Daniel J. Sharfstein, a legal historian who studies American legal history, race and the law, and property law, has been appointed to the Distinguished Lectureship Program of the Organization of American Historians. The three-year appointment means that Sharfstein will deliver at least three invited lectures over the next three years through the program, which was established by the OAH in 1981.
“OAH presidents have appointed their most illustrious and dynamic colleagues to our program, making it one of the longest running and most successful efforts of its kind among scholarly associations,” said OAH Executive Director Katherine M. Finley.
Sharfstein’s 2011 book, The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White, was awarded the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize for narrative nonfiction, the American Society for Legal History’s William Nelson Cromwell Book Prize, and the Law and Society Association’s James Willard Hurst Prize.
Sharfstein was a 2013 Guggenheim Fellow; the fellowship supported work on his current book, “Thunder in the Mountains: The Clash of Two American Legends,” which explores the Nez Perce War and Reconstruction’s legacy in the American West. He was also awarded an Alphonse Fletcher, Sr., fellowship and a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, and he was the inaugural recipient of the Raoul Berger Visiting Fellowship in Legal History at Harvard Law School.
He is also a Robert Penn Warren Faculty Fellow at Vanderbilt University for the 2014-15 academic year.
He has received the law school’s Hall-Hartman Outstanding Professor Award twice.
