The Department of History could not be more pleased to share that our esteemed colleague, Professor Barbara Krauthamer, has been appointed Dean of Graduate School.
In the words of Provost Katherine Newman: "As many of you know, Professor Barbara Krauthamer is an eminent historian of slavery and emancipation in the 19th-century American South, a devoted mentor to graduate students in her department, and an innovative leader. A member of our History Department faculty since 2008, Barbara was named associate dean for student inclusion and engagement in the Graduate School in 2015. In that role, she created multiple fellowship programs designed to support the recruitment and retention of traditionally underrepresented graduate students. In addition to the REAL fellows program, she initiated the Summer Dissertation Fellows program and the STEM Faculty-Student Research Fellowship. These fellowship programs facilitate multiple mentoring pathways for graduate students to ensure that they have access to both financial resources and mentoring and support networks. Barbara has also worked closely with the Graduate School’s Office of Professional Development to promote diversity issues and ensure that professional development programs reach broad audiences across campus.
As a faculty member, Professor Krauthamer has worked closely with master’s and doctoral students in History as well as Afro-American Studies; Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies, and other departments across campus. She served for a number of years on the History Department’s graduate studies committee and held the position of graduate program director for two years. During her time in that role, she worked to promote diversity in the department and implemented changes to the admissions and funding process that expanded resources for doctoral students.
Barbara is widely recognized as a leading historian of African American slavery and emancipation in the United States. Her published work includes Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South. She is the co-author of Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery, which received a number of honors, most notably the 2013 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Non-fiction. Most recently, she co-edited the textbook, Major Problems in African American History, one of the leading textbooks in the field. She has authored numerous articles, curated exhibits and written pieces for general audiences. She appears in the award-winning documentary film, Through A Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People. Her research and books have been profiled in many media outlets, including the New York Times, CBS Evening News, National Public Radio, Pa cifica R adio and CNN as well as in media outlets in the U.K., France and Italy.
Barbara also has a long record of academic service on and off campus. She is currently one of the Organization of American Historians’ Distinguished Lecturers and also serves on the OAH Nominating Committee. She is also the rising president of the Southern Association of Women Historians. She has served in leadership positions in a number of professional organizations, including the Association of Black Women Historians, the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians and the Southern Historical Association.
Barbara has received 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, the Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. She also sits on the boards of the Berkshire Museum and the Samuel Harrison Society, both in Pittsfield.
She received her B.A. from Dartmouth College, a master’s degree from Washington University in St. Louis, and her Ph.D. from Princeton University."