Erica Armstrong Dunbar

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 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.

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 before joining Rutgers University in 2017. 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. 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.

In 2017 she published Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge. Never Caught was a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award for Nonfiction. In November 2018 Dunbar was named joint winner of the Frederick Douglass Prize for Never Caught.

Works A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City (Yale University Press, 2008) , Never Caught: The Washingtons' Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge (Atria/37 Ink, February 2017) , The Politics of History: A New Generation of American Historians Writes Back with Jim Downs, Timothy Patrick McCarthy, and T.K. Hunter (in progress)