Sharmila Sen is the Editorial Director and Director of Special Initiatives at Harvard University Press, where she strategizes and oversees their overall book acquisitions program. She welcomes books that make lasting contributions to several fields in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences. Her 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.
