• Research Professor
750 N. Lake Shore Drive
4th Floor
Chicago, IL 60611
Joint Appointment
Associate Professor of Legal History and African American History, DePaul University
Education
J.D./Ph.D., Northwestern University
School of Law, Department of
African American Studies

B.A. from Stanford University

Tera Agyepong

  • Research Professor
ABF Researcher

Tera Agyepong (she/her) is a Research Professor at the ABF and an Associate Professor of Legal History and African American History at DePaul University, where she directs the Pre-Law Concentration and History of Law minor. She was awarded the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences’ first endowed professorship in 2016. She is also a Visiting Professor of Law at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law.

Agyepong’s scholarly interests lie at the intersection of race, gender, history, and the law. She pays particular attention to how historical processes of constructing race and gender have shaped the evolution of criminal and juvenile justice laws. 

Her book, The Criminalization of Black Children: Race, Gender and Delinquency in Chicago’s Juvenile Justice System, 1899–1945 (University of North Carolina Press, 2018) won the 2018 Grace Abbott Book Prize from the Society for the History of Children and Youth.  

Her work has also been featured in book chapters and publications, including Northwestern Journal of Human Rights, Journal of African American History, and Gender and History.  

Research Focus

Intersections of race, gender, history, family and the law; how the historical construction of race and gender have shaped criminal and juvenile justice laws.