Tera W. Hunter, a professor of history and African American studies at Princeton University in New Jersey, has been awarded the Mary Nickliss Prize in U.S. Women’s and/or Gender History from the Organization of American Historians. She was honored at the organization’s annual meeting in San Francisco in mid-April.
Professor Hunter was honored for her book Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century (Harvard University Press, 2017). Professor Hunter’s great-great grandparents were slaves, freed, and married during the Reconstruction era. In the book, Professor Hunter used her research of court records, legal documents, and personal diaries to examine the constraints slavery placed on intimate relationships.
Professor Hunter joined the faculty at Princeton in 2007 after earlier teaching at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Dr. Hunter is a graduate of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, where she majored in history. She holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in history from Yale University.