Brenda Elaine Stevenson is the inaugural Hillary Rodham Clinton Chair in Women’s History at St. John’s College, Oxford University, as well as the Nickoll Family Endowed Chair in the Department of History and a Professor of African American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). In her role as the Clinton Chair at St. John’s, as well as her work at UCLA, Stevenson actively works to demonstrate that the study of women and their histories, particularly those which addresses women of color, is both valuable and legitimate. She continues to push the university system further towards this goal by encouraging the development of future scholars and cutting-edge scholarship on women’s histories within the historical discipline’s mainstream, while also fostering the creation of new students and schools of thought committed to advancing research on women and gender, specifically.

Stevenson is a social historian whose work centers on gender, race, family and social conflict in America and the Atlantic World from the colonial period through the late 20th century.  She was born and raised in Portsmouth, Virginia, the child of James William and Emma Gerald Stevenson. She received her undergraduate degree from the University of Virginia where she was a DuPont Regional Scholar and an Echols Scholar. There, she studied with, among others, Paul Gaston, Joseph Miller, Arnold Rampersad, Vivian Gordon, Ray Nelson and Barry Gaspar.  She then enrolled in Yale’s M.A. Program in African American Studies. Stevenson began her edition of The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimke while in this program, and this work became part of the Schomburg Library of Nineteenth Century Black Women’s Writers. She continued in the Yale Ph.D. program in American History, where she studied with John Blassingame, David Brion Davis, V.P. Franklin, Nancy Cott, and Edmund S. Morgan. Her Ph.D. dissertation became her award winning book, Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South.

The work is a social history of southern planter, enslaved and free black community and family life.  It successfully challenged the revisionist claim of Herbert Gutman, John Blassingame and Eugene Genovese, among others, that enslaved families typically had a nuclear structure and male head, documenting instead that extended families were the most significant form of slave family structure, and that matrifocality and matrilocality were common attributes. The reviewer in the New York Times Review of Books noted that “Life in Black and White is an impressive example of the kind of local and regional history that for the last generation has transformed our understanding of the past;” concluding that “Stevenson’s intensive study . . . appears to refute both Genovese and Gutman on the matter of two-parent slave families.” The American Historical Review added that it is “An important book that enriches our understanding of family and community among blacks and whites of the slaveholding South.” Life in Black and White was awarded a Gustavus Myers book prize as an outstanding book in the study of human rights in North America.

Brenda Stevenson’s next major study, The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins: Justice, Gender and the Origins of the L.A. Riots, challenged male centered analyses of U.S. race relations, conflict and race riots. It proposed, in particular, that the 1992 Los Angeles uprising/ riot erupted not only as a response to the outcome of the first Rodney King trial, but as a response to an earlier criminal case that ended with a controversial sentencing of a shopkeeper found guilty of murdering an unarmed black girl. Hector Tobar described Contested Murder in his Los Angeles Times review as “an excellent and methodically researched new history.” The Library Journal review states that: “Stevenson skillfully combines the depth of a scholarly work with the rich details of a tragic novel.” Contested Murder was awarded the (OAH) Organization of American Historian’s 2014 James A. Rawley Prize for the best book on the history of race relations in the U.S.; and Women’s eNews honored her with the 2015 Ida B. Wells Award for Bravery in Journalism for the book. In 2015, Professor Stevenson published What is Slavery?, which surveys the history of human bondage in pre-modern societies and black enslavement in the United States with emphasis on the social history elements and voices of the enslaved.  She currently is completing a history of the enslaved black family in North America. She served as a senior editor for the award winning, three-volume Encyclopedia of Black Women’s History, is editor of The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimke, is co-author of the National Park Services’ Underground Railraod and author of numerous journal articles, book chapters and review essays.