Tera W. Hunter is the Edwards Professor of American History and Professor of African-American Studies, a specialist in the 19th and 20th centuries. Her research focuses on gender, race, labor, and Southern histories.
Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017) is her latest book. It is the winner of the Stone Book Award, Museum of African American History; Mary Nickliss Prize, Organization of American Historians; Joan Kelly Memorial Prize, American Historical Association; Littleton-Griswold Prize, American Historical Association; and The Deep South Book Prize, Frances S. Sumersell Center for the Study of the South. It was a finalist for the Lincoln Prize, Gettysburg College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute; and the Longman-History Today Book Prize.
Her first book, To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War, was awarded the H. L. Mitchell Award in 1998 from the Southern Historical Association, the Letitia Brown Memorial Book Prize in 1997 from the Association of Black Women’s Historians and the Book of the Year Award in 1997 from the International Labor History Association. The book was also named an Exceptional Book of 1997 by Library Booknotes, Bookman Book Review Syndicate.
A native of Miami, Professor Hunter attended Duke University where she graduated with Distinction in History. She received a M.Phil. in history from Yale University and a Ph.D. from Yale. Professor Hunter previously taught at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She joined the Princeton faculty in the fall 2007. She has received numerous fellowships and grants including the National Humanities Center Fellowship (2017-2018) and a Mary I. Bunting Institute fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University from (2005-2006).
