Professor Dr. Laura Edwards

Biography

Laura F. Edwards is a legal historian whose research focuses on nineteenth-century United States history. She holds a B.A. in American Culture from Northwestern University and a Ph.D. in History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Edwards has taught at Duke University for twenty years before coming to Princeton University. She is the author of five significant books: 'Gendered Strife and Confusion: Political Culture in Reconstruction' (1997), 'Scarlet Doesn’t Live Anymore: Southern Women in the Civil War Era' (2001), 'People of the Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South' (2009), 'Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction: A Nation’s Rights' (2015), and 'Clothes Back: Textiles, Law, and Commerce in Nineteenth-Century United States' (2022). Edwards has served as an associate editor for 'New History of the American South' (2023). Her work has received numerous prizes and fellowships, including the Charles Sydnor Prize and the Littleton-Griswold Prize. Edwards has been awarded fellowships from prestigious institutions such as the American Council of Learned Societies and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. She holds the Old Dominion Research Professorship at the Humanities Council at Princeton University for the academic year 2023-2024.

Research Interests