Dr. Daina Ramey Berry is the Michael Douglas Dean of Humanities and Fine Arts at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Daina is an acclaimed author and editor of nine books. Her latest, A Black Women’s History of the United States, co-authored with Kali Nicole Gross, highlights Black women's resilience and community-building in the face of systemic oppression.
A specialist in gender, slavery, and Black women's history in the United States, Daina’s work includes the award-winning The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation. This book earned the Phyllis Wheatley Award, the 2018 Best Book Prize from the Society for the History of the Early American Republic, and the 2018 Hamilton Book Prize. It was also a finalist for Yale University's Frederick Douglass Book Prize. A Black Women’s History of the United States won the 2021 Susan Koppelman Award, was a 2021 NAACP Finalist for Literary Non-Fiction, and received an honourable mention for the 2021 Darlene Clark Hine Book Award.
Daina is working on two new books: The Myths of Slavery (Beacon Press) and a biography of Anna Murray Douglass (Yale University Press). She frequently speaks, writes, and consults on topics such as slavery, emancipation, the Tulsa Massacre, Black women, reparations, and social studies education.
Daina completed her BA, MA, and PhD in African American Studies and U.S. History at the University of California, Los Angeles.