In 2007-08 she was a Fellow of the National Humanities Center. Professor Williams teaches and writes about African Americans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with emphasis in the American South. Her book, Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2005, received several book awards, including the Lillian Smith Book Prize. She is currently writing a book on separation of African American families during the antebellum period and efforts to reunify families following emancipation.