People
Dylan Penningroth
African American History, U.S. Social and Legal History
Office: 1800 Sherman #513
Phone: 847-491-7421
E-mail: dcp
northwestern.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 Professor 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, the EbscoHost/America, History and Life prize, and grants from the NEH and NSF. He is the author of The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South (2003). His work has appeared in the Journal of American History, the American Historical Review, and the Journal of Family History. In 2008, he received a Wayne V. Jones Research Professorship, and a Weinberg College Teaching Award. 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.
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