Berry’s interests include nineteenth century American history, Comparative Slavery and Southern history, with a particular focus on the role of gender, labor, family and economy among the enslaved populations of the Americas. The department of History was fortunate to hire Dr. Berry as a tenured professor soon after the publication of her first book Swing the Sickle for the Harvest is Ripe: Gender and Slavery in Antebellum Georgia, published by the University of Illinois Press in 2007. Dr. Berry is working on her second book, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: the Value of Human Chattel, which is an economic and social history of slave prices in the United States. Dr. Berry has earned a number of distinguished awards and fellowships, most notably the American Council of Learned Societies Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship at the National Humanities Center in 2007-2008.