Christopher Bonner

Christopher Bonner is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland. His research focuses on African American history and the nineteenth-century United States. In 2020, he published his first book, Remaking the Republic: Black Politics and the Creation of American Citizenship, which centers free Black Americans in the legal transformations of the United States during the mid-nineteenth century. He is currently at work on a project exploring the ways enslaved people navigated commercial networks as they sought to purchase freedom in the nineteenth century. His work has been supported by the Library Company of Philadelphia and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Prof. Bonner teaches courses covering African American politics and culture, slavery and emancipation in the Atlantic world, the transformations of the United States during the nineteenth century, and race and ethnicity in early America.