Season 1, Episode 5 "Dr. Daina Ramey Berry: Slavery, Commodification and Black Women's Erasure"

In this last episode for Black History Month 2019, Cite Black Women founder Christen Smith interviews historian Daina Ramey Berry, the author of five books on gender and slavery in the United States. In this conversation we talk about the powerful and reflective work of writing about our collective past, the relationship between the commodification of Black women during slavery and the politics of citational erasure and the importance of reading our history and mentoring for Black women. Dr. Daina Ramey Berry is a specialist on the history of gender and slavery in the United States and Black women’s history. She is the award winning author and editor of five books and several scholarly articles. Her recent book, The Price for their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to the Grave, in the Building of a Nation (Beacon, 2017) has been awarded three book awards including the 2018 Hamilton Book Prize from the University Coop for the best book among UT Austin faculty; the 2018 Best Book Prize from the Society for the History of the Early American Republic (SHEAR); and the Phyllis Wheatley Award for Scholarly Research from the Sons and Daughters of the US Middle Passage. Berry’s book was also a finalist for the Frederick Douglass Book Prize. In addition to her written work, Dr. Berry has received teaching awards from every university she’s taught. Recently she received the President’s Associates Teaching Excellence Award at UT Austin, an honor reserved for 8 faculty members across campus. Prof. Berry has received prestigious fellowships for her research from the National Endowment for the Humanities; the American Council of Learned Societies; the American Association of University Women and the Ford Foundation. She is a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians and has been featured by major news outlets from around the country. She is currently finishing a co-authored book with historian Kali Gross, A Black Women's History of the United States (Beacon Press, 2020), creating an online resource on slavery for K-12 educators.