1 | Name: | Professor Annette Gordon-Reed | |
Institution: | Harvard Law School; Harvard University | ||
Year Elected: | 2019 | ||
Class: | 3. Social Sciences | ||
Subdivision: | 303. History Since 1715 | ||
Residency: | Resident | ||
Living? : | Living | ||
Birth Date: | 1958 | ||
Annette Gordon-Reed is currently Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History at Harvard Law School and University Professor and Professor of History at Harvard University. She earned her J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1984. She has taught at a number of institutions, including as Wallace Stevens Professor of Law at New York Law School, Board of Governors Professor of History at Rutgers University, and Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. In the vast library of Thomas Jefferson studies, few scholars have done more to challenge received wisdom than Gordon-Reed. Her first book challenged the dominant view that Jefferson could never have engaged in amorous relations with a woman of mixed African-American descent by carefully identifying the inherently racist and psychologically problematic claims that had long rejected this possibility. Gordon-Reed demonstrated that every source of evidence required equally scruplulous examination, and that the oral histories of the Hemings family were just as valuable than what turned out to be the contrived tales of later Jeffersons. The importance of that approach became evident after the 1998 publication of a study indicating that Hemings descendants were genetically linked to the male Jefferson line. Building on that finding, Gordon-Reed’s second book on The Hemingses of Monticello provided a reconstruction of this family’s life that was at once boldly imaginative yet again rigorously grounded in the evidence. The nuanced portrait of Jefferson that has in turn emerged from these two studies, and which is reflected in the book she recently co-authored with Peter Onuf, has made the field of Jefferson studies even more complicated. Annette Gordon-Reed has won a number of awards, including the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2008, the Pulitzer Prize for History in 2009, a MacArthur Fellowship in 2010, and the National Humanities Medal in 2010. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, 2011. Her works include Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (1998), Race on Trial: Law and Justice in American History (2002), The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (2008), Andrew Johnson (2011), with Peter S. Onuf "Most Blessed of the Patriarchs": Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination (2016), and On Juneteenth (2021). Annette Gordon-Reed was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2019. |