Dr. Roger Hepburn is a specialist in African American history and 19th-century American
history. She offers courses on African American history, American slavery, and the
Civil War. As Director of the Department of History’s Center for Archives and Digital
History, Dr. Hepburn also teaches HIST 200: Introduction to Digital Archives and HIST
400: Advanced Digital Archives.
Her book Crossing the Border: A Free Black Community in Canada (University of Illinois Press, 2007) earned the 2008 Albert B. Corey Award, jointly
presented by the American Historical Association and the Canadian Historical Association.
Her most recent publication, Private No More: The Civil War Letters of Private John Lovejoy Murray, presents a collection of correspondence from an African American soldier during
the Civil War. This work received the 2024 Morton N. Cohen Award for a Distinguished
Edition of Letters from the Modern Language Association.
Currently, Dr. Hepburn is researching and writing a regimental history of the 102nd
United States Colored Infantry and its role in the Civil War. Her scholarly achievements
have been recognized with the 2010 Distinguished Scholarship Award from the College
of Humanities and Behavioral Sciences, and in 2022, she was named a Dalton Eminent
Scholar by Radford University.
