Grace Elizabeth Hale is the Commonwealth Professor of American Studies and History at the University of Virginia. An award-winning historian and internationally recognized expert on modern American culture and the regional culture of the U.S. South, she has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, American Scholar, and CNN's website, and has appeared as an expert on southern history on CNN, C-Span, and PBS.

A recent Carnegie Fellow, she has also received fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, the National Humanities Center, the Gilder Lehrman Foundation, the American Historical Association, and the American Association of University Women. The author of three previous books, including Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940, she lives in Charlottesville, VA.