Amy Murrell Taylor is a historian of the American South whose work focuses on the era of the Civil War, Emancipation, and Reconstruction.

A native of Rockville, Maryland, Taylor graduated from Duke University and received her PhD in History from the University of Virginia. She is currently a professor of history at the University of Kentucky, where she was honored with a Great Teacher Award from the UK Alumni Association in 2016.

Her latest book, Embattled Freedom: Journeys through the Civil War’s Slave Refugee Camps (UNC Press, 2018), received the Avery Craven Prize for Civil War history, and the Merle Curti Prize for U.S. social history, from the Organization of American Historians in 2019.

Taylor is also the author of The Divided Family in Civil War America (UNC Press, 2005), and co-editor, with Michael Perman, of Major Problems in the Civil War and Reconstruction (Cengage, 2010). She has served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Southern History and the Civil War Monitor Magazine, and enjoys working with local history sites, including Ashland and Waveland, on researching and interpreting the history of slavery. ■