An historian of African American women and the antebellum United States, Dunbar is the author of A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City (2008) and Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge (2017).

Never Caught was a National Book Award for Nonfiction finalist and winner of the Frederick Douglass Prize.

[2] Her first book was A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City, published by Yale University Press in 2008.

[4] In 2017 she published Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge.

[10] In November 2018 Dunbar was named joint winner of the Frederick Douglass Prize for Never Caught.