Tamika Nunley

  • Associate Professor of History and Comparative American Studies

Areas of Study

Offices

Education

  • PhD, University of Virginia
  • MA, University of Virginia
  • MA, Columbia University
  • BA, Miami University (Ohio)

Biography

Tamika Nunley is an associate professor of American history at Oberlin College. Her research and teaching interests include slavery, gender, 19th-century legal history, digital history, early America and the American Civil War.

At Oberlin, she created the History Design Lab that allows students to develop scholarly projects that involve methodological approaches such as digital humanities, public history, creative nonfiction, and curatorial practices.

Her book, At the Threshold of Liberty: Women, Slavery, and Self-making in Washington, D.C., which examines African American women’s strategies of self-definition in the contexts of slavery, fugitivity, courts, schools, streets, and the government during the Civil War era, is forthcoming with the University of North Carolina Press.

She is the author of essays and articles featured in William & Mary Quarterly, the American Journal of Legal History, and the Journal of Southern History. She serves on the editorial board of Civil War History. Her work has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon and Woodrow Wilson foundations as well as the American Association of University Women.

  • The Demands of Justice: Enslaved Women, Capital Crime, and Clemency in Early Virginia, 1705-1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, under contract)
  • At the Threshold of Liberty: Women, Slavery, and Self-Making in Washington, D.C. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, under contract and forthcoming, February 2021)
  • “Thrice Condemned: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Practice of Leniency in Antebellum Virginia Courts,” Journal of Southern History 87, No. 1 (forthcoming, February 2021)
  • “The New Civil War Revisionism,” with Edward L. Ayers, Gregory Downs, Daniel Crofts, Christopher Phillips, and Matthew E. Stanley, Civil War History 65, No. 4 (December 2019)
  • “’I Know What Liberty Is’: Elizabeth Keckly’s Union War” New Perspectives on the Union War eds. Gary Gallagher and Elizabeth Varon in The North’s Civil War Series (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019)
  • “By Stealth’ or Dispute: Freedwomen and the Contestation of American Citizenship” in The Civil War and the Transformation of the American Citizenship, ed. Paul Quigley (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2018)
  • “Teaching in Climes of Unrest: BLM, Slavery, and the Intellectual Underpinnings of Student Protest at Oberlin” in The Panorama, a digital publication of the Journal of the Early Republic (Aug. 21, 2017)

  • Thavolia Glymph, The Women’s Fight: The Civil War’s Battles for Homes, Freedom, and Nation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020) forthcoming in The English Historical Review (2021)
  • Loren Schweninger, Appealing for Liberty: Freedom Suits in the South (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018) William and Mary Quarterly Vol. 76, No.3 (July 2019).
  • Tera Hunter, Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017) in American Journal of Legal History 58, no.1 (spring 2018).
  • Amber D. Moulton, The Fight for Interracial Marriage Rights in Antebellum Massachusetts, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015). Journal of the Civil War Era Vol. 6, Issue 4 December 2016.
  • Jessica Millward, Finding Charity’s Folk: Enslaved and Free Black Women in Maryland. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015) Civil War Book Review August 2016.

Notes

Tamika Nunley publishes journal article

February 15, 2021

Tamika Y. Nunley published "Thrice Condemned: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Practice of Leniency in Antebellum Virginia Courts" in The Journal of Southern History in early February.

Tamika Nunley Gives Talk at American Civil War Museum

February 21, 2020

Assistant Professor of History and Comparative American Studies Tamika Nunley gave a talk on Feb. 22 titled, “(Freed) Women: Mobilizing Emancipation, Citizenship, and Self-making in Wartime Washington, DC” at the American Civil War Museum. The talk airs on C-span in spring 2020.

News

This Week in Photos: March 11

March 11, 2020

Women’s suffrage is recognized, the Arts and Sciences Orchestra performs, entrepreneurs pitch business ideas for prizes, and a podcasting/journalism rockstar shares his recipe for success.

This Week in Photos: March 4

March 4, 2020

Alumni journalist and authors, the first black woman to stage an opera in the United States is honored, and TIMARA students who turn words of gratitude into works of audible art at a nearby hospital are just some of the features in this week’s photo series.