Dr. Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers is a historian who explores women’s social, economic and legal relationships to enslaved people and to the slave trade in the trans-Atlantic world. She is an Associate Professor and Chancellor’s Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley, where she specializes in African-American history, women’s and gender history, and the history of American slavery.

Jones-Rogers’ research has been primarily concerned with women and slavery, but her work also explores the evolution and development of early systems of law, especially as they pertain to women, bondage, and the slave trade.

Jones-Rogers’ work puts heavily mined archival documents and novel sources in conversation with each other to tell never-before-told stories about women’s economic and legal relationships to slavery. Her research locates women in legal and financial records from which we assume they would be excluded, situates them in spaces and places seemingly off limits to them, and documents them engaging in economic and legal activities in which we presume they would not be engaged in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.

In her work, Jones-Rogers adopts a unique approach to history in her willingness to move beyond reductive assumptions about what women could or could not do or where women did or did go in the past. When she seeks women out in the archive, she tries to understand them on their own terms and to chronicle their lives in the ways she thinks they wanted to be understood and remembered.

Jones-Rogers is the author of They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South,( Yale University Press, 2019), which draws on the testimonies of enslaved and formerly enslaved individuals, legal, financial, and military records as well as an array of other narrative sources to show how white married women – a group historically seen as legally disempowered and economically dispossessed – exercised extraordinary power in and over enslaved African-Americans’ lives.

The book won a number of prizes in 2020: the Harriet Tubman Prize from the Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery, the Julia Cherry Spruill Prize from the Southern Association for Women’s Historians, the Southern Historical Association’s Charles S. Sydnor Award, the Best Book Prize from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, and the Merle Curti Prize from the Organization of American Historians.

Jones-Rogers is 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. She is currently working on her second book, Women of the Trade, which 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 second book, Women of the Trade, connects the separate and shared histories of English, African, and Afro-English women across three continents, chronicles their lives, and charts their travels and ties to the Atlantic slave trade.

Jones-Rogers’ research has been supported by prestigious fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Hellman Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. She has also held postdoctoral fellowship positions at Tulane University and the University of Texas at Austin.

She earned her BA, MA and PhD from Rutgers University.