Jane Dailey is a professor in History, the College, and the Law School. Her most recent book, White Fright: The Sexual Panic at the Heart of America's Racist History (Basic Book, 2020), concerns race, sex, and the civil rights movement from emancipation to the present. Her next most recent book is Building the American Republic, Volume 2: A Narrative History From 1877 (Chicago, 2018). Both volumes are free in e-book form.

Dailey’s work has revolved around the relationship between race, sex, and politics in the post-Emancipation South. Her first book, Before Jim Crow: The Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia (North Carolina, 2000), analyzed the conditions that facilitated and, ultimately, undid interracial democracy in the post–Civil War South. An edited collection with Glenda E. Gilmore and Bryant Simon, Jumpin' Jim Crow: Southern Politics from Civil War to Civil Rights (Princeton, 2000), continued the theme of African American resistance to white domination from Reconstruction through the 1950s. A third book, The Age of Jim Crow: A Norton Documentary History (Norton, 2008), examines the creation and dissolution of legal segregation in America through primary sources.

Dailey’s awards include fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Academy in Berlin, the Alphonse Fletcher Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.