Bernard Bailyn, whose historical work centers on early American history, the American Revolution, and the Anglo-American world in the pre-industrial era, is Adams University Professor and James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History, emeritus, at Harvard University.

He served as Director of Harvard’s International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World, 1995-2013; as editor-in-chief of the John Harvard Library from 1962 to 1970; as co-editor of the journal Perspectives in American History, 1967-77, 1984-86; and as Director of the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, 1983-1994.

He was the Trevelyan Lecturer (1971) and Pitt Professor of American History (1986-87) in Cambridge University, where he is an Honorary Fellow of Christ's College. In 1993 he received the Thomas Jefferson Medal of the American Philosophical Society. In 1998 he was appointed the Jefferson Lecturer by the National Endowment for the Humanities. His books, which center on the American Revolution, the peopling of British North America, and Atlantic History, have won the Bancroft Prize, two Pulitzer Prizes, and the National Book Award. He delivered the first Millennium Lecture at the White House in 2000 and in 2010 he received a National Humanities Medal.