Annette Gordon-Reed

Annette Gordon-Reed is a Professor of Law at New York Law School and a Rutgers Board of Governors Professor of History at Rutgers University. She holds an honorary doctorate from Ramapo College. After receiving an A.B in history from  Dartmouth College (1981) and a J. D. from Harvard Law School (1984), she worked as an Associate at the law firm of Cahill, Gordon & Reindel (1984-87) and as a Counsel on the New York City Board of Correction (1987-92) before beginning her academic career at NYLS in 1993. She joined the faculty of Rutgers in 2006.

Best known for her Pulitzer Prize–winning study Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (University of Virginia Press, 1997), she is also the author of Vernon Can Read! A Memoir (Public Affairs, 2001), written with its subject, Vernon Jordan; The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (Norton, 2008), the second volume of which she will be completing during her Guggenheim Fellowship term; and Andrew Johnson (Henry Holt/Times Books, 2009). She is also the editor of Race on Trial: Law and Justice in American History (Oxford UP, 2002) and Thomas Jefferson: A Reader on Race (Princeton UP, 2009). 

Among Ms. Gordon-Reed’s many honors are NOW’s Woman of Power and Influence Award (1999); the NYLS Otto Walter Prize for best faculty publication of 1999; the Bridging the Gap Award, recognizing her efforts to foster racial reconciliation (2000); Columbia University’s Barbara A. Black lectureship (2001); the Trailblazer Award from the Metropolitan Black Bar Association (2001); and selection as a National Book Award judge in the nonfiction category.