Christa Dierksheide

Christa Dierksheide has emerged at UVA as a formidable voice on the life and legacy of Thomas Jefferson, the Founding Era, and race and slavery. In addition to her teaching load, research, and collaborations across Grounds, she serves as the inaugural director of the Foundation’s new Center for the Study of the Age of Jefferson, where she takes an innovative approach to training the next generation of Early Americanists, giving doctoral and postdoctoral students opportunities to expand their expertise in a wide variety of methodologies, including digital history, material culture, and public history. She also offers manuscript workshops and an opportunity to co-teach a course with her.

Her first book, Amelioration and Empire: Progress and Slavery in the Plantation Americas, 1770-1840 (Virginia, 2014) brought the Anglophone Caribbean and the U.S. South into the same frame, arguing that “improvement” lay at the core of both proslavery and antislavery thinking. Her second book, Beyond Jefferson: the Hemingses, Randolphs, and the Making of Nineteenth Century America (Yale, 2024), is a global history of Jefferson’s family members on both sides of the color line.  

She is currently at work on a third book, Jefferson’s Wolf: The Struggle to End Slavery in the Founding Era (under contract with Harvard), co-written with Nicholas Guyatt of the University of Cambridge.