Amicus Curiae Lecture on Constitutional Democracy

Sarah M.S. Pearsall is Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University; she previously taught at Cambridge University. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and Distinguished Fellow in the American Revolution at the British Library. She holds degrees from Yale, Cambridge, and Harvard. Her first book, Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century (Oxford University Press, 2008), received the Women’s History Network Prize. Her second book, Polygamy: An Early American History (Yale University Press, 2019), and a related article in the American Historical Review, received commendations and awards from the Organization for American Historians and the Western History Association. Her third book, Polygamy: A Very Short Introduction, came out with the Oxford University Press series in 2022. Her fourth book, Freedom Round the Globe: A World History of the American Revolution, will be released in May 2026 by Knopf Doubleday (U.S.), Picador (U.K.), and Rowohlt Berlin (Germany). Her scholarship has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the British Academy, among others.