Administration and Staff – Harvard Law School

Jane is the Graduate Program’s Graduate Writing and Academic Preceptor. She earned her first two degrees (a B.A. and an M.A. in anthropology) at McGill University before taking her Ph.D. (in anthropology) at the University of Chicago. For her M.A. thesis she carried out fieldwork in Iranian Baluchistan on the incorporation of a regional system of peasants and nomads into the Iranian state. Her Ph.D. research was an archival study of dynasty and state formation in Italy between 1250 and 1500, with a focus on the House of Este. As a Liberal Arts Fellow at Harvard Law School from 1993-1994, she studied the anthropology of law and the history of the formation of the ius commune from civil, canon, and feudal law. The results of this research have appeared in articles on succession and marital transactions in Past & Present, Comparative Studies in Society and History, the Rivista internazionale di diritto commune and elsewhere. Jane has recently completed a book manuscript on succession and state formation in Italy.

Responsibilities

Jane runs the LL.M. Writing Workshop, advises LL.M. students on admission to the S.J.D. program, and advises S.J.D. students on their study plans, dissertations, and other writing projects. She is available to help all students in the Graduate Program with general issues of research and writing and on getting by as a graduate student in general.