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Amy Murrell Taylor is a historian of the U.S. South in the 19th century, with special attention to the Civil War, Emancipation, and Reconstruction.
Her latest book, Embattled Freedom: Journeys through the Civil War's Slave Refugee Camps (UNC Press, 2018), received multiple national awards including the Frederick Douglass Book Prize given by the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Abolition, and Resistance at Yale University and the Merle Curti Social History Award from the Organization of American Historians. Embattled Freedom is a study of the many thousands of men, women, and children who fled slavery and sought refuge behind the lines of the Union army during the American Civil War. Taylor is also the co-editor, with Stephen Berry, of the "UnCivil Wars" series with the University of Georgia Press, as well as a member of the Executive Councils of the Southern Historical Association and the Society of Civil War Historians. Taylor is currently working on several projects related to the history of everyday life in Reconstruction, including a study of a free town in Virginia, and a GIS-based genealogy of Emancipation Day commemorations. She is also involved in a variety of public history and historic preservation projects in central Kentucky.
Taylor has written for the Times Literary Supplement and been featured in the Washington Post, USA Today, Slate, C-Span, and PBS. She was honored as the Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences in 2020-2021, and as the 2020 University Research Professor at the University of Kentucky.
M.A., University of Virginia
Ph.D., University of Virginia
- 19th Century U.S. South
- Civil War and Reconstruction
- slavery and emancipation
- Race and Gender
- Public History
- Cultural Memory
- History
- African American and Africana Studies
- Gender and Women's Studies
- Commonwealth Institute for Black Studies
- Historic Preservation (College of Design)