

In November 2018 Dunbar was named joint winner of the Frederick Douglass Prize for Never Caught. Never Caught was a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award for nonfiction. In 2017 she published Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge. 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. Her first book was A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City, published by Yale University Press in 2008. Her research and teaching focus on the history of African American women and late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century United States history. She is Charles and Mary Beard Professor of History at Rutgers.

She taught at the University of Delaware before joining Rutgers University in 2017. Never Caught was a National Book Award for Nonfiction finalist and winner of the Frederick Douglass Prize.ĭunbar attended college at the University of Pennsylvania, then earned an M.A. 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 (2008) and Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge (2017). She is a distinguished Charles and Mary Beard Professor of History at Rutgers. National Book FestivalĮrica Armstrong Dunbar is an American historian at Rutgers University.
