Brenda E. Stevenson is an expert on race and gender, US race riots, and southern and African-American family during the colonial and antebellum eras. Her books include Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South (1997), which won an Outstanding Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights; The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimke (1988); and The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins: Justice, Gender, and the Origins of the L.A. Riots (2013), which received the OAH James A. Rawley Prize for the best book on US race relations. Her latest book, What is Slavery?, was published in May 2015.
Stevenson’s research has been supported by the Ford Foundation, Mellon Foundation, American Association of University Women, Smithsonian Institution,Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, and others. She is also the recipient of the University of California at Los Angeles’ Gold Shield Award for outstanding scholarship, teaching, and service, and the Ida B. Wells Barnett Award for Bravery in Journalism. Most recently she received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship and the John Hope Franklin Fellowship from the National Humanities Center.
