Robin M. Bernstein

Robin Bernstein is a cultural historian who specializes in U.S. racial formation from the nineteenth century to the present. A graduate of Yale's doctoral program in American Studies, she is the Dillon Professor of American History and professor of African and African American studies and studies of women, gender, and sexuality at Harvard University. She currently chairs Harvard’s doctoral program in American Studies. She wrote her most recent book, Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder That Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit (2024), with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Freeman’s Challenge won the Montaigne Medal and the 2025 PROSE Award for North American/US History; it also received the Nonfiction Honor for the Massachusetts Book Award and Honorable Mention for the Merle Curti Award for Social History from the Organization of American Historians. Bernstein’s previous book, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights, won five awards and was runner-up for two more. Bernstein’s other books include the anthology Cast Out: Queer Lives in Theater (University of Michigan Press) and a Jewish feminist children's book titled Terrible, Terrible! Bernstein has published articles in PMLA, J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, African American Review, Social Text, Theatre Journal, American Literature, and many other journals. Her article, "'You Do It!': Going-to-Bed Books and the Scripts of Children's Literature," co-won the 2021 William Riley Parker Prize for an outstanding article in PMLA. Her public-facing work has appeared in the New York Times, Common-Place, Teen Vogue, the Zinn Education Project, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Inquest. With Stephanie Batiste and Brian Herrera, she edits the book series Performance and American Cultures for New York University Press.