Despite scholarly opposition toward her groundbreaking book, Thomas Jefferson & Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, historian, Harvard Law School professor and Pulitzer Prize winner Annette Gordon-Reed published an unrelenting body of research that led to a 1998 DNA test which proved a once-rumored relationship between Jefferson and the woman he owned.

Her current work continues the story of the Hemings-Jefferson family. She serves as a humanities commission member for the “Heart of the Matter.”

Co-sponsored by the ADVANCE Program for Inclusive Excellence and Miller Center for Historical Studies.