Featuring Professor Mary Sarah Bilder of Boston College Law School
2022 Age of Jefferson Lecture Thursday, October 27, 2022
The Center for Study of the Age of Jefferson and the Jefferson Scholars Foundation present the 2nd annual Age of Jefferson Lecture featuring Professor Mary Sarah Bilder of Boston College Law School.
In her book, Professor Bilder looks to the 1780s—the Age of the Constitution—to investigate the rise of a radical new idea in the English-speaking world: female genius. She finds the perfect exemplar of this phenomenon in English-born Eliza Harriot Barons O’Connor. This pathbreaking female educator delivered a University of Pennsylvania lecture attended by George Washington as he and other Constitutional Convention delegates gathered in Philadelphia. As the first such public female lecturer, her courageous performance likely inspired the gender-neutral language of the Constitution.
Professor Bilder has authored two other books. The first, Madison's Hand: Revising the Constitutional Convention (Harvard University Press), was awarded the 2016 Bancroft Prize in American History and Diplomacy and the James C. Bradford Prize for Biography from the Society for Historians of the Early Republic. It was also named a finalist for the George Washington Book Prize. The second, The Transatlantic Constitution: Colonial Legal Culture and the Empire (Harvard University Press), received the Littleton-Griswold Award from the American Historical Association.
This event is facilitated by The Center for the Study of the Age of Jefferson, a hub of interdisciplinary research and study funded by the Jefferson Scholars Foundation.
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