Department of History

Erica Armstrong Dunbar
Charles and Mary Beard Distinguished Professor of History
Degree: Ph.D., Columbia University
Additional Degree(s): M.A., Columbia University B.A., University of Pennsylvania
Rutgers : At Rutgers since 2017
Specialty: African-American and US History: Women's and Gender History
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Email: erica.dunbar@rutgers.edu
Office: 303A Van Dyck Hall
Phone: 848-932-8352
Research Interests: I am a late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century scholar with a specialization in African American women’s history. I have interests in urban slavery, emancipation studies, and the intersection of race and gender in American history.

Books

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

Selected Articles/Essays

“Ringing the Freedom Bell” The Nation (November 2016)
Daina Ramey Berry and Erica Armstrong Dunbar, “The Unbroken Chain of Enslaved African Resistance and Rebellion.” In The Birth of a Nation: Nat Turner and the Making of a Movement, edited by N. Parker, 35-61. New York: Atria/Simon and Schuster, September 2016.
“[“]I knew that if I went back to Virginia, I should never get my liberty.” Ona Judge Staines: The President’s Runaway Slave.” In Women in Early America, 225-245, edited by Tom Foster. New York: NYU Press, 2015.
Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, guest co-editor of special issue on the 150^th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. (January 2013)
Freedom Bound: The Sesquicentennial of the Emancipation Proclamation – with Readex, a division of Newsbank. Volume 7 Issue 3 (October 2012)
“African-American Women and Indentured Servitude.” In The Oxford Encyclopedia of Women in World History, edited by Bonnie G. Smith. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
“Writing for True Womanhood: African American Women's Writings and the Anti-Slavery Struggle.” In Women’s Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery in the Era of Emancipation, edited by Kathryn Kish Sklar and James Brewer Stewart, 299-318. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007
“A Mental and Moral Feast:” Reading, Writing, and Sentimentality in Black Philadelphia” in The Journal of Women’s History (Spring 2004)

Op-Eds

“Melania Trump’s Reluctance Matches a FLOTUS Before Her” TIME.COM (January 2017)
“George Washington, Slave Catcher” The New York Times (February 2015)
“Echoes of Slavery Era in Reaction to Ferguson” Philadelphia Inquirer (December 4, 2014)