When we consider historical scholarship at its highest levels, we may imagine hours spent in research libraries and classrooms, uncovering new details and teaching the next generation.

Emory professor Erica Dunbar has added another setting: Sunday night television, where viewers across the globe tune in to the historical drama “The Gilded Age” on HBO.

Dunbar has served as co-executive producer and lead historical consultant for the series since it first went into production in 2020.

Season three earned eight nominations for Emmy Awards, including for “Outstanding Drama Series.”

“There’s a way in which the historical authenticity that’s really demanded in our show is a portal for scholars like myself to leave their fingerprints over television, so that audiences can make connections between the past and the present — and perhaps the future,” says Dunbar.

Created by Julian Fellowes, “The Gilded Age” explores the lives of the moneyed families of New York and their employees during the 1880s. Season four launches Nov. 1.

Dunbar ensures the accuracy of period details on the series and also helps shape scripts and storylines related to New York City’s Black elite.

“Erica Dunbar is integral to ‘The Gilded Age,’” says Davita Scarlett, executive producer and writer on the series. “She’s been there since the very beginning, and you need someone with an encyclopedic knowledge of the time period to do that meticulous research. She is that person.”

Dunbar, whose scholarship focuses on 18th- and 19th-century African American women, is the author of seven books, including “Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge” — a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction and a co-winner of the 2018 Frederick Douglass Book Prize.

She also consults on historical documentaries, including “Benjamin Franklin,” directed and produced by Ken Burns, and “The Abolitionists,” an “American Experience” production on PBS.

Chair of Emory’s Department of African American Studies, Dunbar is also NEH Professor in the Humanities. This April, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious honorary societies and a leading independent policy research center.

Finding the truth in the details

What size should the bustle be on a given character’s opulent dinner dress? What current events might a Gilded Age family debate as they dine? And what might the kitchen staff discuss while preparing the meal? Dunbar researches and verifies each of these touches and more.

“There could be language I’ll flag and say, ‘This is actually a word that I think isn’t used until the 20th century,’” Dunbar explains. “And to confirm this, I access my databases at Emory Libraries and search through the periodicals to look for phrases and when they might start to appear.”

Characters on “The Gilded Age” contend with new ideas sweeping society, including women’s suffrage, the temperance movement promoting abstinence from alcohol, and marriages based on love rather than socioeconomic benefit.

“So, we see these stories of generational differences and also coming of age,” says Dunbar, “especially among women.”

“At the start of every season, Erica leads the way,” says Scarlett. “The writers will come to her with maybe the year they want the season to take place. And then she just immerses herself in all the interesting things that were happening. So, many of those fascinating details come from her.”

At times while working on season four, Scarlett would let Dunbar know about historical tidbits she’d found on the internet.

“And Erica would often tell me, ‘No, that’s not accurate,’” Scarlett says. “So, she is just going deep to make the show specific in ways viewers respond to.”

New narratives about Black womanhood

The character of Peggy Scott, played by Denée Benton, was originally imagined as a domestic servant. But, looking to history, Dunbar worked with Fellowes and the entire creative team to reimagine her as an aspiring writer and journalist.

Focusing on New York’s Black elite posed an opportunity to tell a story that differed from familiar television territory of enslavement and its direct aftermath in the South, says Dunbar.

While those stories are important, she says, “I think my whole career has been based on expanding the knowledge of 19th-century Black womanhood.”

Dunbar says she also worked with the writers on the series to “erase the mythic understanding of the North as a place of milk and honey and freedom for African American people in this era.”

In season three, a white physician refuses to treat Peggy because of her race. The show shines a light on discrimination within the African American community, too. In one episode, a Black acquaintance gives Peggy’s father the cold shoulder after learning he was formerly enslaved.

Still, says Dunbar, African Americans living in the 1800s did more than just survive — and the series demonstrates that.

“People married, people fell in love. People found work that was satisfying. People had parties,” she says. “Even when things were terribly difficult, Black people still found ways to experience a modicum of joy. And I think that’s a human story that’s translatable across race, class and gender boundaries.”

A storyteller in the classroom

As a child, Dunbar was an avid reader who “liked to talk and make up stories,” she says.

Growing up in Philadelphia, where the First Continental Congress signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776, Dunbar says some of her favorite stories involved “the history in our backyard.”

Her senior year of high school, Dunbar wrote her first major research paper. It was about Camp William Penn, the nation’s first training ground for Black soldiers during the Civil War. She was hooked.

Dunbar earned a bachelor’s degree in history and Africana studies from the University of Pennsylvania and a PhD in history from Columbia University.

Her first book, “A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City,” was published in 2008. The scholarly work analyzed the lives of emancipated African American women in Philadelphia before the Civil War.

But then Dunbar pivoted. “Never Caught,” the story of Ona Judge, an enslaved woman who liberated herself from George Washington, is a work of nonfiction intended for a general audience.

The book follows “a purposeful, heavy narrative arc,” says Dunbar, “and all my writing since has followed that path.”

She relates this approach to her work in the classroom.

“I see it as my job to teach,” she says, “but the vehicle is storytelling.

“If I sat at the front of the classroom and spewed out a bunch of dates, that would mean nothing,” she says, especially when a simple online search could yield the same facts. “These days, it’s my job to take themes and people and weave them into a tapestry that allows all of my students to see themselves in the founding of this nation through the 1800s.”

Dunbar sees the viewers riveted to their screens each Sunday as an extension of that classroom.

“One of the things I’m most proud of with ‘The Gilded Age’ is that it makes people think; it makes people ask questions,” she says. “And I can’t think of a more important space for academics like myself to be involved.”

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