Erica Armstrong DunbarActing Professor of African American Studies
Erica Armstrong Dunbar received her B.A. in History and Africana Studies from the University of Pennsylvania and her Ph.D. in History from Columbia University. Her area of expertise centers the lives of eighteenth and nineteenth century Black women who lived in what would become the United States of America. Her work focuses on the history of slavery and freedom, social history, urban history, and women’s history. While Dunbar is committed to the production of scholarly literature, she is deeply invested in more public facing work—scholarship that reaches large general audiences through television, film, radio, and podcasts.
Dunbar’s first book, A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and Emancipation 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 (Simon & Schuster) was a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction and a co-winner of the 2018 Frederick Douglass Book Prize. The young readers version of Never Caught (Aladdin/Simon and Schuster) was published in January 2019. In the fall of 2019, Dunbar published She Came To Slay: The Life and Times of Harriet Tubman, an accessible biography of one of the most remarkable social activists of the 19th century. Dunbar’s op-eds and essays in outlets such as the New York Times, The Nation, TIME, Essence, and the New York Review of Books, her commentary in media outlets such as CNN and the LA Times, and her appearances in documentaries such as “The Abolitionists” an American Experience production on PBS, the History Channel’s biopic of George Washington, Kareem Abdul Jabbar’s Black Patriots, and Ken Burns’ Benjamin Franklin, place her at the center of America’s public history. More recently, Dunbar has expanded her audience by serving as Co-Executive Producer on HBO’s hit television series, “The Gilded Age.”
From 2019-2022, Dunbar served as the National Director of the Association of Black Women Historians–the only professional organization focused on Black women’s history. From 2011-2018, she served as the inaugural Director of the Program in African American History at the Library Company of Philadelphia.
