Rebecca J. Scott is the Charles Gibson Distinguished University Professor of History and Professor of Law at the University of Michigan.
Her most recent book, coauthored with Jean M. Hébrard, is Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation (Harvard University Press, 2012), which traces the theme of the law in slavery and freedom through the examination of one family across five generations. Her previous book, Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery (Harvard University Press, 2005), received the Frederick Douglass Prize and the John Hope Franklin Prize.
Among Scott's recent articles are "Paper Thin: Freedom and Re-enslavement in the Diaspora of the Haitian Revolution" (Law and History Review, November 2011); the coauthored essay "Rosalie of the Poulard Nation: Freedom, Law, and Dignity in the Era of the Haitian Revolution" (in Garrigus and Morris, Assumed Identities, 2010); "Public Rights, Social Equality, and the Conceptual Roots of the Plessy Challenge" (Michigan Law Review, 2008); and "The Atlantic World and the Road to Plessy v. Ferguson" (Journal of American History, 2007).
Scott received an A.B. from Radcliffe College, an M.Phil. in economic history from the London School of Economics, and a Ph.D. in history from Princeton University. She is a recent recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
