Dylan C. Penningroth specializes in African American history and in U.S. socio-legal history. His first book, The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), won the Avery Craven Prize from the Organization of American Historians. His articles have appeared in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, the Journal of American History, the American Historical Review, and the Journal of Family History. Penningroth has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, and the Stanford Humanities Center, and has been recognized by the Organization of American Historians’ Huggins-Quarles committee, a Weinberg College Teaching Award (Northwestern University), a McCormick Professorship of Teaching Excellence (Northwestern), and a MacArthur Foundation fellowship.
Before joining UC Berkeley in 2015, Dylan Penningroth was on the faculty of the History Department at the University of Virginia (1999-2002), at Northwestern University (2002-2015), and a Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation (2007-2015).
In Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights (Liveright, 2023), Penningroth revises the conventional story of civil rights to tell a forgotten pre-history of the marches of the 1960s. Drawing on sources found in the basements of county courthouses across the nation, he reveals that African Americans have thought about, talked about, and used the law going as far back as even the era of slavery. They dealt constantly with the laws of property, contract, inheritance, marriage and divorce, of associations, and more. Before the Movement is an account of Black legal lives that looks beyond the Constitution and the criminal justice system to recover a rich, broader vision of Black life―a vision allied with, yet distinct from, the freedom struggle.
Before the Movement has been awarded the Scribes Book Award; the J. Willard Hurst Prize from the Law & Society Association; the Merle Curti Prize, Organization of American Historians; the Ellis W. Hawley Prize, Organization of American Historians; and the Langum Prize for American Legal History. It was shortlisted for the Cundill History Prize, the Stone Book Award from the Museum of African American History, and the Mark Lynton History Prize from the Columbia Journalism School.
Professor Penningroth received his BA with Distinction in History from Yale University and his MA and PhD in History from John Hopkins University.