NCC Presents Annette Gordon-Reed

Acclaimed historian, author, and Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard University, Annette Gordon-Reed, will be the keynote speaker for Northampton Community College’s (NCC) Annual Humanities Program this upcoming April 2026. The live event will take place on April 14, 026, at 7 p.m. The event is free and is open to the public. To reserve tickets, visit northampton.edu/keynote2026.

NCC’s Annual Humanities Theme for 2025-2026, “We the People: Reflecting Back, Building Forward,” honors the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. This program builds upon NCC’s original designation by the National Endowment for the Humanities as a “We the People” institution, a distinction that placed our College among an elite group committed to strengthening the teaching, study, and understanding of American history and culture.

Annette Gordon-Reed has won sixteen book prizes, including the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2009. For her work, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, been awarded the National Book Award in 2008; the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, the& Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and the George Washington Book Prize in 2009.

In addition to articles, essays, and reviews, her other works include Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy; Race on Trial: Law and Justice in American History; with Peter S. Onuf, Most Blessed of the Patriarchs: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination; On Juneteenth. Her newest book, Jefferson on Race: A Reader, will be forthcoming from Princeton University Press in March 2026.

Gordon-Reed was the Vyvyan Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at the University of Oxford (Queens College) 2014-2015 and was the 2018-2019 President of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. She is the current President of the Ames Foundation. Her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship in the Humanities, a MacArthur Fellowship, and the National Humanities Medal.

Gordon-Reed’s groundbreaking work—exploring history and the complexities of the American experience—invites us to reflect on our shared past. Her work continues to shape how we understand American history, identity, and democracy.