Dr. Jessica Lepler is an associate professor of history. At UNH, she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on the History of Animals, Early American Republic, American Intellectual History, the Emergence of Industrial America, Capitalism in the Long Nineteenth Century, Historiography, Historical Methods, and Professionalization for Historians.
In 2013, Cambridge University Press published Professor Lepler’s first book, _The Many Panics of 1837: People, Politics, and the Creation of a Transatlantic Financial Crisis._ It won the James H. Broussard Best First Book Prize from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic and was a finalist for the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize. Prof. Lepler's second book entitled _Canal Dreamers: The Epic Quest to Connect the Atlantic and Pacific in the Age of Revolutions_ will be published by the University of North Carolina Press in Fall 2025.
Professor Lepler earned her B.A. in history and religious traditions of the West from Newcomb College of Tulane University. As an undergraduate, she also studied at Mansfield College, Oxford University. She earned her M.A. and Ph.D. from Brandeis University. The Society of American Historians awarded her doctoral dissertation the 2008 Allan Nevins Prize. Prior to her arrival at UNH in 2008, Professor Lepler was a visiting assistant professor at Case Western Reserve University.
In 2023-2024, Prof. Lepler served as Central American Visiting Scholar at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University. She has also been the recipient of a Hench Post-Dissertation Fellowship from the American Antiquarian Society, a Dissertation Fellowship from the Library Company of Philadelphia’s Program in Early American Economy and Society, a John E. Rovensky Dissertation Fellowship in Business History, and a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship from the U.S. Department of Education.
Professor Lepler co-founded the Second-Book Writers’ Workshop of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. She has served on the Advisory Council of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic and as a Distinguished Lecturer of the Organization of American Historians.
