People
Dylan Penningroth
African American History, U.S. Social and Legal History
Office: Harris Hall #303
Phone: 847-491-7421
E-mail: dcp
northwestern.edu
Dylan Penningroth (PhD, Johns Hopkins 2000) specializes in African American history and in U.S. socio-legal history. He is an Associate Professor of History at Northwestern and a Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation. His first book, The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South (2003), won the Avery Craven Prize from the Organization of American Historians. His articles have appeared in the Journal of American History, the American Historical Review, and the Journal of Family History. Penningroth’s awards have included an NEH, an NSF, the Huggins-Quarles, a Weinberg College Teaching Award, a McCormick Professorship of Teaching Excellence, and a MacArthur Foundation fellowship.
He received a B.A. (1993) from Yale University and an M.A. (1996) and a Ph.D. (2000) from Johns Hopkins University. From 1999 to 2002 he was Assistant Professor of History at the University of Virginia.
Penningroth is currently working on a study of African Americans' encounter with law from the Civil War to World War II. Combining legal and social history, the study explores the practical meaning of legal rights for black life. His next project is a study of the legacy of slavery in colonial Ghana. Professor Penningroth welcomes inquiries from prospective graduate students.
