Grace Elizabeth Hale is an award-winning historian and writer who teaches at the University of Virginia.  An internationally recognized expert on modern American culture and the regional culture of the US South, she has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, American Scholar, and CNN’s website, as well as websites and publications focused on the South including Southern Cultures and Southern Spaces.  Across almost a quarter century in academia, Hale has lectured widely in the US, Europe, and Japan and has spoken to all kinds of audiences, large and small, academic and popular, at venues as varied as universities, public and private colleges, academic and popular conferences, book and film festivals, the National Gallery of Art, and Pop Con, a popular music conference held annually at the Museum of Popular Culture in Seattle.  She has also appeared as an expert on post-1945 southern history on CNN and has been interviewed on C-Span, and she frequently answers questions for journalists and appears in documentaries, including the widely acclaimed PBS documentary The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow and the BBC Music of the American Civil War.

In her research, Hale examines how people in the past have used stories, images, and artifacts to understand themselves and their worlds.  She has worked on the history of popular music, documentary film, photography, and social and political movements.  In particular, she has written and spoken about the stories and images Americans use to think about race and racial difference and its power as a political and economic problem and an imaginative challenge. 

Hale is a native of Georgia, where she grew up in Atlanta before moving to Athens.  There, she earned undergraduate and graduate degrees at the University of Georgia while playing in a band and co-founding and running a café/ music venue/ gallery.  She left Athens to earn a PhD in US History at Rutgers University.  Today, Hale lives in Charlottesville with her husband the photographer and art professor William Wylie and her two daughters.