Penningroth Named Jones Research Professor in History

EVANSTON, Ill. --- Dylan C. Penningroth, associate professor of history at the Northwestern University Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, has been named the Wayne V. Jones Research Professor in History.

Penningroth is currently working on two projects: a study of the cultural, social and legal legacy of slavery in colonial Ghana, and a study of African Americans' engagement with local courts in the late-19th and early-20th century South.

His research interests include family relations, rise of the independent black church, migration, interactions between legal categories and popular conceptions such as respectability, race and "slavish origins."

Affiliated with the department of African American Studies and holding a joint appointment as research fellow at the American Bar Foundation, Penningroth instructs courses on African American history, American legal history, history of slavery and emancipation, and comparative history.

Penningroth received the Avery O. Craven Award and was named a Distinguished Lecturer, both by the Organization of American Historians. In 2006, he was awarded a Newberry Library National endowment for the Humanities Fellowship and was named a Lane Professor in the Humanities by the Kaplan Center of the Humanities.

He is author of "The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South" (2003), and serves on the editorial board of the Journal of American History.

Before joining Northwestern in 2002, Penningroth taught at the University of Virginia.