Stephanie Jones

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. 

Jones-Rogers attended Rutgers University, earning a BA in Psychology in 2003 and a Master's in 2007. She was awarded a Ph.D. in History in 2012. Her doctoral thesis was "Nobody couldn't sell'em but her" slave-owning women, mastery, and the gendered politics of the antebellum slave market. Her Ph.D. 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.

Jones-Rogers began her career at the University of Iowa as an 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.'

She also has a couple of podcasts as well as radio interviews. These, as well as various events she speaks at, can be found on her personal website. As of 2022, her research tends to focus on gender and American slavery as well as colonial and 19th-century legal and economic history with a focal point on women, systems of bondage, and the slave trade. They are also currently working on the manuscript Women of the Trade as well as Women, American Slavery, and the Law. She also has a study called “'She had…a Womb Subjected to Bondage': The Afro-Atlantic Origins of British Colonial Descent Law". 

Rogers also is in charge of the Department of History's first African and African-American History Writer's Workshop. They work towards providing opportunities for scholars to circulate their research in a conducive environment. Another purpose of this Workshop is to cultivate the African-descended community of scholars within the department and offer a means of connecting them with one another. They Were Her Property won the L.A. Times Book Prize in History in 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. Jones-Rogers was awarded the Organization of American Historians Lerner-Scott Dissertation Prize in U.S. Women's History in 2013.