The West Virginia Humanities Council announces that Pulitzer Prize-winning author and historian Annette Gordon-Reed will present the annual McCreight Lecture in the Humanities on Thursday, Oct. 27, at the University of Charleston. The 7:30 p.m. program is free and open to the public. Additional details will be announced in the fall. Annette Gordon-Reed, a National Humanities Medal recipient, is the Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History at Harvard Law School, a professor of history at Harvard University, and formerly the Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at the Queen’s College, University of Oxford in 2014-2015. Gordon-Reed won the Pulitzer Prize in History and the National Book Award for “The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family” (W.W. Norton, 2009), a subject she had previously written about in “Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy” (University Press of Virginia, 1997). She is also the author of “Andrew Johnson” (Times Books/Henry Holt, 2010). 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). “We are delighted to have a speaker of this caliber for the 2016 McCreight Lecture,” said Ken Sullivan, executive director of the Humanities Council. “Professor Gordon-Reed is working a fascinating corner of American history in the Jefferson-Hemings story, and the National Book Award, a Pulitzer and a string of other awards attest to her success. We look forward to hearing what she has to say.” Her additional honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship in the humanities, a MacArthur Fellowship, a fellowship from the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and the Woman of Power & Influence Award from the National Organization for Women in New York City. Gordon-Reed was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011 and is a member of the Academy’s Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences. The McCreight Lecture is a program of the West Virginia Humanities Council and also serves as a kick-off event for the West Virginia Book Festival that will be held Oct. 28-29 at the Charleston Civic Center. The Humanities Council is a Charter Presenter of the Book Festival. For more information contact the Humanities Council at 304-346-8500 or visit www.wvhumanities.org.
