Hospitality | Tourism 2025: KAMENSKY, JANE

Kamensky started work as the head of the foundation that owns and operates Monticello, in 2024. Home of Thomas Jefferson, the third U.S. president and author of the Declaration of Independence, Monticello draws more than 300,000 visitors annually.

Before coming to Albemarle County, the Yale alumna was a history professor at Harvard University and director of the university’s Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America. She has authored or co-authored seven award-winning books about American history and was the chair of Brandeis University’s history department.

Among many board appointments, Kamensky serves as co-leader of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences’ America250 working group and is on the Women’s Suffrage National Monument Foundation’s Council of Advisors.

MY MOTTO: “Here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.”
— Thomas Jefferson to William Roscoe, Dec. 27, 1820

BOOK I’D RECOMMEND: Rick Atkinson’s “The Fate of the Day,” which brings the middle years of the grueling American Revolution to life as the brutal war it was.

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