Vanessa Braganza

Vanessa Braganza is a public-facing intellectual and book detective, and a PhD candidate in Renaissance literature at Harvard. She writes for Smithsonian, Lithub, Mental Floss, and the LA Review of Books and her academic work has appeared in a variety of scholarly journals and volumes. She is a member of the Foundation of St. John's College, Cambridge, where she earned her MPhil in Renaissance Literature. She is also a JD candidate at Columbia Law School where she specializes in constitutional law. As a curator, her past work includes co-coordinating Harvard's Renaissance Colloquium in 2020-21, programming at the Library of Congress, and curating the Harvard exhibit 500 Years of Women Authors, Authorizing Themselves. . In 2022, Braganza was named a Harvard Horizons Scholar and a Bowdoin Prize recipient. She is also a JD candidate at Columbia Law School where she specializes in constitutional law.