For Gordon-Reed ’81, grant to aid her research

By Nathan Yeo, The Dartmouth Staff

Published on Wednesday, September 29, 2010

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Pulitzer-Prize winning historian Annette Gordon-Reed ’81 received the MacArthur Fellowship — commonly known as the “Genius Grant” — for her groundbreaking scholarship on the life and family of President Thomas Jefferson, the Foundation announced Tuesday.

Gordon-Reed, a professor at Harvard University’s undergraduate college and Harvard Law School, wrote the 2008 book “The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family,” which traced the history of several generations of the slave family owned by Jefferson. The book won the National Book Award in 2008 and the Pulitzer Prize in 2009.

“I’m enormously grateful and humbled to be given this award,” Gordon-Reed told Harvard Law School News. “Of course I’ve known about MacArthur Fellowships for many years and wondered what it would be like to have someone call out of the blue and tell you you’ve won something like that. Now I know, and I have to say it’s a very good feeling.”

According to the The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s website, the Fellowships are awarded each year to 23 individuals who have displayed “extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction.” Gordon-Reed and the other fellows each receive $500,000 in payments over five years to further their careers and research.

“It’s a validation of my work and a way of making it easier for me and will help me continue the work that the MacArthur Foundation thought was worthwhile,” Gordon-Reed said in a video on the MacArthur website.

Gordon-Reed’s research on Jefferson began with her 1997 book, “Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy,” in which she examined the historical evidence for a sexual relationship between Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings. Although such a relationship was alleged at the time and has been discussed ever since, many historians dismissed the claims. Through a close examination of scholarly and historical records, Gordon-Reed wrote that an affair was likely and historians had used double standards to cast doubt upon its existence. DNA testing conducted in 1998 concluded that Jefferson was the probable father of one of Hemings’s children, lending scientific credibility to Gordon-Reed’s conclusion.

“I was concerned about the way the words of former enslaved people were treated in the historiography,” Gordon-Reed said in the video. “There was a tendency to subject them to extra scrutiny and when they contradicted the words of the whites, to believe the whites. So it was not just about Jefferson and Hemings — ‘did he or did he not [have an affair]’ — it was a bigger topic to me. It was, ‘how do you view the words of enslaved people in American history’?”

According to the video on the MacArthur website, Gordon-Reed is working on a sequel to “The Hemingses of Monticello” in which she will further trace the history of the family into the 19th century. She said she plans to further examine what the experience of the mixed-race Hemingses, some of whom remained in the black community and others who joined the white community, says about race and the United States at the time.

Gordon-Reed majored in history at Dartmouth and subsequently received a law degree from Harvard Law School in 1984. In July, she joined the faculty of both Harvard Law School and was appointed professor of history in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Carol K. Pforzheimer professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, also at Harvard. She was previously Wallace Stevens Professor of Law at New York Law School and Board of Governors Professor of History at Rutgers University in Newark, N.J.