Makes History
Priya Satia

The Making of the Bible: From the First Fragments to Sacred Scripture
Konrad Schmid and Jens Schröter, translated by Peter Lewis

Unflattening
Nick Sousanis

Empire, Incorporated: The Corporations That Built British Colonialism
Philip J. Stern

Waiting for the People: The Idea of Democracy in Indian Anticolonial Thought
Nazmul Sultan

Sur’s Ocean: Classic Hindi Poetry in Translation
Surdas, translated by John Stratton Hawley

Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Misogyny in the Digital Age
Donna Zuckerberg