George Barrett Social Justice Program

Daniel Sharfstein

Dick and Martha Lansden Chair in Law
Professor of History

Daniel Sharfstein’s scholarship focuses on the legal history of race and citizenship in the United States.  His writing has appeared in the Yale Law Journal, Virginia Law Review, Minnesota Law Review, New York Times, Slate and Legal Affairs. His first book, The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White, won the 2012 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize for excellence in non-fiction as well as the Law & Society Association’s 2012 James Willard Hurst Jr. Prize for socio-legal history, the William Nelson Cromwell Book Prize from the American Society for Legal History, and the Chancellor’s Award for Research from Vanderbilt. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship to research his 2017 book on post-Reconstruction America, Thunder in the Mountains: Chief Joseph, Oliver Otis Howard and the Nez Perce War, which was a Montana Book Award Honor Book and Southern Book Award finalist.