Monticello CEO to give Randolph’s Philip Thayer Memorial Lecture

Jane Kamensky, president and CEO of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation and Jefferson’s home, Monticello, will deliver Randolph College’s Philip Thayer Memorial Lecture in April. 

The lecture, “‘I Think Right When I Think with You’: Jefferson, Adams, and the Lost Art of Civic Friendship,” will be held on Tuesday, April 7, at 6 p.m. in Wimberly Recital Hall. Admission is free and open to the public. 

“In this 250th anniversary year of the Declaration of Independence, there could not be a more fitting moment to welcome Dr. Kamensky, one of the nation’s leading scholars of the Revolutionary era, to campus,” said history professor Connor Kenaston. “Her visit invites us to reflect not only on the founding of the United States but on the unfinished work of American democracy.”

The lecture topic also aligns with Randolph’s ongoing commitment to fostering pluralism on campus. The College is a member of the statewide Advancing Campus Pluralism Cohort, sponsored by Interfaith America and the Council of Independent Colleges in Virginia. 

“Her lecture on the civic friendship of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, bitter rivals who eventually came to find common ground, speaks to our polarized present,” Kenaston said. “Their relationship offers a compelling historical framework for considering how to engage differences with intellectual rigor and mutual respect.”

An emerita professor at Harvard University, Kamensky earned her BA and PhD in history from Yale University. She spent 30 years working as a professor and higher education leader, most recently as Harvard University’s Jonathan Trumbull Professor of American History and the Pforzheimer Foundation Director of the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at Harvard Radcliffe Institute. 

She is the author or editor of numerous books, including A Revolution in Color: The World of John Singleton Copley (2016), which won four major prizes and was a finalist for several others, and the authoritative Oxford Handbook of the American Revolution, co-edited with the late Edward G. Gray. 

Her most recent book, Candida Royalle and the Sexual Revolution, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography. 

A former commissioner of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery and past trustee of the Museum of the American Revolution, Kamensky serves as a member of the National Advisory Council of More Perfect and as one of the principal investigators on the NEH/Department of Education-funded initiative, Educating for American Democracy, among many other public history roles. 

Her work has been supported by fellowships from the NEH, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation, among others, and she is an elected fellow of the American Antiquarian Society, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the Society of American Historians.