What inspired this series,
and what can we learn from it?
Work shapes our lives in ways we rarely examine, and women’s intellectual contributions have shaped our world in ways that history has yet to fully acknowledge.
Together, we’re changing that.
This series showcases, celebrates, and shares women’s stories of professional success. Through in-depth conversations, each Women of Letters interview examines the professional practices and career trajectories of the women whose work is actively shaping our cultural landscape. Join me as I talk with them about what they do, how they decided to do it, what they’ve discovered about themselves along the way, and what keeps them going now.
These, in other words, are conversations about work. But they’re not just conversations about work. With how central work is to everything we do, these interviews are also investigations into how we design our lives—and, ultimately, what gives them meaning beyond the confines of our job descriptions.
When you subscribe for free, you’ll be getting…
2x new original interviews every month with the women shaping our cultural landscape
1x new episode of The Postscript every month: a life update from me + a behind-the-scenes look at my conversations with our guests
Priority access + exclusive launch pricing for merch drops
In case we haven’t met yet…
I’m Jana.
(I’m not usually this much of a minimalist, btw. That photo was taken in my near-empty apartment just days before I boarded a plane and left the country for the last time.)
As a Croatian-Canadian who earned her PhD in the US, I’ve lived in many different cities and countries around the world. I’m an award-winning scholar whose research has garnered over a quarter of a million dollars in funding from leading institutions across North America and the UK, including the University of Cambridge and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
I am endlessly fascinated by the mechanics of professional success. It’s a fundamental curiosity that, in my own life, has guided me through the several strategic reinventions that have marked my career as I’ve benefitted from what Molly Graham has termed “j-curves”: “a risky career choice … where you bet that you can transfer the skills you currently have to a completely new environment.”
e.g., I left business school more than two years into a four-year degree and decided to study something entirely different. From there, I became a classically trained literary scholar with a master’s degree in 19th-century poetry before going on to conduct my doctoral work in information science as a woman in STEM.
These days, between working as a computational social scientist and running a longform interview series, I spend my time building frameworks for understanding complex questions. And although I never could’ve anticipated that this is what I’d end up doing, if I had tried to I don’t think I could have arrived at a more perfect curriculum for it.
The question of how best to navigate that balance, between intention and opportunity in the architecting of a career, runs through each of these conversations. I’m excited for us to continue exploring it together with our incredible guests, and I can’t to wait to hear from you along the way as we do.
woman of letters (n). an intellectually accomplished woman, esp. in literary, scientific, or artistic domains; in some cases, an author or a scholar; an expert.
