Ariela Gross
Biography
Ariela J. Gross is Distinguished Professor of Law and History at the University of California – Los Angeles. She was previously the John B. and Alice R. Sharp Professor of Law and History and Co-Director of the Center for Law, History, and Culture at the University of Southern California. Her most recent book, co-authored with Alejandro de La Fuente, Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana (Cambridge UP, 2020), was the winner of the 2021 Order of the Coif Award for the best book on law, and the John Philip Reid Award for the best book in Anglo-American legal history from the American Society for Legal History. Her book What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America (Harvard UP 2008), was winner of the James Willard Hurst Prize from the Law and Society Association, the Lillian Smith Award for the best book on the U.S. South and the struggle for racial justice, the American Political Science Association’s Best Book on Race, Ethnicity, and Politics, and a Choice Outstanding Academic Title. Gross is also the author of Double Character: Slavery and Mastery in the Antebellum Southern Courtroom(Princeton UP 2000).
Professor Gross is currently working on a book entitled Erasing Slavery: How Stories About Slavery and Freedom Shape Battles Over the Constitution, which is under contract to Beacon Press. She has published numerous law review articles and essays, and her op-eds have appeared in the Washington Post, LA Times, and the Wall Street Journal. She received her JD (Order of the Coif) and PhD in History from Stanford University, and has been a visiting professor at Stanford Law School, Tel Aviv University, the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Kyoto University, Sciences Po, and the University of Paris. She has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Harvard-Radcliffe Institute Joy Foundation Fellow, a Stanford Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences Fellow, an ACLS Burkhardt Fellow, an ACLS Collaborative Research Fellow, an NEH Huntington Research Libraries Fellow, and winner of the Rutter Distinguished Teaching Award and the Mellon Mentoring Award at USC.
