Once, at a conference in 1985, Jasanoff was approached by a stranger who told her that his sister-in-law had attended Radcliffe with her; he asked if she knew how impressive she had appeared in college.
“I thought to myself, ‘Ridiculous!’” Jasanoff said. “I was going around thinking how impressive everybody else was.”
A CAREER OF CHANGE
According to Jasanoff, her father, who worked for the UN, intended for her to return to India after she completed her education. Those original plans changed when Jasanoff was completing her M.A. at the University of Bonn in what was then West Germany.
While in West Germany, she changed her field of study to linguistics, a decision that she said led to her father cutting her off. It was also in Bonn that she met her future husband Jay H. Jasanoff ’63, a professor of linguistics at Harvard. Though their college years had overlapped, the two had not met at Harvard.
Jasanoff returned to Harvard twice afterwards, first for a Ph.D. in linguistics from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and then for a J.D. from the Law School.
“Harvard is woven into the fabric of our family in a very engaging way,” Jasanoff said. “This the place where [my husband and I] both grew up, got married, had kids.” Jasanoff’s husband and daughter are both professors at the College, and many members of her immediate family attended the College.
She added that asking why she chose to return to Harvard several times is akin to asking, “Why did you decide to come home?”
Jasanoff practiced environmental law in Boston from 1976 to 1978 until she and Jay Jasanoff accepted job offers at Cornell University.
PIONEERING A FIELD
She said that it was at Cornell that her career in Science and Technology Studies began. STS is an interdisciplinary field that explores how scientific discoveries and technological advances impact social structures like law, public policy, and ethics.
“Back then, the field didn’t exist. The field gradually came into being in the 70s and onwards, and it didn’t crystallize until the 80s and 90s,” Sheila Jasanoff said. “It was a cluster of researchers who had interests in this field, but they weren’t trained in it.”
As the founding chair of the STS department at Cornell, Jasanoff greatly contributed to the establishment of the field. The field of STS has blossomed since its founding, with popular programs at schools like Cornell, MIT, and Stanford. Since 2002, Jasanoff has taught and conducted research in the STS program at the Kennedy School.
Jasanoff’s daughter Maya R. Jasanoff ‘96, a history professor at Harvard, called her mother a “very creative and field-defining scholar.”
