Pulitzer-Prize-winning author Annette Gordon-Reed will deliver “Thomas Jefferson’s Imagined Black Nation,” a public lecture, on Thurs., April 20.
Pulitzer-Prize-winning author Annette Gordon-Reed will deliver “Thomas Jefferson’s Imagined Black Nation,” a public lecture, on Thurs., April 20, 7-9 p.m. in Tishman Auditorium at NYU’s School of Law (Vanderbilt Hall, 40 Washington Square South [between MacDougal and Sullivan Streets]).
The event is free and open to the public—registration is required. For more information, email nyih.info@nyu.edu or call 212.998.2101. Subways: A, C, E, D, F, M (West 4th Street).
Gordon-Reed, the Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History at Harvard Law School and a professor of history at Harvard University, won the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2009 for The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (W.W. Norton, 2009).
Her most recently published book (with Peter S. Onuf) is Most Blessed of the Patriarchs: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination (Liveright Publishing, 2016). Gordon-Reed’s lecture draws on her research from this book, which centers on Thomas Jefferson’s vision of enslaved African Americans as a “captive nation”—a nation that could not coexist peacefully with the American nation. How did Jefferson come to this view? What are we to make of him in light of his pessimism about the possibility of a multiracial, multicultural society?
The lecture is co-sponsored by Princeton University Press (PUP) and the New York Institute for the Humanities (NYIH) at NYU. It is the Second Annual PUP/NYIH Lecture in the Humanities, which aims to highlight both the value and the relevance of the humanities through talks by notable figures from a wide range of fields who explore humanistic topics and themes.
Editor’s Note:
About Princeton University Press
Princeton University Press is an independent publisher with close connections, both formal and informal, to Princeton University. As such it has overlapping responsibilities to the University, the academic community, and the reading public and a fundamental mission to disseminate scholarship both within academia and to society at large. Founded in 1905, it has offices in Princeton, Oxford, and Beijing.
About the New York Institute for the Humanities
Established in 1976, the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University is a leading forum for promoting the exchange of ideas between academics, professionals, politicians, diplomats, writers, journalists, musicians, painters, and other artists in New York City. Comprising more than two hundred distinguished fellows, the NYIH serves to facilitate conversations about the role of the humanities in public life.