Rate My Professor Annette Gordon-Reed

Annette Gordon-Reed served as Board of Governors Professor of History at Rutgers University in Newark from 2007 to 2010. A graduate of Dartmouth College with a BA in 1981 and Harvard Law School with a JD in 1984, she began her career in legal practice as an associate at Cahill Gordon & Reindel and as counsel to the New York City Board of Corrections. From 1992 to 2010, she held the position of Wallace Stevens Professor of Law at New York Law School. Her scholarship bridges history and law, focusing on early American history, race, slavery, and legal justice.

During her Rutgers tenure, Gordon-Reed published The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (W.W. Norton, 2008), a landmark work on the enslaved Hemings family at Thomas Jefferson's Monticello. The book garnered the Pulitzer Prize in History (2009), National Book Award for Nonfiction (2008), Frederick Douglass Book Prize (2009), George Washington Book Prize (2009), Anisfield-Wolf Book Award (2009), and additional accolades including the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic Book Award and the Owsley Award from the Southern Historical Association. Other key publications include Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (University of Virginia Press, 1997), Race on Trial: Law and Justice in American History (Oxford University Press, 2002, editor), Andrew Johnson (Times Books/Henry Holt, 2010), “Most Blessed of the Patriarchs”: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination (with Peter S. Onuf, Liveright Publishing, 2016), and On Juneteenth (Liveright Publishing, 2021). She received the MacArthur Fellowship (2010), Guggenheim Fellowship (2009), and a fellowship from the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library (2010-2011). Gordon-Reed was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2011) and the American Philosophical Society (2019). She served on the Dartmouth College Board of Trustees (2010-2018), as President of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (2018-2019), and currently as President of the Ames Foundation. After Rutgers-Newark, she joined Harvard University as Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute (2010-2015) and now holds the titles of Carl M. Loeb University Professor, Professor of History in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History at Harvard Law School.