Annette Gordon-Reed is the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard University. A distinguished historian and law professor, she gained widespread recognition for her groundbreaking works on Thomas Jefferson and the enslaved members of the Hemings family, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy and The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family.

Gordon-Reed grew up in Conroe, Texas, during the era of enforced racial segregation. At age six, she integrated the schools in her hometown. Her fascination with history began in the third grade when she read a book about Jefferson and slavery at Monticello. Indeed, Gordon-Reed went on to major in history at Dartmouth College. She then attended and graduated from Harvard Law School where she was a member of the Harvard Law Review, and where she met her future husband, the Honorable Robert R. Reed, now a justice of the Supreme Court of the State of New York. After Harvard, she became an associate at Cahill, Gordon & Reindel. She left Cahill to become the Counsel for the New York City Board of Correction.

In 1992, Gordon-Reed took a position at New York Law School. While there, she noted a controversy over a film that treated the story of Thomas Jeffersonrsquo;s relationship with Sally Hemings as true. The prevailing view among historians was that the story was false. Gordon-Reed believed that historians’ consideration of the issue was deeply flawed, and she wrote her first book, Thomas Jefferson & Sally Hemings (1997), to demonstrate that point. In 1998, DNA tests on the descendants of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings supported Gordon-Reedrsquo;s work. Her subsequent book on the topic, The Hemingses of Monticello (2008), which tells the multi-generational enslaved familyrsquo;s story during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, won at least sixteen book prizes, including the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

“…in America the law is king. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be King; and there ought to be no other.”

Thomas Paine, Common Sense

Gordon-Reed joined Harvard in 2010 with joint appointments in history and law, and as the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She was the Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Visiting Professor at Queenrsquo;s College, Oxford 2014-2015. She became the Carl M. Loeb University Professor in 2020. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship and fellowships from the Cullman Center and the John W. Kluge Center. She served as a member of the Dartmouth College Board of Trustees from 2010 to 2018. Gordon-Reed is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the British Academy, and an honorary fellow of Queenrsquo;s College, Oxford. Gordon-Reed has served as the president of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, as president of the Society of American Historians, and is now the president of the Organization of American Historians. She currently serves as a trustee of New York Public Library, the New York Historical, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Gilder-Lehrman Foundation, and the Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture. In 2022, Gordon-Reedrsquo;s hometown school district opened Annette Gordon-Reed Elementary School in her honor. Gordon-Reed is the recipient of numerous honorary degrees.

Gordon-Reed resides in New York City with her husband Robert and in Cambridge. Their daughter, Susan Jean Gordon Reed, is a graduate of Harvard College, Oxford, and the Yale School of Management. Their son, Gordon Penn Reed, is a graduate of Dartmouth College.