Professor Annette Gordon-Reed
Professor of Law at New York Law School and Professor of History at Rutgers, USA
Annette Gordon-Reed is Professor of Law at New York Law School since 1992 and Professor of History at Rutgers University. She has a long fascination with the Jefferson family and her first book was Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (1997). It had an acclaimed but stormy reception when published in 1997, and was described as "brilliant' by The New Yorker. In this publication she did not then take a definitive position on whether Jefferson had a liaison of nearly 40 years with a slave in his household, Sally Hemings, or whether Hemings bore him several children. News published in 1998 described DNA tests showing a near-certain confirmation of a genetic link between Jefferson and Hemings' youngest child, Eston. So she has revisited this case again in her latest book The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family which won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in History and 2008 National Book Award for Non-Fiction.
Professor Gordon-Reed, who grew up in still-segregated east Texas, became interested in Jefferson in elementary school after reading a children's biography of him, narrated by a fictional slave boy. At 14, she joined the Book-of-the-Month Club (concealing her status as a minor) to receive Fawn Brodie's biography, Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate Portrait. She continued her study of Jefferson's life at Dartmouth College, where she majored in History, graduating in 1981. She attended Harvard Law School, where she was a member of the Law Review.
