Robin Bernstein is a cultural historian who specializes in race and racism from the nineteenth century to the present. She teaches at Harvard, where she is the Dillon Professor of American History and Professor of African and African American Studies and of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. She also chairs Harvard’s doctoral program in American Studies. Bernstein wrote Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder that Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit with fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Freeman’s Challenge won the 2026 Herbert H. Lehman Prize for Distinguished Scholarship, the 2025 PROSE Award for North American/U.S. History, the 2025 Montaigne Medal, and the 2025 Nonfiction Honor from the Massachusetts Book Award. Freeman's Challenge also received Honorable Mention for the 2025 Merle Curti Award for Social History from the Organization of American Historians. Click here for praise from Angela Y. Davis, Tiya Miles, Ibram X. Kendi, Heather Ann Thompson, Elizabeth Hinton, Caleb Smith, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Bernstein’s previous book, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights, won five awards. Other publications include a Jewish feminist children’s book, many prize-winning articles, and op-eds and essays in the New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and other venues. She recently received the Everett Mendelsohn Excellence in Mentoring Award.