Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

U.S. History
Duke University
2001

Master of Arts (M.A.)

U.S. History
Duke University
1996

Bachelor of Arts (B.A.)

U.S. History
University of Pennsylvania
1994

19th Century U.S. and African American History

Urban History

African American Women's History

History of American Slavery

African American Women's History

African American History

African Americans and State -Sponsored Injustice

College of Arts & Sciences Howard Univ Distinguished Faculty Award, 2021

African American Legacy Award, 2009

Darwin Turner Scholars’ Program Faculty Award for Excellence in Teaching and Mentoring students of color, 2006-2012

Brooding Over Bloody Revenge

Brooding Over Bloody Revenge: Enslaved Women and Lethal Resistance

From the colonial through the antebellum era, enslaved women in the US used lethal force as the ultimate form of resistance. By amplifying their voices and experiences, Brooding over Bloody Revenge strongly challenges assumptions that enslaved women only participated in covert, non-violent forms of resistance, when in fact they consistently seized justice for themselves and organized toward revolt.

Driven Toward Madness

Driven Toward Madness: The Fugitive Slave Margaret Garner and Tragedy on the Ohio

Margaret Garner was the runaway slave who, when confronted with capture just outside of Cincinnati, slit the throat of her toddler daughter rather than have her face a life in slavery. Her story has inspired Toni Morrison’s Beloved, a film based on the novel starring Oprah Winfrey, and an opera. Yet, her life has defied solid historical treatment. In Driven toward Madness, Nikki M. Taylor brilliantly captures her circumstances and her transformation from a murdering mother to an icon of tragedy and resistance.
Taylor, the first African American woman to write a history of Garner, grounds her approach in black feminist theory. She melds history with trauma studies to account for shortcomings in the written record. In so doing, she rejects distortions and fictionalized images; probes slavery’s legacies of sexual and physical violence and psychic trauma in new ways; and finally fleshes out a figure who had been rendered an apparition.

America’s First Black Socialist

America’s First Black Socialist: The Radical Life of Peter H. Clark

This book is a political and intellectual biography of one of the foremost African American activists, intellectuals, orators, and politicians in the nineteenth century--a man whose name once was spoken in the same breath as Frederick Douglass, Dr. McCune Smith, and John Mercer Langston. This book charts Clark’s journey from recommending that slaveholders be sent to "hospitable/ graves," to advocating for a separate black nation, to forging alliances with German socialists and labor radicals, to adopting the conservative mantle of the Democratic Party.
 

Frontiers of Freedom

Frontiers of Freedom Cincinnati’s Black Community, 1802-1868

Nineteenth-century Cincinnati was northern in its geography, southern in its economy and politics, and western in its commercial aspirations. While those identities presented a crossroad of opportunity for native whites and immigrants, African Americans endured economic repression and a denial of civil rights, compounded by extreme and frequent mob violence. Frontiers of Freedom chronicles alternating moments of triumph and tribulation, of pride and pain; but more than anything, it chronicles the resilience of the black community in a particularly difficult urban context at a defining moment in American history.