Tiya Miles: Eco-Consciousness in the Lives of Enslaved Black Women

Tiya Miles is the author of eight books, including four prize-winning histories about race and slavery in the American past. Her latest work is the biography Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People. Her 2021 National Book Award winner All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake, was a New York Times bestseller that won eleven historical and literary prizes, including the Cundill History Prize and the Frederick Douglass Prize. All That She Carried was named a best book of the year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Atlanta-Journal Constitution, NPR, Publisher’s Weekly, The Atlantic, Time, and more. Her other nonfiction works include Wild Girls: How the Outdoors Shaped the Women Who Challenged a Nation, The Dawn of Detroit, Tales from the Haunted South, The House on Diamond Hill, and Ties That Bind. Miles has published essays and reviews in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, and other publications, and she is the author of the time-bridge novel The Cherokee Rose, a ghost story set in the plantation South. She has consulted with colleagues at historic sites and museums on representations of slavery, African American material culture, and the Black-Indigenous intertwined past, including, most recently, the “Fabric of a Nation” quilt exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Her work has been supported by a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Award, the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Miles was born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, and she is currently the Michael Garvey Professor of History and Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at Harvard University.

Cosponsored by Boston College History Department, American Studies, African and African Diaspora Studies, Women’s Studies, Environmental Studies, the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life, and the Forum for Racial Justice in America.

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