Fellowship / Fellows

Tiya Miles

  • 2021–2022
  • Humanities
  • Radcliffe Alumnae Professor
  • Harvard University
Portrait of Tiya Miles
Photo by Stephanie Mitchell

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Tiya Miles is a Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at Harvard Radcliffe Institute and the Michael Garvey Professor of History in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences. She is a public historian, an academic historian, and a creative writer whose work explores the intersections of African American, Native American, and women’s histories. 

At Radcliffe, Miles is working on a project titled “Women Change Makers in the 19th-Century United States.”

Miles holds an AB in Afro-American studies from Harvard University, an MA in women’s studies from Emory University, and a PhD in American studies from the University of Minnesota. She is the author of six books, including the prize-winning histories The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits (New Press, 2017), The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story (University of North Carolina Press, 2010), and Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom (University of California Press, 2005). Her most recent book is All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, A Black Family Keepsake (Random House, 2021). She has also published historical fiction, a lecture series on haunted plantations, and various essays in the Boston Globe, CNN.com, the New York Times, and other media outlets. Her work has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Jason Mott, Tiya Miles among the Winners of the 2021 National Book Awards (Los Angeles Times, 11/17/21)

Tiya Miles Writes History but She Reads Everything (Boston Globe, 10/7/21)

How A Cotton Sack, Passed Down Over Generations, Tells A Larger Story About Slavery (NPR, 9/7/21)

Nantucket Doesn't Belong to the Preppies (The Atlantic, 8/30/21)

The Layered Histories in Black Family Keepsakes (Harvard Magazine, 7/22/21)

Our 2023–2024 Fellows

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