Dunbar has also been a contributor to The Nation, Time, The New York Times, and The Philadelphia Enquirer. Dunbar is the author of She Came to Slay: The Life and Times of Harriet Tubman Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge, which was a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award for nonfiction and A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City. Dunbar is also the National Director of the Association of Black Women Historians and previously served as the Inaugural Director of the Program in African American History at the Library Company of Philadelphia. Dunbar’s research and scholarship has, in her own words, focused primarily on “the lives of women of African descent who called America their home during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.” With special interests in urban history, Philadelphia history, and emancipation studies, Dunbar is the current Charles and Mary Beard Professor of History at Rutgers University in New Jersey, a post she has held since 2017.

After earning a BA from UPenn in history and Afro-American Studies, she went on to receive her MA and PhD from Columbia University.

She was drawn to true stories, and when she enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania, decided to turn her childhood passion into a course of study. She lived most of her time as a fugitive in Greenland, New Hampshire, a tiny community just outside the city of Portsmouth.Born and raised in Pennsylvania, Erica Armstrong Dunbar spent the early years of her education at a Philadelphia Quaker school reading deeply for hours on end. For almost fifty years, the fugitive slave woman kept to herself, building a family and a new life upon the quicksand of her legal enslavement. Afraid of being returned to her owners, Judge lived a shadowy life that was isolated and clandestine.

But it was the threat of capture and re-enslavement that kept closed the mouths of those who managed to beat the odds and successfully escape. Sometimes, the nightmare of human bondage, the murder, rape, dismemberment, and constant degradation, was simply too terrible to speak of. Enslaved men and women on the run often kept their pasts hidden, even from the people they loved the most: their spouses and children. For fugitives, like Ona Judge, secrecy was a necessity. The violence required to feed the system of human bondage often made enslaved men and women want to forget their pasts, not recollect them. “Very few eighteenth-century slaves have shared their stories about the institution and experience of slavery.

Never caught by dunbar