Christa Dierksheide is Brockman Foundation Jefferson Scholars Foundation Professor of History at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Beyond Jefferson: The Hemingses, the Randolphs, and the Making of Nineteenth-Century America and Amelioration and Empire: Progress and Slavery in the Plantation Americas, 1770-1840. Formerly the Historian at the Robert H. Smith Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello, she has curated and contributed to numerous related exhibitions.