Biography
Education
Ph.D. 2009, University of Iowa, Iowa City
M.A. 2003, University of Iowa, Iowa City
B.A. 2001, University of St. Thomas, St. Paul MN
Biography
Christy Clark-Pujara is Chair and Professor of History in the Department of African American Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She received her B.A. in History and Social Science from the University of St. Thomas (St. Paul, MN) and her M.A. and Ph.D. in History from the University of Iowa, Iowa City. Her research focuses on the experiences of Black people in British and French North America in the 17th–19th centuries, with particular attention to the often-overlooked histories of African Americans in small towns and cities in the North and Midwest.
Her first book, Dark Work: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island (NYU Press), examines how the business of slavery shaped enslavement, emancipation, and Black freedom in Rhode Island from 1636 to 1865. Her in-progress book project, Black on the Midwestern Frontier: Contested Freedom in Wisconsin, 1787–1868, explores how slavery, Black settlement, and debates over abolition and Black rights shaped Midwestern race relations. She is also the author of numerous journal articles, book chapters, and essays.
Clark-Pujara is an award-winning teacher and scholar. Her honors include UW–Madison’s Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award (2026), and the H. I. Romnes Faculty Fellowship (2023), the Vilas Faculty Early Career Investigator Award (2018), the UW–Madison and UW System Outstanding Woman of Color Awards (2020, 2019), the Feminist Scholar’s Fellowship (2019), and multiple Honored Instructor Awards (2014, 2017, 2020, 2022). She was also a co–principal investigator on the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Just Futures Grant “Humanities Education for Anti-racism Literacy (HEALSTEM) in Sciences and Medicine” (2021–2024).
Committed to both academic and public history, Clark-Pujara has recent work in the Journal of the Early American Republic, Journal of American History, Middle West Review, and in the edited volume Unnamed Figures: Black Presence & Absence in Early American Vernacular Art (American Folk Art Museum). She is a segment producer for the forthcoming documentary African American Midwest (Kartemquin Films/Democracy Films, PBS). Her public-facing work includes interviews with CNN and Time on the protests and violence in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and an essay in Smithsonian’s American History magazine, “Many Tulsa Massacres: How the Myth of a Liberal North Erases a Long History of White Violence.” She has received several community awards, including YWCA Madison’s Woman of Distinction and the Athena Award (both 2022), and works closely with Nehemiah: Center for Urban Leadership and Development, Madison’s oldest Black-run nonprofit.