Erica Armstrong Dunbar
American historian
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Erica Armstrong Dunbar is an American historian at Emory University. She was previously a distinguished Charles and Mary Beard Professor of History at Rutgers. An historian of African American women and the antebellum United States, Dunbar is the author of A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City (2008) and Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge (2017). Never Caught was a National Book Award for Nonfiction finalist and winner of the Frederick Douglass Prize.
Columbia University
Erica Armstrong Dunbar | |
|---|---|
Author at the 2018 U.S. National Book Festival | |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | History |
| Institutions | Rutgers University |
Life
Dr. Dunbar attended college at the University of Pennsylvania, then earned an M.A. and Ph.D from Columbia University. She taught at the University of Delaware[1] before joining Rutgers University in 2017.[2] She is Charles and Mary Beard Professor of History at Rutgers. Her research and teaching focus on the history of African American women and late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century United States history.[2]
Her first book was A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City, published by Yale University Press in 2008.[3] In it she examines the lives black women made in Philadelphia’s large free black community, using documents like friendship albums and personal correspondence, church records, and labor contracts.[4]
In 2017 she published Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge.[5][6][7][8][9] Never Caught was a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award for Nonfiction.[10] In November 2018 Dunbar was named joint winner of the Frederick Douglass Prize for Never Caught.[11]
Works
- A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City (Yale University Press, 2008) ISBN 9780300177022, OCLC 816818622
- Never Caught: The Washingtons' Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge (Atria/37 Ink, February 2017) ISBN 9781501126413, OCLC 1019993773
- The Politics of History: A New Generation of American Historians Writes Back with Jim Downs, Timothy Patrick McCarthy, and T.K. Hunter (in progress)