Catherine Kerrison is an associate professor of history at Villanova University in Villanova, Pennsylvania, where she teaches courses in colonial and revolutionary America and women's and gender history. She holds a Ph.D. in American history from the College of William and Mary. Her first book, “Claiming the Pen: Women and Intellectual Life in the Early American South” (Cornell), won the Outstanding Book Prize from the History of Education Society in 2007. She has recently written “Jefferson’s Daughters: Three Sisters, White and Black, in a Young America” (Ballantine).