Tamika Nunley

Tamika Nunley is Professor of History and African and African American Studies at Duke Univeristy. 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, the 2021 Mary Kelley prize winner for best book published in women, gender, or sexuality in the Early American Republic, and the Francis B. Simkins Prize.

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 History, The William and Mary Quarterly, The Journal of Women’s History, the Journal of American Legal History and the Journal of the Civil War Era.

BIO FEB 2026