The distiguished historian is slated to give this year’s Annual Leon Levy Biography Lecture on Wednesday (May 4 at 6 p.m. ET), in a free, online presentation open to the public. Her investigative, multigenerational biography The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family won both the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in History and the National Book Award.
Gordon-Reed is widely acknowledged to have “changed the course of Jeffersonian scholarship,” according to The MacArthur Foundation, which honored her with a 2010 MacArthur Fellowship. That year, too, she received the National Humanities Medal.
Gordon-Reed teaches at Harvard, where she is the Carl M. Loeb University Professor. Her many other award-winning books include Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy; Race on Trial: Law and Justice in American History; and On Juneteenth.
