Giuliana Perrone

Giuliana Perrone is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), where she specializes in 19th-century U.S. history, slavery, law, and the Civil War and Reconstruction eras. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley (2015). Her research examines the intersections of race, law, and political institutions, particularly focusing on reparations, legal frameworks of emancipation, and the sociolegal dimensions of slavery’s legacy.

Research Interests: Perrone’s work centers on the history of slavery and abolition, legal responses to emancipation, and the Reconstruction era’s contested legacy. Her current project, Rehearsals for Reparations, explores enslavers’ testamentary bequests to enslaved individuals as precursors to modern reparations discourse. This work bridges historical archives and contemporary debates about racial justice and compensation.

Publications & Honors: Perrone’s book Nothing More than Freedom: The Failure of Abolition in American Law (Cambridge, 2023) challenges assumptions about legal abolition’s efficacy. She has been awarded the University of California President’s Faculty Research Fellowship in the Humanities (2018–2019) and the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation Early Career Fellowship (2020).

Teaching: Perrone teaches courses on U.S. legal history, slavery and abolition, and Reconstruction. Recent courses include History of the Present, American Legal & Constitutional History, and Slavery and the Making of African America.

Current Projects: Her research extends into legal historiography, focusing on how courts navigated crises like the Civil War and Reconstruction. She advises graduate student Casey Haughin-Scasny and collaborates on interdisciplinary projects linking historical archives to modern social justice movements.