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 and Fay Yarbrough, of the "UnCivil Wars" series with the University of Georgia Press, as well as a member of the Executive Council of the Southern Historical Association and President-elect of the Society of Civil War Historians. Taylor is currently co-authoring a new edition of the textbook, America: A Narrative History (W.W. Norton, forthcoming 2025), with Joseph Crespino, Daina Ramey Berry, and David Shi, and is also working on both a book project about the material culture and built environment of the Reconstruction era 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.