Wittenberg welcomes Annette Gordon-Reed, a renowned law professor and scholar of American history, for its annual William A. Kinnison Endowed Lecture in History at 7:30 p.m. Monday, March 26, in historic Weaver Chapel as the final event of the 2017-18 Wittenberg Series.

The Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History at Harvard Law School and a professor of history in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University, Gordon-Reed has taught at the New York Law School and at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. She was formerly the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (2010-2016) and the Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at Queen's College, University of Oxford (2014-2015). Her keynote address is titled “Jefferson in the Time of ‘Hamilton.’”

In 2009, she won the Pulitzer Prize in History for her book The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (W.W. Norton, 2009), a subject she had previously written about in Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (University Press of Virginia, 1997). She is also the author of Andrew Johnson (Times Books/Henry Holt, 2010). Her sixth and most recently published book (with Peter S. Onuf) is Most Blessed of the Patriarchs: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination (Liveright Publishing, 2016). Her next book, A Jefferson Reader on Race, is forthcoming from Princeton University Press.

Gordon-Reed’s honors include a fellowship from the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, a Guggenheim Fellowship in the Humanities, a MacArthur Fellowship, the National Humanities Medal, the National Book Award, and the Woman of Power & Influence Award from the National Organization for Women in New York City. She was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011 and is a member of the Academy’s Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences.

She holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School and an A.B. from Dartmouth College. Prior to becoming an academic, she was counsel to the New York City Board of Corrections and was an associate at Cahill, Gordon, and Reindel.

Now in its 35th year, the Wittenberg Series brings distinguished lecturers and performing artists of national and international prominence to the Wittenberg campus and Springfield community. To make special arrangements, request a Series poster, or become a friend of the Wittenberg Series, contact Lisa Watson at WatsonL4@wittenberg.edu. All Wittenberg Series events are free and open to the public.

For more information on the Wittenberg Series, click here.