Jane Dailey is Associate Professor History and the College. Her first book, Before Jim Crow: The Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia (North Carolina, 2000), analyzed the conditions that facilitated and, ultimately, undid interracial democracy in the post-Civil War South. An edited collection, Jumpin’ Jim Crow: Southern Politics from Civil War to Civil Rights (Princeton, 2000, with Glenda E. Gilmore and Bryant Simon), continued the theme of African American resistance to white domination from Reconstruction through the 1950s. A third book, The Age of Jim Crow: A Norton Documentary History (Norton, 2008), examines the creation and dissolution of legal segregation in America through primary sources.

The recipient of fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Dailey taught at Rice University and Johns Hopkins before joining the University of Chicago in 2006.