Celebrating the Legacy of Daniel P. Jordan

Edward L. Ayers

Edward L. Ayers is university professor of the humanities and president emeritus at the University of Richmond. The author of eight books, he has won the Bancroft and Lincoln Prizes for his scholarship, been named National Professor of the Year, received the National Humanities Medal from President Obama at the White House, served as president of the Organization of American Historians, and was the founding board chair of the American Civil War Museum in Richmond. He taught at the University of Virginia for 27 years, where he served as Dean of the College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and received the Thomas Jefferson Award, the University’s highest honor.  He is executive director of New American History and Bunk, dedicated to making the nation’s history more visible and useful for a broad range of audiences. His latest book is American Visions:  The United States, 1800-1860 (W.W. Norton, 2023)

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Andrew Davenport

Andrew M. Davenport is the acting Saunders Director at Monticello's Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies. He is a Ph.D. candidate at Georgetown University where he served as a research assistant with the Georgetown Slavery Archive. Davenport has published in Lapham’s Quarterly, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Smithsonian Magazine. His first academic article, “Ralph Ellison and New York City, 1946-1994,” appeared in Ralph Ellison in Context (ed. Paul Devlin, Cambridge University Press, 2021), and his second article, “Mourning at Monticello,” appeared in Mourning the Presidents (eds. Lindsay Chervinsky and Matthew Costello, University of Virginia Press, 2023).

Davenport serves on the Board of Directors of the American Agora Foundation (Lapham’s Quarterly) and is a member of the inaugural cohort of the White House Historical Association Next-Gen Leadership Ambassadors. Davenport has taught middle school history at Brooklyn Jesuit Prep, high school history at Fairfield College Preparatory School, African American Art History at Fairfield University, and a Georgetown University course on the history of the Georgetown neighborhood. He earned a B.A. in English from Kenyon College, an M.A. in American Studies from Fairfield University, and an M.A. in U.S. History from Georgetown University.

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J. Calvin Jefferson, Sr.

Julius “Calvin” Jefferson, Sr. was born and raised in Washington, D.C. and educated in the District of Colombia Public School System graduating from high school in 1965. He attended District of Columbia Teachers College earning a Bachelor of Science Degree for History/Education and studied Public Administration at American University. Calvin taught United States History at Armstrong Adult Education Center in the District of Columbia Public School System for approximately eighteen months before joining the staff of the National Archives and Records Administration, retiring in 2007.

Calvin’s ancestral research began in 1978 at the National Archives searching Virginia’s Census Records for his great grandparents, Philip Evens and Carry Ann Robinson Hughes. The 1870 census records revealed Phillip’s parents to be Robert and Sydney Evens Hughes and Carry Ann’s parents are Isaac and Lucy Fleming Robinson all residing in Albemarle County, Fredericksville Parish. While researching records in the Albemarle County court house he discovered Robert Hughes performed marriage ceremonies at Union Branch Baptist Church. Upon further research he learned Robert Hughes and the emancipated people of Edge Hill and adjacent plantations founded Union Branch Baptist Church on land donated by Thomas Jefferson Randolph. In 1874 the congregation of Zion Hill Baptist Church select Robert to become their first permanent minister.

In 1999, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation’s Getting Word Project contacted Calvin revealing his maternal linage to three Monticello families (Jupiter Evens, George and Ursula Granger, and Elizabeth Hemings). This information reinforced his roots in Albemarle County date back to the creation of the county and his family’s enslavement by Jefferson/Randolph families on their Shadwell, Monticello, and Edge Hill plantations. Calvin’s genealogy goal is to discover as much information about his family in order to tell their story and the family’s contribution to the history of the United States.

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Dr. Jane Kamensky

Dr. Kamensky joined Monticello from Harvard University, where she served since 2015 as the Jonathan Trumbull Professor of American History and the Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation Director of the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at Harvard Radcliffe Institute. In her years as Director of the Schlesinger Library, she successfully worked to raise the profile of the library to the most preeminent of its kind in the world by partnering with an international network of diverse scholars and thought leaders. 

Dr. Kamensky is the author or co-author of seven books spanning four centuries of American history, including the prize-winning A Revolution in Color: The World of John Singleton Copley (2016). She is also a member of the author team on A People and a Nation, one of the preeminent textbooks in American history, and the co-editor, with Edward G. Gray, of The Oxford Handbook of the American Revolution. A principal investigator for the NEH-DoE funded social studies initiative Educating for American Democracy, Dr. Kamensky brings a commitment to civic education and engagement that deeply aligns with Monticello’s mission.

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J. Jefferson Looney

J. Jefferson Looney is the Daniel P. Jordan Editor of The Papers of Thomas Jefferson at Monticello. He is the founding editor-in-chief of the Jefferson Papers Retirement Series, sponsored by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Inc., Charlottesville, Virginia. Twenty volumes of this definitive edition of Jefferson’s writings and correspondence between 1809 and 1826 have been published, and a twenty-first is in press. Dr. Looney was formerly editor and project director of the Dictionary of Virginia Biography, and he is a past president of the Association for Documentary Editing. He is the author or editor of several works on the history of Princeton University, where he did his doctoral work in British history.

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Ann M. Lucas

Ann Lucas is the Senior Historian Emerita at the Thomas Jefferson Foundation (Monticello). She is the co-editor of Thomas Jefferson’s Granddaughter in Queen Victoria’s England: The Travel Diary of Ellen Wayles Coolidge, 1838-1839 (University of Virginia Press: 2012) and was an NEH Research Fellow for the exhibition The Worlds of Thomas Jefferson at Monticello as well as a contributor to the exhibition catalog of the same name. She has a master’s degree in Architectural History and a certificate in Historic Preservation from the University of Virginia.