I am the Mary Gibbs Jones Professor of Humanities and Professor of History at Rice University. You can contact me at wcaleb AT rice DOT edu. You can also subscribe to occasional updates about my work and research findings.
My most recent work includes the book, Slavery, Segregation, and the Second Founding of Rice University, co-authored with Alexander X. Byrd and forthcoming from Louisiana State University Press in Fall 2025. The book is a product of research done for the Rice University Task Force on Slavery, Segregation, and Racial Injustice, which we co-chaired from 2019 to 2023.
My second book, Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America, was published in 2019 by Oxford University Press. It received the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in History and the Civil War and Reconstruction Book Award from the Organization of American Historians. Research for the book was was supported by a Public Scholar grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
My first book, The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery, won the Merle Curti prize from the Organization of American Historians and the James Broussard Prize from the Society of Historians of the Early American Republic.
In addition to numerous academic articles about the history of slavery, antislavery, and emancipation in the nineteenth century, I have written essays, reviews, and blog posts that have appeared in the New York Times, Smithsonian, The Atlantic, and TIME.
I am also the creator or co-creator of several digital humanities projects and a past member of the editorial team for The Programming Historian. I created the Syllabus Maker to help professors generate dates for a course.
You can view my full curriculum vitae as a PDF.
Representation: The Strothman Agency