About the Author

Andrew O’Shaughnessy is Professor of History at the University of Virginia. Between 2003 and 2022, he was the Vice President of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation (Monticello), the Saunders Director of the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello, and Professor of History at the University of Virginia. His most recent book is the Illimitable Freedom of the Human Mind: Thomas Jefferson’s Idea of a University (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2021). He has previously published The Men Who Lost America. British Leadership, the American Revolution and the Fate of the Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), which received eight national awards including the New York Historical Society American History Book Prize, the George Washington Book Prize and The Society of Military History Book Prize. He is also the author of An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000) which was the alternate designate selection of the History Book Club. He coedited Old World, New World: America and Europe in the Age of Jefferson (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010) and The Founding of Thomas Jefferson’s University of Virginia (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press: 2019). He co-authored book with the late Trevor Burnard, “Republic and Empire: The American Revolution and The Crisis of British Imperialism,” which will be published by Yale in 2025.

As part of his study of the 1824-25 American tour of Edward Geoffrey Stanley, 14th Earl of Derby, he was awarded a Visiting Research Fellowship at Magdalen College, Oxford.  He has previously been a Visiting International Fellow at the Wilberforce Institute at Hull University; a Miegunyah Distinguished Visiting Fellow at The University of Melbourne, Australia; a Sons of the American Revolution Visiting Professor at King’s College, London University, in association with the Georgian Papers Programme at Royal Archives in Windsor Castle; a  Barra Senior Research Fellow at The McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; a Copeland Colloquium Fellow at  Amherst College, Massachusetts; and a University of Wisconsin System Fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanitie at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

 He has given various keynote addresses and distinguished lectures, including the Sir John Elliot Lecture at the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford University, James Madison Lecture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the George Rule Lecture at Southampton University, the 25th Anniversary Celebration of the Teaching Company (“The Great Courses”) Keynote Speech, The Yorktown Day Association 235th Anniversary of the Victory at Yorktown, the George Rogers Clark Lecture at the Society of Cincinnati, and, the governing board of the Montgomery Bell High School, Constitution Day Lecture at the University of Oklahoma (Norman),  the first  Richard S. Dunn Symposium, Autumn General Meeting of the American Philosophical Society. He has lectured to a wide range of audiences, including the Queen Mary 2, the Metropolitan Club, Charleston Library Company, The US Pavilion at the 2022 World Expo in Dubai,  The Brook, The Library Company of Philadelphia,  Boodles,  Virginia Bar Association, Cato Institute, Rancho Mirage Writers Festival,  Mill Reef Club, Hamden Sydney College, The American Antiquarian Society, The Reform Club, The South Carolina Historical Society,  the University of San Diego, Virginia Military Institute, The Pendennis Club, New York Historical Society, British Library (Eccles Centre), Winchester College, Huntington Library,  Mount Vernon, AHA Washington History Seminar, and the Board of Visitors at the University of Virginia.  

He coedited Old World, New World: America and Europe in the Age of Jefferson (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010) and The Founding of Thomas Jefferson’s University of Virginia (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press: 2019), and The European Friends of the American Revolution (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2023). A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, he is an editor of the Jeffersonian America series published by the University of Virginia Press.