Laura F. Edwards, Class of 1921 Bicentennial Professor in the History of American Law and Liberty and Professor of History, has been appointed director of the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts for a four-year term, beginning July 1, 2026.
She will succeed Yelena Baraz, Kennedy Foundation Professor of Latin Language and Literature and professor of classics, who led the Society from 2023 – 2026. Baraz will assume the role of chair of the Department of Classics.
Edwards is a legal historian whose research focuses on the nineteenth-century United States with particular interest in the history of women, material culture, social, political and constitutional history. She is the author of five books, including her most recent, “Only the Clothes on Her Back: Textiles, Law, and Commerce in the Nineteenth-Century United States,” which was published in 2022 by Oxford University Press. The book was awarded the Merle Curti Prize for the best book in social history from the Organization of American Historians, the Best Book Prize from the Society for the History of the Early Republic, and the John Phillip Reid book prize from the American Society for Legal History.
In 2023-24, Edwards served as an Old Dominion Research Professor in the Humanities Council and a faculty fellow for the Society of Fellows. She is currently working on two projects, both focused on the nineteenth-century United States: one that traces the material consequences of the shift from unwritten to written forms of law and the other examines women’s legal relationship to property.
The Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts, established by a gift from charter trustee Lloyd Cotsen and the Humanities Council’s leadership in 1999, is an interdisciplinary community that aims to bring innovative approaches to scholarship and teaching. Each year, the Society chooses a new cohort of Cotsen fellows, who are appointed for three-year terms to conduct research and to teach at the University.
