Stephanie Jones-Rogers


Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers is an American historian. She is an Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South. She is an expert in African-American history, the history of American slavery, and women’s and gender history.

Education

Jones-Rogers attended Rutgers University, earning a BA in Psychology in 2003, and a Masters in 2007. She was awarded a PhD in History in 2012. Her doctoral thesis was "Nobody couldn't sell'em but her" slaveowning women, mastery, and the gendered politics of the antebellum slave market. Her PhD was supervised by Deborah Gray White and examined by Thavolia Glymph. In 2013 her doctoral research won the Lerner-Scott Prize, which is given annually by the Organization of American Historians for the best doctoral dissertation in U.S. women’s history.

Career

Jones-Rogers began her career at the University of Iowa as Assistant Professor in the departments of History and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She was a Post-doctoral Fellow in Law and Society at Tulane University, 2013–14. She held the Harrington Faculty Fellowship in the History Department at the University of Texas-Austin, 2018–19. She has won fellowships from the Hellman Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Ford Foundation, and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation.
Her first book was published in 2019 by Yale University Press. They Were Her Property challenges previous depictions of white antebellum women as only minimally involved in the institution of slavery, onlookers to male relatives' active practice of enslaving African-Americans. Jones-Rogers draws on court records and oral histories to show the active role white women play in enslavement, both on a day-to-day basis and in the buying and selling of slaves, for their personal economic gain. Jones-Rogers demonstrates that white women exercised extraordinary control over the enslaved people in their households and had a deep economic investment in slavery. The book was described as 'scrupulous', 'focused', and 'crisp'.

Awards and honors

They Were Her Property was one of five finalists for the L.A. Times Book Prize in History, 2020. It won the award, announced on 17 April 2020. Jones-Rogers was the first African American and the third woman to receive the Prize in History.
The book was also shortlisted for the 2020 Lincoln Prize in February 2020, with seven other books chosen out of 110 submissions. It won the Merle Curti Social History Award 2020 for the best book in American social history.