Tera W. Hunter is the Edwards Professor of American History and Professor of History and African American Studies at Princeton University, where she serves as Chair of the Department of African American Studies. A native of Miami, she graduated with Distinction in History from Duke University and received her M.Phil. and Ph.D. in history from Yale University. Before joining the Princeton faculty in the fall of 2007, Hunter taught at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is a specialist in the 19th and 20th centuries, focusing her research on gender, race, labor, and Southern histories. Hunter has held leadership roles such as Acting Chair of the Princeton Humanities Council and contributes to public scholarship through hosting the Department of African American Studies podcast.

Her major publications include Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017), which earned the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize and Littleton-Griswold Prize from the American Historical Association, the Mary Nickliss Prize from the Organization of American Historians, the Stone Book Award from the Museum of African American History, and the Deep South Book Prize from the Frances S. Sumersell Center for the Study of the South; it was also a finalist for the Lincoln Prize from Gettysburg College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute, as well as the Longman-History Today Book Prize. Another seminal work is To 'Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors after the Civil War (Harvard University Press, 1997). Currently, she is developing a project on “The African American Marriage Gap in the Twentieth Century” and co-authoring The Making of a People: A History of African-Americans with Robin D. G. Kelley and Earl Lewis for W. W. Norton Press. Hunter has received prestigious fellowships, including the National Humanities Center Fellowship (2017-2018) and the Rogers Distinguished Fellowship in Nineteenth-Century American History at the Huntington Library. Her teaching encompasses African American History to 1865, History of African-American Families, Comparative Slavery in the Americas, and African-American Women’s History.

Professional Email: thunter@princeton.edu