Rebecca Horwitz-Willis is the 2024-2026 Drinan Visiting Assistant Professor at Boston College Law School. Horwitz-Willis is a legal historian of race and education in the United States. Her work uses education as a lens to explore a range of topics in 19th and 20th American legal history, including civil rights, social welfare, and state formation. Her research has explored the expansion of punitive state power through compulsory school laws during the late 19th and early 20th century, and she has interrogated the historical relationship between schooling and the carceral state. Horwitz-Willis is currently working on a project analyzing how Black educators in the pre-Brown North used their collective agency to advocate for laws and policies that would shift power to local Black communities.
She has taught courses on the history of education rights, law and inequality, the history of education in the United States, and race, equity, and education. She is passionate about engaging students with digital humanities and believes study of the historical relationship between race, power, and law can provide fresh insights for contemporary movements for racial and economic justice.
Prior to joining BC Law, Horwitz-Willis worked as a postdoctoral fellow with the Black Teacher Archive project, an open access digital collection of the journals of the Colored Teachers Associations (CTAs). In this capacity, she researched the legal and social history of the CTAs of the North. She also helped pilot the BTA’s Teaching Partners program, which brings together university professors in education studies and Black studies to develop curriculum drawing on the archival holdings of the BTA. She has also worked as an educator in the Bay Area and an attorney in Austin, Texas.
Horwitz-Willis’s work has appeared in the Georgetown Journal of Poverty Law and Policy and the Harvard Educational Review. Her research has been supported by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative, and the Charles Warren Center for American History. She was a 2023 recipient of the Kathryn T. Preyer Award from the American Society of Legal History for her paper, “Educating a Class of Unfortunates: Crime Control, Child Protection, and the Development of Compulsory Schooling, 1888 – 1903.”
Horwitz-Willis received a B.A. from Rutgers College, a J.D. from the University of Texas School of Law, and a Ph.D. in education from Harvard University.
