Paul Jefferson, associate professor emeritus of history at Haverford College in Pennsylvania, died on March 23. He was 77 years old.
Jefferson earned a bachelor’s degree and a Ph.D. from Harvard University. He also studied at the University of Ghana, conducting research on W.E.B. Du Bois. Dr. 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.
Dr. Jefferson 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. He was a scholar who specialized in 19th- and 20th-century intellectual history. Dr. Jefferson taught different 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 program.
Dr. Jefferson taught in the department of history at Haverford for nearly 30 years until his retirement in 2010.
