Amy Murrell Taylor
Amy Murrell Taylor is a historian of the U.S. South in the 19th Century, with a focus on the Civil War, Emancipation, and Reconstruction.
Her 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. Taylor is currently serving as the President of the Society of Civil War Historians and as the co-editor, with Stephen Berry and Fay Yarbrough, of the "UnCivil Wars" series with the University of Georgia Press. Taylor is a co-author of the textbook, America: A Narrative History 13th ed. (W.W. Norton, 2025), with Joseph Crespino, Daina Ramey Berry, and David Shi, and is also working on a book exploring the material history of the Reconstruction South and a GIS-based genealogy of Emancipation Day commemorations.
Taylor has written for the Times Literary Supplement and been featured in the Washington Post, USA Today, Slate, C-Span, and PBS. She has been honored with awards for teaching and was named the Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences in 2020-2021, and a 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
- 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)