Kali Gross, professor of African American studies at Emory University, has been named one of 26 recipients of the 2021 Andrew Carnegie Fellowship. Each fellow receives $200,000 to fund significant research and writing in social sciences and the humanities that addresses important and enduring issues confronting society.
Gross’s Carnegie project will shed new light on capital punishment in the United States through the histories of Black women disproportionately condemned. She aims “to better understand how it is that Black women became so grossly overrepresented among those put to death in the United States, especially by means of the electric chair.”
The fellowship will support Gross’s work at archives across the country to examine capital cases involving Black women. “This history is essential for ongoing efforts to eradicate structural racism in our nation’s criminal justice system,” says Gross, “and it will fill a crucial gap in historical studies of lethal puni