Painter, Nell Irvin

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Painter, Nell Irvin

August 2, 1942

The daughter of Frank Edward and Dona McGruder Donato Irvin, historian Nell Irvin Painter was born in Houston, Texas, but grew up in Oakland, California. She attended the University of California at Berkeley, including a year of study at the University of Bordeaux, France, where she discovered a love of history that influenced her approach to her major in anthropology. After graduation in 1964 she joined her parents in the Ghana of Kwame Nkrumah. In Ghana she taught French at the Ghana Institute of Languages and began graduate study at the University of Ghana's Institute of African Studies. Painter remained in Ghana for two years, leaving after a coup d'état deposed Nkrumah. She returned to graduate study and completed a master's degree in African history at the University of California at Los Angeles in 1967.

Painter completed her Ph.D. in U.S. history at Harvard University in 1974. Alfred A. Knopf published her dissertation under the title Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas After Reconstruction in January 1977 (copyrighted 1976). She was promoted to a tenured associate professorship in history at the University of Pennsylvania in 1977. Two years later Harvard University Press published her biography of Hosea Hudson, The Narrative of Hosea Hudson: His Life as a Negro Communist in the South. In 1980 Painter joined the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as a full professor of history. In 1986 W. W. Norton published her first general history of the United States, Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877–1919. These three books represent her writing as a social/labor historian. In 1988 Painter became a professor of history at Princeton University. She remained at Princeton until her retirement in 2005, becoming the Edwards Professor of American History in 1992 and serving as director of the Program in African-American Studies from 1997 to 2000.

In the mid-1980s Painter undertook a self-education in women's history, feminist theory, and psychology, which resulted in her essays on several women, including the plantation mistress Gertrude Thomas (1990); a biography, Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol (1996); and Penguin Classic editions of the Narrative of Sojourner Truth (1998) and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (2000). In 2002 the University of North Carolina Press published her collected essays as Southern History Across the Color Line.

Painter's later books represent a break from southern history. Creating Black Americans (2005) presents the history of African Americans from 1619 to the present, illustrated by the work of black artists. In 2005 Painter was also working on books concerning what Americans and Europeans have said about white identity, and concepts of beauty as related to sex appeal and prestige.

Throughout her academic career Painter gained several honors. As an undergraduate she was on the dean's list and in Mortar Board. As a graduate student, she received the Coretta Scott King Award of the American Association of University Women and a Ford Foundation Fellowship for the writing of a dissertation in minority studies. As an assistant professor, she was a fellow of the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History and the Radcliffe/Bunting Institute. As an associate professor, Painter was a fellow at the National Humanities Center and a Guggenheim Fellow. As a full professor, she was a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and of the National Endowment for the Humanities. In addition to several other fellowships, she has received honorary doctorates from such institutions as Wesleyan University, Dartmouth College, the State University of New York at New Paltz, and Yale University. Radcliffe College and the University of California at Berkeley have honored her as a distinguished alumna. She has served the learned societies of the historical profession in several capacities, including as national director of the Association of Black Women Historians, president of the Southern Historical Association, and president of the Organization of American Historians.