Daina Ramey Berry is an American historian and academic who is the Michael Douglas Dean of Humanities and Fine Arts at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

[1] In 2018 she was named Oliver H. Radkey Regents Professor of History and in 2019, she became associate dean of the graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin.

Through a comparison of Glynn County, Georgia and Wilkes County, Georgia during the early 19th century, Berry studies the relationship between the idea of skilled labor and gender in understanding enslaved peoples' work, and more broadly she examines the relationship between enslaved peoples' labor and their family and community relations.

[5] Berry proposes four types of value that an enslaved person could hold: their assessed value, as determined by others for the purposes of accounting and sale; their market value, which was a function of local demand; their soul value, derived from inherent spiritual self-worth and reinforced by familial and communal connections; and their ghost value, evaluated by body brokers who engaged in the sale of human cadavers.

[7][8] Berry's focus on the factors that produced assigned value, as well as the value of unborn slaves, also makes a contribution to the historical literature on the violent role of gender and reproduction in the systems of American slavery.

[11] Berry and Gross selected stories about historical figures who are not well-known, in what was described in Kirkus Reviews as a "wide-ranging search-and-rescue mission for black female activists, trailblazers, and others who have left a mark".