Tera Agyepong

Professor Tera Agyepong joined the Department during her last year of graduate study and earned a tenure as an Associate Professor of History in 2020. Professor Agyepong loves being in the classroom and has helped developed new curricular innovations in a variety of units within the university. In addition to being awarded the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences’ very first endowed professorship in 2016, she founded and directs a new program in legal history. She received a JD/PhD from Northwestern University after earning her bachelor’s degree from Stanford University. Her teaching and scholarly interests lay at the intersection of race, gender, history, and the law. Her scholarship pays particular attention to how historical processes of constructing race and gender have shaped the evolution of criminal and juvenile justice laws. Her first book, The Criminalization of Black Children: Race, Gender, and Delinquency in Chicago’s Juvenile Justice System, 1899-1945 (University of North Carolina Press), was awarded the Society for the History of Childhood and Youth’s 2018 Grace Abbott Book Prize. She has also authored numerous book chapters and articles in scholarly venues like Journal of African American History, American Historical Review, Gender and History, Northwestern Journal of International Human Rights, and Society for the History of Childhood and Youth.