- Assistant Professor of History and Comparative American Studies
Education
- BA, Miami University (Ohio), 2007
- MA, Columbia University, 2008
- MA, University of Virginia, 2012
- PhD, University of Virginia, 2015
Biography
Tamika Nunley is an assistant professor of American history. She received a PhD and MA in U.S. history from the University of Virginia, an MA in African American studies from Columbia University, and a BA in black world studies and history at Miami University of Ohio (Oxford).
Her research and teaching interests include slavery, race, gender, 19th-century legal history, digital history, and the American Civil War. Her work integrates primary research methodologies with digital platforms such as Omeka and Neatline.
As a digital humanist, Nunley is interested in the ways that technology can help both students and faculty answer research questions, develop new archives, and disseminate knowledge using a variety of digital mediums. While at Oberlin, she started a Digital History Lab that invites history majors to gain experience with digital archiving and curating practices.
Her research and teaching interests include slavery, race, gender, 19th-century legal history, digital history, and the American Civil War. Her book manuscript, At the Threshold of Liberty: Women, Slavery, and Freedom in Washington, D.C., examines how black women strategically navigated the nation’s capital and its borders during the Civil War era.
The project focuses on the experiences of both enslaved and free black women to show how they interacted with the social, geographical, and legal demarcations of slavery and freedom. Her work integrates primary research methodologies with digital platforms such as Omeka and Neatline.
As a digital humanist, Nunley is interested in the ways that technology can help both students and faculty answer research questions, develop new archives, and disseminate knowledge using a variety of digital mediums. While at Oberlin, she started a Digital History Lab that invites history majors to gain experience with digital archiving and curating practices.
The Woodrow Wilson and Mellon Foundations have supported her work. She has served on the board of trustees at Miami University (Ohio), the President’s Commission on Slavery and the University at the University of Virginia, and the board of directors for the Prince William County Historic Preservation Foundation.
She currently serves on the Community Advisory Board at University Hospitals Rainbow Center for Women and Children.
- At the Threshold of Liberty: Women, Slavery, and the Boundaries of Freedom in Washington, D.C. (book manuscript in progress)
- “’I Know What Liberty Is’: Elizabeth Keckly’s Union War” New Perspectives on the Union War eds. Gary Gallagher and Elizabeth Varon. (Peer-reviewed chapter under contract with Fordham University Press in the North’s Civil War series)
- “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 (Louisiana State University Press, June 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, August 21, 2017
- Book Review, The Fight for Interracial Marriage Rights in Antebellum Massachusetts. By Amber D. Moulton (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). Journal of the Civil War Era, December 2016
- Book Review, Finding Charity’s Folk: Enslaved and Free Black Women in Maryland. By Jessica Millward (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015) Civil War Book Review (August 2016)