Dylan C. Penningroth

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 2024 Merle Curti Prize, Organization of American Historians; the 2024 Ellis W. Hawley Prize, Organization of American Historians; the 2023 Langum Prize for American Legal History; and was shortlisted for the 2024 Mark Lynton History Prize from the Columbia Journalism School.

For office hours, see Jurisprudence & Social Policy / Legal Studies.

For more information, see Penningroth’s personal website.

Education

B.A., Yale University (1993)
Ph.D., Johns Hopkins University (2000)

Dylan C Penningroth is teaching the following course in Fall 2024:

• 209 sec. 001 - JSP Orientation Seminar

Courses During Other Semesters

Semester	Course Num	Course Title	Teaching Evaluations
Spring 2024	375P sec. 001	Teaching Learning in Higher Education	View Teaching Evaluation
Fall 2023	209 sec. 001	JSP Orientation Seminar	View Teaching Evaluation
Spring 2023	375P sec. 001	Teaching Learning in Higher Education	View Teaching Evaluation