Paul Channing Jefferson papers

Paul Channing Jefferson (1944-2022) was associate professor emeritus of history at Haverford College where he taught for nearly thirty years. Jefferson earned both his B.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University, where he won the Graduate Prize Fellowship. He also studied at the University of Ghana, researching W.E.B. Du Bois. Jefferson was selected for a Fulbright Fellowship at the University of Paris in 1967, but turned it down to become associate director of the Yale Summer High School. He was a teaching fellow at Harvard, a lecturer at Babson College, and an instructor at the Commonwealth School in Boston before joining the Haverford faculty in 1981.

Jefferson was a scholar who specialized in 19th- and 20th-century intellectual history. He taught classes on American intellectual history, African-American intellectual history, and African-American political and social thought, among others. From 1984 through the late 1990s, he was the coordinator for the College’s African American Studies Concentration, now called African and Africana Studies. He published on Black public intellectuals, including Du Bois, William Wells Brown, and Haverford’s first tenured Black professor, Ira de Augustine Reid. In 1983, he was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship award from the National Research Council for his research on the history of Black sociology. In 1988, he won the Christian R. and Mary F. Lindback Foundation Teaching Fellowship. Jefferson retired in 2010.