Michael Grossberg
Sally M. Reahard Professor of History and Adjunct Professor of Law
E-mail: grossber@indiana.edu
B.A., 1972, University of California, Santa Barbara; Ph.D., 1979, Brandeis University.
Professor Grossberg is the Sally M. Reahard Professor of History and an adjunct professor of law at Indiana University. He is also the co-director of the IU Center for Law, Society, and Culture. His research focuses on the relationship between law and social change, particularly the intersection of law and the family. He is the author of a number of books and articles on legal and social history, and his 1985 book, Governing the Hearth: Law and the Family in Nineteenth-Century America, won the Littleton-Griswold Prize in the History of Law and Society in America given by the American Historical Association. Grossberg also published A Judgment for Solomon: The d'Hauteville Case and Legal Experience in Antebellum America in 1996 and a co-edited volume, American Public Life and the Historical Imagination, in 2003. Professor Grossberg has been involved in a number of public policy research projects, including a current project designed to devise guidelines for genetic testing in child custody cases.
Grossberg is currently working on a study of child protection in the United States that will assess issues such as child labor, juvenile justice, school reform, disabilities, and child abuse from the 1870s to the present. He is also co-editing the Cambridge History of Law in the United States, a three-volume collection of articles analyzing the central substantive and methodological developments in American legal history from the colonial period to the present. He has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment of the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Newberry Library, and the American Bar Foundation, and he has been a Fellow at the National Humanities Center. He teaches courses in American legal and social history in the College of Arts and Sciences and the School of Law.
Teaching and Research Interests
Courses
- American Legal History (B659)