Christy Clark-Pujara
Credentials: Professor
Position title: Department Chair
Email: clarkpujara@wisc.edu
Address:
4131 Helen C. White Hall
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 a historian of colonial North America and the early American Republic. Her research focuses on the experiences of Black people in French and British North America in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. She is particularly interested in retrieving the hidden and unexplored histories of African Americans in areas that historians have not sufficiently examined—small towns and cities in the North and Midwest. Clark-Pujara contends that the full dimensions of the African American and the American experience cannot be appreciated without reference to how Black people managed their lives in places where they were few. Her first book Dark Work: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island (NYU Press, 2016), examines how the business of slavery—economic activity that was directly related to the maintenance of slaveholding in the Americas, specifically the buying and selling of people, food, and goods—shaped the experience of slavery, the process of emancipation, and the realities of black freedom in Rhode Island from the colonial period through the American Civil War. Her current book project, Black on the Midwestern Frontier: From Slavery to Suffrage in the Wisconsin Territory, 1725—1868, examines how the practice of race-based slavery, black settlement, and debates over abolition and black rights shaped white-Black race relations in the Midwest.
Clark-Pujara is committed to both academic scholarship and public history. She works closely with the Nehemiah Center for Urban Development, where she teaches community history courses. Her public history work also includes writing blogs and op-eds like, “Many Tulsa Massacres: How the Myth of a Liberal North Erases a Long History of White Violence,” for the Smithsonian American History Magazine and “The 1539 Project: Why Black Midwest and Iowa History Matters“. Des Moines Register. Clark-Pujara is also a Segment Producer, for an in-progress documentary “African American Midwest” (Kartemquin Films and Democracy Films Co-Production distributed by PBS).