Kabria Baumgartner

Kabria Baumgartner is an award-winning historian of early United States history, specializing in African American women’s and gender history, public history, and the history of education. She is the author of In Pursuit of Knowledge: Black Women and Educational Activism in Antebellum America (New York University Press, 2019), which tells the story of Black girls and women who fought for their educational rights in the nineteenth-century United States. Her book won four prizes, including the prestigious 2021 American Educational Research Association’s Outstanding Book Award.

Professor Baumgartner has published a dozen peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. Her second book, On the Cusp: Black Youth and the Origins of Civil Rights in Boston (under contract with the University of North Carolina Press, expected 2026), explores Black youth organizing in nineteenth-century Boston.

She has received numerous fellowships and grants from the Spencer Foundation, the National Academy of Education, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the American Antiquarian Society where she is an elected honorary member. She serves as an associate editor of Global Black Thought and series co-editor of the University of Massachusetts Press’ Black New England series.

As a community-engaged public historian, she co-curated an historical exhibit on the youth-led equal school rights movement, “Let None Be Excluded,” on view at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts from 2022 to 2024. In 2022, she co-founded the Newburyport Black History Initiative, which aims to highlight Newburyport’s Black history. The organization received the prestigious 2024 Leadership in History Award of Excellence from the American Association for State and Local History. As part of the Andrew W. Mellon grant-funded initiative Reckonings Project, Baumgartner collaborates with local historical organizations such as the Black Heritage Trail of New Hampshire and Marblehead Museum on historical exhibits and community archiving workshops. Her community-engaged work was recognized with the Massachusetts Black and Latino Caucus’ Black Excellence on the Hill Award in 2024.

In 2024, she collaborated with Dr. Meghan Howey and her Great Bay Archaeological Survey team on the NEHC grant-funded, King Pompey Project. Together, they unearthed the home site of King Pompey, an enslaved African man who won his freedom, purchased property, and hosted Black Election Day celebrations in colonial Massachusetts. This archaeological and archival research project has been featured in Smithsonian Magazine, Newsweek, Boston.com, Northeastern Films, WMUR, and other outlets.

Professor Baumgartner teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on early African American history, slavery and abolition, and community-engaged public history.