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Annette Gordon-Reed: Awarded a 2010 MacArthur Fellowship
On September 28, 2010, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation named legal scholar, historian, and
Harvard Professor Annette Gordon-Reed as one of the recipients of the 2010 MacArthur Fellowship, known as the
MacArthur"Genius" Award/Grant.
This past year Gordon-Reed also received the National Humanities Medal. She won the Pulitzer Prize and
Frederick Douglass Book Prize in 2009, and the National Book Award in 2008 for"The Hemingses of Monticello: An
American Family."
Basic Facts
Position:
Professor of law at Harvard Law School, Professor of history in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and the Carol
K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Havard University, July 2010--
Area of Research:
American Legal History, American Slavery and the Law
Education:
J.D., Harvard University, 1984;
A.B., Dartmouth College in history, 1981;
honorary Doctor of Letters, Ramapo College;
honorary degree, the College of William and Mary, May 2010.
Major Publications:
Gordon Reed is the author of The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, W.W. Norton & Co.
(New York, NY), 2008.
(With others) Jubilee: The Emergence of African-American Culture, National Geographic Publishing (Washington, DC),
2003; (Editor) Race on Trial: Law and Justice in American History, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2002;
(With Vernon E. Jordan) Vernon Can Read! A Memoir, Public Affairs (New York, NY), 2001, 2nd edition, Thorndike Press
(Waterville, ME), 2002; and Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, University Press of
Virginia (Charlottesville, VA), 1997.
Contributor to books, including Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory, and Civic Culture, University
Press of Virginia, 1999; Thomas Jefferson: Genius of Liberty, Viking Press, 2000; Jefferson's Children: The Story
of One American Family, Random House, 2001; and Slavery and Its Aspects, University Press of Mississippi,
2003.
Gordon-Reed also contributes to periodicals, including New York School Law Review, William and Mary Quarterly,
New York Times, Washington Post, and Washington Times.
Awards:
Gordon-Reed is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including among others:
National Humanities Medal, 2009;
Guggenheim Fellowship in the Humanities (2009);
Pulitzer Prize in history for"The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family," 2009;
National Book Award, for nonfiction, for"The Hemingses of Monticello," 2008;
Fellowship at the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library (2010-2011);
NYLS Otto Walter Prize for best faculty publication of 1999 and 2008;
Old Dominion Fellowship at Princeton University (2002);
Columbia University’s Barbara A. Black lectureship (2001);
the Trailblazer Award from the Metropolitan Black Bar Association (2001);
Best nonfiction book, Black Caucus of the American Library Association, 2001;
Bridging the Gap Award, 2000;
Woman of Power and Influence award, National Organization for Women, 1999;
Anisfeld-Wolf book award for Vernon Can Read, 2002;
Association of Black Women Attorneys Achievement Award, 1988;
American History Roundtable Achievement award, 1988.
Additional Info:
Previously held position at Cahill Gordon & Reindel (law firm), New York, NY, associate; New York City Board of
Correction, New York, NY, counsel; New York Law School, New York, NY, professor, 1992-2010; and
Rutgers-Newark, New Jersey, Rutgers Board of Governors Professor of History, Springs 2007 until June 2010.
Lee C. Bollinger, President of Columbia University, presents the 2009 History prize to Annette Gordon-Reed.
"I'm enormously grateful and humbled to be given this award. Of course I've known about MacArthur fellowships
for many years and wondered what it would be like to have someone call out of the blue and tell you you've won
something like that. Now I know, and I have to say it's a very good feeling." --
Professor Annette Gordon-Reed wins a MacArthur Fellowship
"I am enormously pleased to become a part of the Harvard community once again. I look forward to working with
the students and faculty members at the Law School and in the History Department, and to experiencing the rich
interdisciplinary environment at the Radcliffe Institute."
-- Annette Gordon-Reed to join the Harvard faculty
I first thought about writing this book when I was working on my first book, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An
American Controversy back in the 1990s. That book was about the historiography on the Jefferson and Hemings
relationship. One of the things that bothered me was that the Hemingses, enslaved people, were treated in history
books as if they had no individual identities and lives that were worth being careful about. You could give Sally
Hemings a father for her children on one person’s word alone—no contemporary circumstances to back up that person's
assertion. There’s no way to say you care about, or respect the personal dignity of a person and be that reckless
with her life. It occurred to me that it was easy to dismiss enslaved people in this way because so few of the
details of their lives had been written about. It’s easier to be careless about people when you don’t have any
sense of connection to them. It's hard to have a connection, or develop a"stake" in them, when you don’t know them
personally. I had the idea, perhaps naïve, that I might be able to rectify this to some extent by introducing them
to the American public as individuals.
Jefferson was an inveterate record-keeper. So, there is actually a good amount of information about certain members
of the family. I thought,"Well, why not draw on that, along with information from other sources?" I could do
something that is rarely done: present a portrait of slavery through the eyes of enslaved people. The more I
looked at the record, the more convinced I became that this approach might be useful to scholars and informative
to the public in general.
...I really wanted to get a sense of, and convey to readers, the way slavery worked in the day-to-day lives of people.
We know what the big picture of slavery meant to the enslaved. But I wanted people to understand that this was not
just the oppression of a nameless mass of people. It blighted the lives of millions of individuals in ways that we
can feel, if we allow ourselves to do that. I want readers to identify with, say, Robert Hemings, who had a wife
away from Monticello and wanted to be with her and their children. The tension between him and Jefferson as he
negotiated his freedom so that he could join his family, I think, puts a really human face on the toll slavery took
on family life. We know the poignant drama of enforced separations. But here we see a more quiet desperation: we
have a husband and father using what means were at his disposal to be able to live with his family. Or Mary Hemings
who asked to be sold away from Monticello to live on Main Street in Charlottesville with Thomas Bell, a prosperous
white merchant who left her and their children his house and property. And then you compare them to the other
enslaved people down the mountain—the majority of people at Monticello—who had few real chances to affect their
lives in meaningful ways. We see the differences in individual circumstances while understanding that there was no"good" or"easy" way to be enslaved.... --
Excerpted from:
Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family Interview conducted by Meehan Crist,
National Book Foundation, 2008
About Annette Gordon-Reed
Annette Gordon-Reed is a legal scholar and historian whose persistent investigation into the life of an iconic
American president has dramatically changed the course of Jeffersonian scholarship. Fascinated from childhood by the
Jefferson family, Gordon-Reed began a comprehensive re-examination of the evidence about the rumored committed
relationship between Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings. Independent of her responsibilities as a law
professor, she wrote her first book, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (1997).
While the liaison had been widely alleged contemporaneously and since, it was also largely dismissed, then and later,
by archivists and historians. Although she is not a formally trained historian, Gordon-Reed drew on her legal
training to apply context and reasonable interpretation to the sparse documentation about the shared lives of her
protagonists at Monticello, in London, and in Paris. After publication, An American Controversy was received
skeptically by some, but her conclusions were confirmed in 1998 when DNA evidence supported the documentary
evidence of Jefferson’s genetic paternity. Gordon-Reed has continued her inquiry into colonial interracial
relations in The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (2008), which follows the Hemings family through
the nineteenth century and along markedly different paths of racial assimilation and integration. In disentangling the
complicated history of two distinct founding families’ interracial bloodlines, Gordon-Reed is shaping and enriching
American history with an authentic portrayal of our colonial past.
-- The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
For a distinguished and appropriately documented book on the history of the United States,
Awarded to"The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family," by Annette Gordon-Reed (W.W. Norton & Company),
a painstaking exploration of a sprawling multi-generation slave family that casts provocative new light on the
relationship between Sally Hemings and her master, Thomas Jefferson. --
Citation The 2009 Pulitzer Prize Winner History
Gordon-Reed is the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for history. Her book, The Hemingses of
Monticello: An American Family, explores three generations of a slave family in 19th-century America, with specific
attention to the relationship between President Thomas Jefferson and his slave (and suspected mistress) Sally
Hemings, who was probably the mother of several of his children. --
Press Release Pulitzer Prize for Drama Honors Play About Women in Wartime Congo
Biography, fiction, history, music, nonfiction, poetry winners also named, 4-23-2009
In the mesmerizing narrative of Annette Gordon-Reed's American family saga, one feels the steady accretion of
convincing argument: Her book is at once a painstaking history of slavery, an unflinching gaze at the ways it has
defined us, and a humane exploration of lives—grand and humble—that"our peculiar institution" conjoined. This is
more than the story of Thomas Jefferson and his house slave Sally Hemings; it is a deeply moral and keenly
intelligent probe of the harsh yet all-too-human world they inhabited and the bloodline they share. --
Citation 2008 National Book Award Winner, Nonfiction for"The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family"
New York Law School Professor Wins $25,000 Frederick Douglass Book Prize:
Annette Gordon-Reed, Professor of Law at New York Law School, Professor of History at Rutgers University-Newark,
and Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard University, has been selected as the winner of the 2009 Frederick Douglass
Book Prize, awarded for the best book written in English on slavery or abolition. Gordon-Reed won for her book, The
Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (W.W. Norton and Company). The prize is awarded by Yale University's
Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman
Institute of American History.
This year's finalists were selected from a field of over fifty entries by a jury of scholars that included Robert
Bonner (Dartmouth College), Rita Roberts (Scripps College), and Pier Larson (Johns Hopkins University). The winner
was selected by a review committee of representatives from the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery,
Resistance and Abolition, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and Yale University.
"In Annette Gordon Reed's The Hemingses of Monticello, an enslaved Virginia family is delivered — but not
disassociated — from Thomas Jefferson's well-known sexual liaison with Sally Hemings," says Bonner, the 2009 Douglass
Prize Jury Chair and Associate Professor of History at Dartmouth College."The book judiciously blends the best of
recent slavery scholarship with shrewd commentary on the legal structure of Chesapeake society before and after the
American Revolution. Its meticulous account of the mid-eighteenth century intertwining of the black Hemingses and
white Wayles families sheds new light on Jefferson's subsequent conjoining with a young female slave who was already
his kin by marriage. By exploring those dynamic commitments and evasions that shaped Monticello routines, the path-
breaking book provides a testament to the complexity of human relationships within slave societies and to the
haphazard possibilities for both intimacy and betrayal." --
Press Release, The 2009 Douglass Prize
Annette Gordon-Reed. (Applause.) The 2009 National Humanities Medal to Annette Gordon-Reed, for important
and innovative research about an American family, the Hemings of Monticello. Her narrative story about Sally Hemings
and her relatives, Thomas Jefferson’s slaves, brings to light a previously unrecognized chapter in the American story. (Applause.)
-- Remarks by the President at Presentation of the National Humanities Medal and the National Medal of the Arts,
February 25, 2010
Annette Gordon-Reed ’84 to join the Harvard faculty
Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow:"I celebrate the fact that Annette Gordon-Reed has accepted our invitation to
join the Harvard Law School faculty. Her extraordinary scholarship combines intensive archival research, brilliant
lawyerly analysis, and tremendous historical imagination as well as a gift for writing riveting prose. Long proud of
our own graduate, we here at the law school are delighted she will join our faculty and also participate in the life
of the University through affiliations with Radcliffe and the history department. Colleagues, students, and aspiring
scholars rejoice over the chance to work with her as she deepens historical understanding of law, slavery, and the
human experience."
Barbara J. Grosz, dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study:"I'm thrilled that Annette Gordon-Reed
will join us as the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute. I very much look
forward to her participation in the Institute’s Fellowship Program and the activities of our Academic Engagement
Programs."
Michael D. Smith, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences:"I'm very pleased that a scholar of Annette Gordon-Reed's
ability and depth will be joining the History Department. And I am excited that Harvard College students will have
the opportunity to learn directly from an award-winning historian and renowned legal scholar." --
Harvard Law School
"As a gifted historian, [Gordon-Reed] uses her highly informed imagination to help us understand the possible
and probable motives not only in this relationship but also in the immensely fascinating associations between
Jefferson and the other Hemings.... Gordon-Reed has given us an important story that is ultimately about the timeless
quest for justice and human dignity." --
Sanford D. Horwitt, San Francisco Chronicle
Gordon-Reed's"deconstruction of this occluded relationship is a masterpiece of detective work. Although she
employs a considerable amount of deductive reasoning, she resists facile speculation and relies on a very close
reading of the surviving documentary record wedded to copious knowledge of slavery as it was practiced by members
of Jefferson's social class at the time... Gordon-Reed"bravely attempts to untangle a particularly fraught
question: Could genuine love exist between master and slave? With its acknowledgment that slavery's unequal balance
of power 'grossly distorted' the play of human emotions, her conclusion is necessarily subtle and may not satisfy
those who require monochromatic answers." --
Fergus M. Bordewich, Washington Post Book World
(With others) Jubilee: The Emergence of African-American Culture, National Geographic Publishing (Washington, DC),
2003; (Editor) Race on Trial: Law and Justice in American History, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2002;
(With Vernon E. Jordan) Vernon Can Read! A Memoir, Public Affairs (New York, NY), 2001, 2nd edition, Thorndike Press
(Waterville, ME), 2002; and Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, University Press of
Virginia (Charlottesville, VA), 1997.