Daina Ramey Berry

A Bit about Me

Dr. Daina Ramey Berry is Professor of History and Michael Douglas Dean of Humanities and Fine Arts at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She came to Santa Barbara in August 2022 after serving as the Oliver H. Radkey Regents Professor and Chair of the Department of History and Associate Dean of the Graduate School at The University of Texas. She is an internationally recognized scholar of the enslaved and a specialist on gender and slavery and Black women’s history in the United States. Professor Berry completed her B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in African American Studies and U.S. History at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Dr. Berry is the award-winning author and editor of six books and numerous scholarly articles. Her most recent book, A Black Women’s History of the United States, won the 2021 Susan Koppelman Award for the Best Book in Feminist Studies, was a 2021 NAACP Finalist for Literary Non-Fiction, and received honorable mention for the 2021 Darlene Clark Hine Book Award sponsored by the Organization of American Historians. Her other book, The Price for their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation, received the Phyllis Wheatley Award for Scholarly Research from the Sons and Daughters of the US Middle Passage, the 2018 Best Book Prize from the Society for the History of the Early American Republic, and the 2018 Hamilton Book Prize from the University Co-op for the best book among UT Austin faculty. Berry’s book was also a finalist for the 2018 Frederick Douglass Book Prize awarded by Yale University and the Gilder Lehrman Institute. She is completing two other contracted books, The Myths of Slavery (Beacon Press) and a biography of Anna Murray Douglass (Yale University Press).