Writing History Event: Virginia Scharff

“The Women Jefferson Loved”
Conversation and workshop with
historian Virginia Scharff
Thursday 12 February, 3:30 p.m.
HGS 204, 320 York Street
Yale University

All are invited.

We’ll discuss Virginia Scharff’s work-in-progress, “The Women Jefferson Loved,” the first major study of Thomas Jefferson’s female kin and intimate companions. Probing the private lives and emotional entanglements of men and women, both celebrated and little-known, it poses questions about what can–and cannot–be suggested in the face of “documentary silence.”

Virginia Scharff is Professor of History and Director of the Center for the Southwest at the University of New Mexico. Her publications include Taking the Wheel: Women and the Coming of the Motor Age (1991); Twenty Thousand Roads: Women, Movement, and the West (2003); and the edited volume Seeing Nature Through Gender (2003). She is the Beinecke Research Fellow in the Lamar Center for Frontiers and Borders at Yale University (2008-9), Women of the West Chair at the Autry National Center in Los Angeles, and recent President of the Western History Association.

She is also the author of four mystery-suspense novels, written under the name of Virginia Swift: Brown-Eyed Girl (2000), Bad Company (2002), Bye, Bye, Love (2004), and Hello, Stranger (2006).