Dr. Sarah Gronningsater is a historian of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century United States, with particular interests in slavery and abolition, and in the history of American democracy. She works at the intersections of legal, political, constitutional, and social history.
Her first book, The Rising Generation: Gradual Abolition, Black Legal Culture, and the Making of National Freedom, was published in July 2024 (University of Pennsylvania Press). The Rising Generation explores the long and legally-oriented transition from slavery to freedom in New York from the first widespread Quaker emancipations in the 1750s to the passage of the Reconstruction Amendments at the close of the Civil War.
She is increasingly interested in how ordinary citizens petitioned for rights and resources in the long nineteenth century, as well as how people on the ground utilized and transformed democratic practices in their everyday lives in the early republic.
Gronningsater has received a number of prizes and fellowships. In 2015, she received two dissertation awards: the Manuscript Prize from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic and the Cromwell Dissertation Prize from the American Society for Legal History. She also received the 2012 Kathryn T. Preyer Scholar Award from the American Society for Legal History and the 2010 Memphis State Eight Best Paper Prize from the Graduate Association of African American History. She was the recipient of the Hanna Holborn Gray Advanced Fellowship at the University of Chicago from 2014 to 2016. From 2014 to 2016, she was a Barra Postdoctoral Fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2017-2018, she was an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow at the New-York Historical Society.
In 2020, she was awarded the Richard S. Dunn Award for Distinguished Teaching. In 2023, she was awarded both the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching by an Assistant Professor and the Penn Friars Senior Society Faculty Award.