Tiya Miles

Humanities
Radcliffe Alumnae Professor, Harvard Radcliffe Institute; and Michael Garvey Professor of History, Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences

Photo by Stephanie Mitchell

Tiya Miles is a Radcliffe Alumnae Professor, Harvard Radcliffe Institute; and Michael Garvey Professor of History, Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences. She is a public historian, academic historian, and creative writer whose work explores the intersections of African American, Native American, and women’s histories. Her temporal and geographical zones of greatest interest include the 19th-century US South, Midwest, and West. Miles is the award-winning author of five books and coeditor of a collection of essays. Her most recent book, The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits (The New Press, 2017), won a 2018 American Book Award, a 2018 James A. Rawley Prize, a 2018 Merle Curti Social History Award, and the 2017 James Bradford Biography Prize, and it was a 2018 Michigan Notable Book and a New York Times Editor’s Choice.

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 has received a Hiett Prize in the Humanities from the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, a MacArthur Fellowship, and a New Directions Fellowship from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

For Tiya Miles, Girlhood Reading Was "My Escape and Joy" (New York Times, 10/12/23)

Reinspired by True Events (Harvard Gazette, 7/10/23)

Saying Their Names (Harvard Gazette, 11/15/22)

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)

Her Daughter About to Be Sold Away, An Enslaved Mother Carefully Packs Her a Sack (Harvard Gazette, 6/22/21)

In One Modest Cotton Sack, a Remarkable Story of Slavery, Suffering, Love and Survival (New York Times, 6/9/21)

To Find the History of African American Women, Look to Their Handiwork (The Atlantic, 6/8/21)

Crowd-sourcing the Story of a People (Harvard Gazette, 8/27/20)