People

Dylan Penningroth

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

Office: Harris Hall #303
Phone: 847-491-7421
E-mail: dcpnorthwestern.edu

Dylan Penningroth

Dylan Penningroth (PhD, Johns Hopkins 1999) specializes in African American history and in U.S. socio-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. 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, and a Weinberg College Teaching Award. In 2011 he was named a McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence.

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 social, cultural, and religious life. His next project is a study of the legacy of slavery in colonial Ghana. Professor Penningroth welcomes inquiries from prospective graduate students.

Curriculum Vitae