Joy Keys chats with Author Kali Nicole Gross

Kali Nicole Gross is an Associate Professor and Associate Chair of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin and affiliate faculty in the History Department and the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies. 

Her research concentrates on black women’s experiences in the United States criminal justice system between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She is author of the award-winning book, Colored Amazons: Crime, Violence and Black Women in the City of Brotherly Love, 1880-1910, and the newly released, Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso: A Tale of Race, Sex, and Violence in America.  

A native New Yorker with Guyanese ancestry, Dr. Gross received her B.A. from Cornell University and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania.

In Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso, historian Kali Nicole Gross uses detectives' notes, trial and prison records, local newspapers, and other archival documents to reconstruct this ghastly whodunit crime in all its scandalous detail. In doing so, she gives the crime context by analyzing it against broader evidence of police treatment of black suspects and violence within the black community. http://www.kalinicolegross.com