The Scholar
Dylan C. Penningroth was born in 1964. He earned his Ph.D. from Columbia University and taught at the University of Wisconsin–Madison before joining the faculty at the University of Virginia. He serves as vice provost and dean of the Graduate School at UVa. His work on African American economic life won the Merle Curti Award from the Organization of American Historians.
Penningroth is distinctive in how he recovers an economic life that official records rendered invisible. He did not write about enslaved people as solely oppressed subjects. He wrote about them as economic actors who owned property, bargained, and built networks of exchange within their own communities.
Invisible Economies
In The Claims of Kinfolk (2003), Penningroth reveals that the enslaved and freed built complex networks of property and ownership recognized within their own communities, long before the law would honor them. He used wills, court records, and family testimony to show that enslaved people owned land, livestock, tools, and household goods – not as legal property owners but as community members whose arrangements carried force among themselves.
His work overturns the assumption that slavery erased all forms of possession. It did not. It simply refused to recognize them. Enslaved people created economies beneath the radar of plantation ledgers. They passed goods through informal inheritance. They testified about property in ways that the law dismissed but the community upheld.
The Bridge to the Archive
Penningroth gives the Archive its understanding of resilience under erasure. The Archive does not exist to document only what survived in official records. It exists to document what survived despite official denial. Penningroth shows that Black communities maintained economic and relational systems even when those systems were legally invalidated.
His work connects to every collection that addresses community self-determination. When the Sacred Blueprint of Community discusses mutual aid, when Already There discusses pre-rupture African governance, when the Land category discusses dispossession – Penningroth provides the evidence that the systems continued underground, unrecognized but not destroyed.
He also models a method the Archive follows: reading against the grain of institutional records. He did not wait for courts to admit property rights. He read the wills, the testimonies, the family claims, and reconstructed the economy they described. That is precisely what the Archive does with history.