Dylan C. Penningroth

African American History, U.S. Social and Legal History

Office: 214 Harris
Phone: 847-491-7421
E-mail: dcpnorthwestern.edu

Dylan Penningroth (PhD, Johns Hopkins 1999) works in African American history and in U.S. social and legal history. He is affiliated with Northwestern’s Department of African American Studies, and holds a joint appointment as Research Fellow at the American Bar Foundation. Before coming to Northwestern, he taught at the University of Virginia (1999-2002). He has worked in a variety of areas of American history: on the history of black family and community life, on the ownership of property by slaves, and on ideologies of slavery in the U.S. and Ghana. His work has been honored with the Allan Nevins Prize, the Huggins-Quarles Prize, the Avery Craven Prize, and a Newberry Library National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. He is the author of The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South (2003). Articles include “Slavery, Freedom, and Social Claims to Property in Liberty County, Georgia, 1850-1880” Journal of American History (1997); “My People, My People: The Dynamics of Community in Southern Slavery,” in New Studies in the History of American Slavery (2006); “The Claims of Slaves and Ex-Slaves to Family and Property: A Transatlantic Comparison,” American Historical Review (2007); and “The Preacher’s Wife: Law, Divorce, and Respectability Among African Americans, 1865-1930” (forthcoming 2008). From 2008-2011, he is serving on the Editorial Board of the Journal of American History.

Current project

Professor Penningroth is currently working on two projects: a study of the cultural, social, and legal legacy of slavery in colonial Ghana, and a study of African Americans' engagement with local courts in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century South. He is particularly interested in family relations, the rise of the independent black church, migration, the interaction between legal categories and popular conceptions such as respectability, race, and “slavish origins.”

Teaching interests

Professor Penningroth teaches courses on African American history, U.S. legal history, the history of slavery and emancipation, and comparative history.

Curriculum Vitae