Richard Dunn (elected October 1981) died January 24, 2022. The Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of American History Emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, Dunn was the founding director of what is now the McNeil Center for Early American Studies (originally the Philadelphia Center for Early American Studies). His 1972 book, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713, was among the earliest social histories of Atlantic World slave society. In 2021 the McNeil Center and the Wilberforce Institute (University of Hull) honored its fiftieth anniversary with a workshop illustrating the richness of the field today. Dunn’s 2014 book, A Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life and Labor in Jamaica and Virginia, focused on generations of enslaved people and served as a bookend to Sugar and Slaves. With his wife, the historian Mary Maples Dunn (elected April 1979; died 2017), he edited the fourvolume Papers of William Penn (1981–87) and several other volumes on Penn.
Philadelphia, PA
United States