Coombs Lecture Theatre, Building 9, ANU

Professor Annette Gordon-Reed* 

Thomas Jefferson enslaved over 700 people over the course of his adult life.  Most lived and worked at his famous home, Monticello. 

This paper examines Jefferson's complicated relationship to slavery - what he wrote about it and how he lived it at the plantation that occupies an iconic place in the American imagination.

 *Annette Gordon-Reed is a Professor of Law and Professor of History at Harvard University. She is also the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard. Gordon-Reed is the author of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (1997), Vernon Can Read: A Memoir with Vernon Jordan (2001), the editor of Race on Trial: Law and Justice in American History (2002) and the author of The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (2008) for which she won sixteen awards including the Pulitzer Prize in History, the National Book Award, and the Frederick Douglass Book Prize. Her latest book, Andrew Johnson, was published this past January 18th.  Gordon-Reed received the 2009 National Humanities Medal awarded by President Barack Obama and a MacArthur Fellowship in 2010. She is currently a fellow at the New York Public Library's Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers and a Guggenheim Fellow.