Expert Profile
Jessica Millward

Associate Professor of History and African American Studies
Her research focuses on comparative slavery and emancipation, African American history, gender and the law.
Areas of Expertise
- Anti-Black violence
- African American History
- Humanities
- U.S. History
- Juneteenth
Biography
Dr. Jessica Millward is an Associate professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Irvine. Her research focuses on comparative slavery and emancipation, African American history, gender and the law. She is the author of “Teaching African American History in the Age of Obama,” which appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education. She is also the recipient of the 2007 Association of Black Women Historians’ Letitia Brown Wood award for the best article in African American Women’s History for her article titled, “More History Than Myth: African American Women’s History since the Publication of Ar’n’t I a Woman,” Journal of Women’s History Vol. 19 No. 2 (Summer 2007): 161-167.” Dr. Millward’s work has appeared in Frontier’s: A Journal of Women’s History, the Women’s History Review and is forthcoming in the Journal of African American History. Dr. Millward’s manuscript on enslaved women, family and freedom in pre Civil War Maryland is forthcoming as part of the Race in the
Atlantic World series, University of Georgia Press.
Dr. Millward is a founding member of the UCI Ghana Project-an educational and cultural exchange program between faculty, students, and staff at the University of California Irvine and the University of Ghana, Legon. For three weeks during summer 2010, UCI collaborated with the Kwame Nkrumah Institute for African Studies, the Ghana Dance Ensemble, and the Department of Dance at the University of Ghana, Legon. Dr. Millward holds affiliate status with the following programs at UCI: African American Studies, the Culture and Theory Program, the Department of Women’s Studies as well as the Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies. She is a Research Associate at the Center for Comparative Immigration at UC San Diego as well as a member of the Organization of American Historian’s Committee on the Status of African American, Latino/a, Asian American, and Native American (ALANA) Historians and ALANA Histories.
Media




Media Appearances
New book challenges Civil War’s old myths
The Washington Post, 1/17/2022
The New Norm for Back to School: Active-Shooter-Response Training
The Chronicle of Higher Education, 8/21/2020
A ballot prop that could boost racial equity among university faculty
CalMatters, 8/20/2020
‘A people’s project’: UCI professors and HBCU students archive the work of living Black activists
Daily Pilot, 8/19/2020
UC Irvine panel discusses mourning, anti-black violence in response to Black Lives Matter protests, COVID-19
LA Times, 6/3/2020
Articles
Charity Folks, Lost Royalty, And The Bishop Family Of Maryland And New York
The Journal of African American History
‘That All Her Increase Shall Be Free’: enslaved women's bodies and the Maryland 1809 Law of Manumission
Women's History Review
Education
UCLA
Ph.D., U.S. History, 2003
UCLA
M.A., African American Studies, 1997