Participant Info

First Name
Dana Elizabeth
Last Name
Weiner
Affiliation
Wilfrid Laurier University
Website URL
https://www.wlu.ca/academics/faculties/faculty-of-arts/faculty-profiles/dana-elizabeth-weiner/index.html
Keywords
mixed-race identity, African American history in the nineteenth-century, race, identity, gender, settler colonialism, California, activism, rights, citizenship, race in the early U.S. West and Midwest/Old Northwest, and abolition.
Additional Contact Information

Personal Info

Photo
About Me

Dr. Dana Elizabeth Weiner is Associate Professor and Undergraduate Officer in the history department at Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario, where she teaches about the early US, race, slavery, the law, gender, western history, and the Civil War era. She is an alumna of U.C. San Diego and Northwestern University. Weiner’s publications include two 2018 book chapters, “Debating the Place of African Americans in California, 1850-1870,” in Africa and its Diasporas: Rethinking Struggles for Recognition and Empowerment, edited by Behnaz A. Mirzai and Bonny Ibhawoh and “Legal Ambiguities on the Ground: Black Californians’ Land Claims, 1848-1870,” in Beyond the Borders of the Law: Critical Legal Histories of the North American West, edited by Katrina Jagodinsky and Pablo Mitchell. In 2013 she published a book about antislavery and anti-Black Law activism, Race and Rights: Fighting Slavery and Prejudice in the Old Northwest, 1830-1870, awarded Best History Book at the 2014 Midwest Book Awards; paperback edition 2015. She has presented her work at the annual meetings of the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association, the American Society for Legal History, the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, and the Western History Association, as well as the Conference on Illinois History, the Filson Historical Society, the Huntington Library, and the Newberry Library Rural History Seminar. Several institutions have awarded her fellowships, including the Huntington and Clements Libraries and the Bentley Historical Library. These days, she researches race, property, identity, and citizenship claims among free people of African descent in early California.

Recent Publications
Media Coverage
Country Focus
United States
Expertise by Geography
United States
Expertise by Chronology
19th century
Expertise by Topic
American Civil War, Colonialism, Law, Politics, Race, Women