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Dr. Erica Armstrong Dunbar will join Emory University’s Department of African American Studies in the fall.
“I am excited to join a community of scholars with a stellar reputation of work that informs different arenas across the academy and the community,” said Dunbar. “I’m looking forward to the energy and the collaboration of working with undergraduate and graduate students as well as being in conversation with the vibrant faculty at Emory.”
Dunbar is an award-winning author and scholar of enslavement with a specific interest in the experience of women. She said she was attracted to Emory because of its reputation for supporting similar research and for faculty who have positioned the African American studies department to be among the nation’s best.
“We are delighted to welcome such a scholar of Dr. Dunbar’s eminence to our faculty and are grateful that all of Emory and the Atlanta community will benefit from her extraordinary accomplishments,” says Dr. Barbara Krauthamer, dean of Emory College of Arts and Sciences.
Dunbar, who serves as the Charles and Mary Beard Distinguished Professor of History at Rutgers University, first earned recognition as a leading historian of African American women and 19th-century American history with her first book in 2008, A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City.
She has also served as director of the program in African American History at the Library Company of Philadelphia and as national director of the Association of Black Women Historians.
Among her many pursuits, Dunbar plans to build immediately on her public scholarship examining the lives of free and enslaved African American women in 19th-century America with two book projects. She will involve undergraduate and graduate students in both her planned series of biographies for middle-grade readers and a book-length monograph on Black women during the Civil War and Reconstruction eras.