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Tamika Nunley

Research Professor of History
History
224 Classroom Building, Box 90719, Durham, NC 27302
1356 Campus Drive, Box 90719, Durham, NC 27708

Overview


Tamika Nunley is Research Professor of History with courses and research focused on the history of slavery, African American women's and gender history, the early Republic, and the American Civil War. Her first book, At the Threshold of Liberty: Women, Slavery, and Shifting Identities in Washington, D.C. (University of North Carolina Press, 2021) reveals how African American women—enslaved, fugitive, and free—imagined new identities and lives beyond the oppressive restrictions intended to prevent them from experiencing liberty, self-respect, and power. Consulting nineteenth-century newspapers, government documents, letters, abolitionist records, legislation, and memoirs, Nunley traces how black women navigated social and legal proscriptions to develop their own ideas about liberty as they escaped from slavery, initiated freedom suits, created entrepreneurial economies, pursued education, and participated in political work. In telling these stories, Nunley places black women at the vanguard of the history of Washington D.C., and illuminates how they contributed to the momentous transformations of nineteenth-century America. This book was named the 2021 Letitia Woods Brown Book prize winner for best book in African American women's history, the 2021 Pauli Murray Book prize winner for best book in Black intellectual history and the 2021 Mary Kelley prize winner for best book published in women, gender, or sexuality in the Early American Republic .

Her second book, The Demands of Justice: Enslaved Women, Capital Crime, and Clemency in Early Virginia, 1662-1865 is published with the University of North Carolina Press. This book examines clemency in legal cases that involve enslaved women accused of capital crime in early Virginia. In these legal encounters, we not only see a system that worked to define and affirm a commitment to legal paternalism that upheld the rule of law, but decades of responses made by the countless enslaved women accused of capital offenses. The Demands of Justice examines how these responses constituted the makings of an intellectual history of enslaved women’s articulations of justice. She has published articles and reviews in The Journal of Southern HistoryThe William and Mary Quarterly, The Journal of Women's History, the Journal of American Legal History and the Journal of the Civil War Era.

In addition to being a lifetime member of the Association of Black Women Historians, she serves on the editorial board of Civil War HistoryThe Journal of Southern History, and the Journal of the Civil War Era. She has served on committees for the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, the Society of Civil War Historians, and the Southern Historical Association. 

Her work has been supported by the Andrew Mellon and Woodrow Wilson foundations as well as the American Association of University Women and the Bright Institute Fellowship. In 2023, the Library of Congress named her the Cary and Ann Maguire Chair in Ethics and American History. 

Current Appointments & Affiliations


Research Professor of History · 2024 - Present History, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences

In the News


Published April 22, 2025
Ten Faculty Named 2025 Bass Chairs

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Recent Publications


The Intellectual World of Phillis Wheatley and the Politics of Genius

Journal Article Journal of Women's History · January 1, 2024 This article examines the life and work of Phillis Wheatley and her interlocutors to consider how African-descended people conceptualized liberty and formed an intellectual community during the American Revolution. Her poetry and epistolary exchanges, shar ... Full text Cite

The Demands of Justice Enslaved Women, Capital Crime, and Clemency in Early Virginia

Book · March 9, 2023 Award-winning historian Tamika Y. Nunley has unearthed the stories of enslaved Black women charged by their owners with poisoning, theft, murder, infanticide, and arson. ... Cite

Thavolia Glymph Roundtable

Journal Article Civil War History · March 1, 2022 Full text Cite
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Education, Training & Certifications


University of Virginia · 2015 Ph.D.