Erica Armstrong Dunbar
Erica Armstrong Dunbar is the Charles and Mary Beard Distinguished Professor of History at Rutgers University and serves as the New Brunswick Campus Director of the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice. Dunbar also serves as the National Director of the Association of Black Women Historians. Her publications, teaching, and documentary appearances have placed her among a small number of African American women scholars who study Black women’s history up to and beyond the Civil War. Dunbar received her B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania (CAS 1994) and her Ph.D. from Columbia University.
Dunbar’s first book, A Fragile Freedom: African American Women in the Antebellum City was published by Yale University in 2008. Her second book, Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge (2018), was named a finalist for the National Book Award in Non-Fiction and was a winner of the Frederick Douglass Book Prize. Her third book, She Came to Slay: The Life and Times of Harriet Tubman (2019), her young readers editions, her audio books, and her recent role as a Co-Executive producer on HBO’s The Gilded Age, remind us that Dunbar has built a name for herself both inside and outside of the academy.
