Princeton University’s Tera Hunter Wins Book Awards From the American Historical Association

Tera W. Hunter, the Edwards Professor of History and professor of African American studies at Princeton University in New Jersey, has been awarded the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize in women’s history and/or feminist theory as well as the Littleton-Griswold Prize in U.S. law and society from the American Historical Association. She will be honored at the association’s annual meeting in Chicago in January.

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.

Earlier this year, Dr. Hunter was awarded the Mary Nickliss Prize in U.S. Women’s and/or Gender History from the Organization of American Historians for the same book.

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.