Dana Elizabeth Weiner

My research explores race, identity, grassroots politics and the historical connections among race, rights, identity, and citizenship. My next book, William Alexander Leidesdorff: Contesting a Life and Afterlife is under contract with University of Nebraska Press. This is a microhistory about the most famous—and perhaps most misunderstood—immigrant of African descent in 1840s California. The book also explores race, mythmaking, and settler colonialism.

I have researched and published about antislavery and antiracist activism in the present day Midwest, the racialization of rights in early 19th century California, and the California "Black Laws." I have focused on citizenship claims and rights activism among California African Americans from 1821-1870, analyzing and re-evaluating nineteenth-century debates between the state and California African Americans over citizenship’s meanings. In recent years I have participated in an institute sponsored by the (U.S.) National Endowment for the Humanities and in a symposium, "Laying Down the Law: Critical Legal Histories of the North American West," sponsored by the William Clements Center at Southern Methodist University and the University of Nebraska. Subsequently, I published a chapter in the edited volume Beyond the Borders of the Law. I also co-organized a symposium, "African Americans in the Nineteenth-Century West," held at Saint Louis University. I am a faculty associate with the Harriet Tubman Institute for Research on the Global Migrations of African Peoples at York University.

• Faculty Merit Award (2013 and 2023)
• Fellow, National Endowment for the Humanities Institute, Westward Expansion and the Constitution in the Early American Republic, University of Oklahoma (2014)
• Winner, Best History Book, Midwest Book Awards (2014) for Race and Rights: Fighting Slavery and Prejudice in the Old Northwest, 1830-1870. De Kalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2013.

Internal Research Grants

• Laurier Short-Term Research Grant (2014 and 2009)
• Laurier Travel Grant (2018, 2013, and 2009)
• Laurier Book Completion Grant (2012)

External Research Grants

• John Brockway Huntington Foundation Fellowship, Huntington Library (2017)
• Mead Foundation Fellowship, Huntington Library (2014)
• Four other competitive research grants from archives in Michigan, Illinois, and Ohio (2004-05)

I am available to supervise graduate students interested in a range of topics in colonial and United States history to 1900, including the history of activism and reform movements, the U.S. West, the Old Northwest, women's and gender history, race, grassroots politics, and debates over rights.

• Weiner, Dana Elizabeth,“Debating African Americans’ Place in California, 1850-1870.” In Africa and its Diasporas: Rethinking Struggles for Recognition and Empowerment. Edited by Behnaz A. Mirzai and Bonny Ibhawoh (Trenton: Africa World Press, 2018)
• Weiner, Dana Elizabeth, “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 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2018) 
• Weiner, Dana Elizabeth, Race and Rights: Fighting Slavery and Prejudice in the Old Northwest, 1830-1870. Early American Places Series. De Kalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2013. This book assesses how anti-prejudice activists in the present-day Midwest shaped new conceptions of justice as they battled to expand African Americans’ rights and reformers’ rights to advocate for others.
• Weiner, Dana Elizabeth, “Anti-Abolition Violence and Freedom of Speech in Peoria, Illinois, 1835-1848,” Journal of Illinois History, 11 (2008): 179-204.