Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers

Research Expertise and Interest

slavery, African-American History, Women's History, Women and the Law, Slavery and the Law

Research Description

Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers is an Associate Professor and Chancellor’s Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley, where she specializes in African American history, the history of slavery, and women’s and gender history. Broadly construed, her work seeks to understand women’s direct legal and economic roles in racialized systems of oppression. She is the author of They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South (2019), which won the Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery (at the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture) 2020 Harriet Tubman Prize for the best nonfiction book published in the United States on the slave trade, slavery, and anti-slavery in the Atlantic World, the Southern Association for Women’s Historians 2020 Julia Cherry Spruill Prize awarded for the best book in southern women’s history, the Southern Historical Association’s 2020 Charles S. Sydnor Award which is awarded for the best book in southern history published in an odd-numbered year, the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic’s 2020 Best Book Prize, and the Organization of American Historians’ 2020 Merle Curti Prize for the best book in American social history. Jones-Rogers was also the first African American and the third woman to win the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History since the award’s inception in 1980. In 2023, she received the Dan David Prize, the largest history prize in the world.

She is currently at work on two new projects. Her second book, “Women of the Trade” (under contract with W. W. Norton), reorients our understanding of the British Atlantic slave trade by centering the lives and experiences of English, African, and Afro-English women, free and captive, in its telling. Her third, “Women, American Slavery, and the Law” (also under contract with W. W. Norton), will be the first book-length manuscript to examine the relationship between gender and the evolution of American slave/property law in both the North and the South from the colonial period to slavery’s legal end. The Hellman Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Ford Foundation, and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation have supported this work.

Jones-Rogers earned her Ph.D. in African American History from Rutgers University-New Brunswick, an M. A. in United States History from Rutgers University-Newark, and a B.A. in Psychology from Rutgers University-New Brunswick.

 

 

In the News

Unmasked: Many white women were Southern slave owners, too

In her new book, They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South, Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, UC Berkeley associate professor of history, expands our understanding of American slavery and the 19th century slave market with an investigation into the role of white women in the slave economy. She found they were active participants, profited from it and were as brutal as men in their management techniques.

Featured in the Media

Please note: The views and opinions expressed in these articles are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or positions of UC Berkeley.
April 20, 2020

Books: Helpless women? Not these slave owners

Los Angeles Times
Nathan Deuel
Associate history professor Stephanie Jones-Rogers spent 10 years researching her book, They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South, for which she won the 2019 Times Book Prize for history. The book details the central and sadistic role that white women played as slave owners in the antebellum South. According to this reviewer, Professor Jones-Rogers' extensive research, supported by legal documents, Confederate correspondence, and many other sources, show that "white women were hardly helpless observers or secret protestors, wilting on fainting couches in the salons of the American South. Rather, they were full and independent owners of slaves, deeply aware of and expert in the business of buying and selling them -- and worst of all, they were fully engaged in the cruelty, invention and conniving that kept a whole people in chains." For more on Professor Jones-Rogers' book, see this interview at Berkeley News.
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