Gordon-Reed (née Gordon) was born in Livingston, Texas, in 1958. She received her bachelor’s degree in 1981 from Dartmouth College, and her JD in 1984 from Harvard Law School, where she worked on the Harvard Law Review. She is currently Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History at Harvard Law School, Professor of History in the Department of History at Harvard University, and Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. After a period of time spent in private legal practice, first as an associate with law firm of Cahill, Gordon & Reindel in New York City, and then as legal counsel for the New York Board of Corrections, Gordon-Reed returned to Academia, teaching first at New York Law School and later at Rutgers University. In 2010, she returned to Harvard with a joint appointment in history and law. In 2014, she was appointed Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Visiting Professor in Queen’s College at the University of Oxford.

Gordon-Reed is best known for her ground-breaking work on the Hemings family of slaves who were owned by Thomas Jefferson and lived on his Virginia plantation, Monticello. In many research articles and three best-selling books, she reviewed earlier historical research and advanced new arguments in support of the thesis that Jefferson’s slave Sally Hemings was the mother of as many as six of his children. After an initial period of skepticism on the part of established white historians, Gordon-Reed’s work on the complex relationship between Jefferson and Hemings has by now become very widely, if not universally, accepted by the academic historical community. In addition to her work on Jefferson and the Hemingses, she has published widely on many other topics of early American history, including a book on Lincoln’s Vice Present and seventeenth President of the US, Andrew Johnson. She also assisted the prominent civil rights activist Vernon Jordan in writing his memoir.

The recipient of several honorary degrees, as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2009 and a MacArthur Fellowship in 2010, Gordon-Reed received both the Pulitzer Prize for History and the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2009 for her book, The Hemingses of Monticello. In addition to her books, she is the author of numerous peer-reviewed articles in edited volumes and in such academic journals as Foreign Affairs, Journal of American History, and William and Mary Quarterly. In 2010, Gordon-Reed received the National Humanities Medal, the nation’s highest award in the humanities, in a ceremony at the White House.

Publications:

• Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (University of Virginia Press, 1997)
• Vernon Can Read! A Memoir (Public Affairs, 2001)
• Race on Trial: Law and Justice in American History (Oxford University Press, 2002)
• The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (W.W. Norton, 2008)
• Andrew Johnson (Times Books, 2011)
• “Most Blessed of the Patriarchs”: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination(Liveright, 2016)

Source: https://thebestschools.org/features/black-scholars-you-should-know/