Concentrating on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Erica Armstrong Dunbar became a historian of the African American experience by committing herself to telling the stories of Black women who lived, loved, struggled, worked, prayed, and fought to survive in a nation that still recognized many of them as property. In her scholarship and public-facing work, she focuses on the uncomfortable concepts of slavery, racial injustice, and gender inequality.

Since 2004, the Africana Research Center has sponsored the Barbara Jordan Lecture Series to recognize and introduce the Penn State community to the scholarship of an African American civil rights activist, scholar, and/or public intellectual. The ARC named the lecture after Congresswoman Barbara Jordan because she was a modern day “giant” in activism, scholarship, and action before her untimely death in 1996.