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).

Penningroth’s new book is entitled Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Civil Rights (Liveright, 2023). Combining legal and social history, and drawing from a large sample of trial court records, the book explores how ordinary Black people used and thought about law in their everyday lives, and how Black legal activity and Black legal thought helped shape American law and Black social movements from the 1830s to the 1970s.

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 Penningroth is teaching the following course in Fall 2023:

• 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
Spring 2023	375P sec. 001	Teaching Learning in Higher Education	View Teaching Evaluation
Fall 2022	209 sec. 001	JSP Orientation Seminar	View Teaching Evaluation