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Andrew Jackson O'Shaughnessy FRHS (born 1959) is an academic historian and professor of history at the University of Virginia.[1] Between 2003 and 2022, he was Vice President of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation and the Saunders Director of the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello.[2] [3]
Born in Cheshire in 1959, Andrew O'Shaughnessy was educated at Bedford School. After completing his B.A. and D.Phil at Oriel College, Oxford, he taught at Eton College. He was subsequently appointed as a visiting professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas and as Professor of American History at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, where he was chair of the History Department between 1998 and 2003.
O'Shaughnessy is the author of An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean (2000) and 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 Daughters of the American Revolution Excellence in American History Book Award.[4] It has been translated into Chinese.[1] 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).[5]
A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, O'Shaughnessy is co-editor of Old World, New World: America and Europe in the Age of Jefferson (2010), The Founding of Thomas Jefferson's University (2019), and The European Friends of the American Revolution (2023). He is a general editor of the Jeffersonian American Series, published by the University of Virginia Press.
O'Shaughnessy's father, John O'Shaughnessy, is an Emeritus Professor of the Columbia University Business School. His brother, Nicholas O'Shaughnessy, is Professor of Communications at Queen Mary College, London University.
He is a joint citizen of the United Kingdom and the United States.[6]