Rate My Professor Barbara Krauthamer

Barbara Krauthamer served as a professor of history in the Department of History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst from 2008 to 2023. She earned her B.A. in government from Dartmouth College, M.A. in history from Washington University in St. Louis, and Ph.D. in history from Princeton University. During her tenure, she held key administrative positions, including associate dean for student inclusion and engagement, dean of the Graduate School from 2017 to 2020, senior vice provost for interdisciplinary programs and innovation from 2019 to 2020, and dean of the College of Humanities and Fine Arts from 2020 to 2023. In these roles, Krauthamer created multiple fellowship programs and an office for inclusion and engagement to support recruitment and retention of underrepresented graduate students. She launched mentoring programs for junior faculty, identified opportunities for staff professional development, reinvigorated programming to improve academic outcomes for first-generation students, and led innovation in interdisciplinary degree and certificate programs. She worked with master’s and doctoral students in history, Afro-American studies, women, gender, sexuality studies, and other departments.

A leading historian of African American slavery and emancipation in the nineteenth-century United States, particularly in the Native American South, Krauthamer authored Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South (University of North Carolina Press, 2013). She co-authored Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery, which received the 2013 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Non-fiction and other honors. Krauthamer also co-edited Major Problems in African American History, one of the leading textbooks in the field. Her research has been profiled in media outlets including the New York Times, CBS Evening News, National Public Radio, CNN, Pacifica Radio, and media in the United Kingdom, France, and Italy. She received the Lorraine A. Williams Leadership Award from the Association of Black Women Historians, awards and funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Stanford University’s Research Institute for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity, Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Krauthamer served as president of the Southern Association for Women Historians, held leadership roles in the Southern Historical Association, American Historical Association, and Organization of American Historians, and was appointed by Governor Charlie Baker to the Massachusetts Cultural Council in 2022.