Paul Finkelman became the president of Gratz College in 2017.  He received his B.A. in American Studies from Syracuse University and his M.A. and Ph.D. in History from the University of Chicago.  He was later a Fellow in Law and Humanities at Harvard Law School, where he also taught one course. Before coming to Gratz, he taught in history departments and law schools at a number of universities including Duke Law School, Washington University in St. Louis, and the University of Texas.  He held the Fulbright Chair in Human Rights and Social Justice at the University of Ottawa College of Law and held the Ariel F. Sallows Chair in Human Rights Law at the University of Saskatchewan.  He was a scholar-in-residence at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia and a Fellow in the Democracy, Citizenship, and Constitutionalism program at the University of Pennsylvania. He has published in a wide variety of subjects including human rights, slavery and human trafficking (historical and modern), American Jewish history, American legal history, constitutional law, and legal issues surrounding baseball.  Finkelman is the author of more than 200 scholarly articles and the author or editor of more than fifty books.  In 2018 Harvard University Press published his book Supreme Injustice: Slavery in the Nation’s Highest Court. His most recent book, a new edition of Defending Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Old South, came out in 2019.  Most recently, he co-authored (with a Gratz Ph.D. student) an article on Jews and the Black Death that appeared in the Jewish Review of Books.